Seven crazy days
The Grakn is emerging from its labs, and it has a lot to do
What. A. Week.
These have been extremely hectic days here at Grakn Labs (Grakn? Exactly, more about that in the next paragraph) and the next week is expected to be as busy and exciting. Let’s have a quick look at all the events at which you may have seen us in the past seven days.
First and foremost: MindmapsDB → Grakn Labs
We are changing our name. We have finally completed our super secret lab in the GraknCave and we are almost ready to release the Grakn 1.0 (formerly known as the MindmapsDB stack) into the wild. Why the change? Because what we do is helping you build your Knowledge Graphs: we effectively put the GRAph in your Knowledge, with our GRAph Query Language. Got it?
What went on
Monday: We were in full force at the Women Who Code Big Data Meetup. I enjoyed the second talk about bots, technical difficulties notwithstanding. It was very refreshing to meet an audience of female developers and founders.
Thursday: My colleague Sheldon (don’t worry: he will have his own Meet the Team post soon) was at the 6th ASI Data Science Fellowship Demo Day. It was great for him to reconnect with the guys from the ASI — as he had been a fellow there a year ago. There were lots of interesting projects, as always, and it was good to see a few graph database applications sneaking in there. Definitely worth keeping an eye on what they get up to!
Halloween stories for adults with the North London folk storytelling meetup for me. Nothing to do with Grakn.ai, actually, but I enjoyed it thoroughly :)
Friday To Sunday: InsurTech Hackathon, with many sponsors from the Insurance world proposing their challenges to tackle and data to analyse. My first Hackathon and definitely not my last one. It was… intense. I met a huge amount of amazing people; in particular, the people sent by the sponsors were incredibly friendly and helpful. All in all, I learnt a lot from the technical point of view, from the human interaction point of view and from the unhealthy eating point of view (Domino’s pizzas tend to be covered in some kind of BBQ sauce. Come on, guys, as an Italian, that’s just blasphemy!).
While it’s a shame that I did not manage to showcase the nice ontology layer I had built for my team’s data, it’s ok: next time MS Powerpoint will work. The Grakn cannot be stopped.
Another lesson learned is that I probably will never be a founder nor a CEO. Two days were more than enough to put the awesome work that Haikal and Precy do into a new perspective. Not that I doubted it, but thank you guys.
What’s next
Even more stuff is going on next week. On Tuesday, you will find us at the Open Data Institute summit and at the PyData London Meetup. On Wednesday at the Microsoft Future Decoded event, then at various Big Data LDN events on Thursday and Friday and at the Facebook+InterTech hackathon on Saturday and Sunday. I will personally attend most of these, so if you are there too, give us a shout on Twitter and say “Hi”. We would love to meet you.
Oh, I also plan to get some rest at some point.
Maybe.
Stay tuned
M.
P.S.
A friendly word of advice: After a hackathon, go to sleep.
Absolutely avoid binge watching a TV series on Netflix just because it is Halloween.
Bad idea, seriously.
Don’t.
