Interview with Max De Marzi at GOTO Chicago 2015

Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m here with GOTO Conf 2015. I ‘m sitting here with Max DeMarzi, who just gave a talk about what finance companies can learn from dating sites, or dating sites can learn from finance. I don’t know. I’m sure there’s some people, you know, don’t call me a gold digger kind of thing. I don’t know, but it was really funny in my head before I said that. So anyway, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me, Max. So that talk is kind of like abstract. What does it mean? So the title was obviously chosen by marketing people who believe that Chicago is nothing but finance companies, which obviously we know is not true. But I mean, it’s a pretty significant population. Yeah, absolutely. And putting all kinds of finance, right? The idea here is not so much about specifics, but really more about the overall theme, which is graphs, right? It is to think of your data as graphs. And then… And the kind of things you can do with it. So for the dating example, we went over things like your friends or friends graph, and how usually you start out with dating people in the real world, and then you kind of venture on to the online world from there. Things like shared interests, shared likes, how people can connect based on the things that they mutually find interesting about the other person. Then we went on to things like the safety graph, finding people who are cheaters, who are already married, who are looking for some side action and not really into a long distance relationship, or spammers, people who are expecting you to pay 20 bucks a month. Who watch them on cam type things, or even like the professionals who are sometimes on dating sites. And then from there, looking to different graphs of finance . Once again, looking at consumer graphs, how vendors, how they interact with each other, who’s there, who purchases from who, what kind of items they’re purchasing. We’re looking at asset graphs, managing the underlying assets of your portfolio, and doing funds of funds of funds type analysis down to the lower level. Risk analysis over that whole spectrum. And there are bits and pieces, traders have social networks and also analyzing social networks for interesting financial data, like stock tweets. Sometimes you see a tweet that would actually move a stock or a commodity up and down quite a bit, depending on what that information is. Sometimes it’s not even true, you have to understand. Like April 1st, we had Elon Musk talking about Project W was supposed to be like a watch from Tesla. It’s not really true. He was talking about something else, but it was April 1st. People thought it was true, and then they retweeted it, and then the stock went up and down for a few seconds. Some people don’t look at their calendar. Yeah. I mean, usually the data you get from finance has, hey, this is a number fool joke, but Twitter data doesn’t have the disclaimer. Yeah. A few years ago, we had a mini crash because somebody tweeted that Barack Obama had been blown up. So we had a few seconds where everything crashed, and then everything came back up again. People realized how it was just a lie. But that kind of thing can happen all the time. The more real time we are now, the more likely this kind of thing will happen. Yeah. I mean, when you’re talking about the impact of Twitter and looking at a tool like Neo4j, so I’m going to, on behalf of your sponsor here at GOTO Conf , I’m going to go ahead and say, can you tell us a little bit about what Neo4j is and how, I mean, when you say graph database. What does that all mean? Yeah, what does that all mean? Sure. So a few years ago, we had this NoSQL movement come around, and NoSQL kind of went two different ways. One way is the… Let’s drop joins altogether and not have them. So document store said, let’s bundle up everything into a document and save that so we don’t have to do the joins. The key value store said, we don’t even know what joins are . We’re just key value stores. The column store said, we don’t do joins very well. Either we look at column families instead. We’re going to deal with those kind of things. And that’s one way of dealing with not joining, which is not joining. The other way is by forcing those relationships to be first class sediments. So we save relationships down to disk, relationships down to memory, and they basically become pointers in memory. So it’s… It’s very fast for us to follow a relationship, but it’s not very fast for a key value store or someone else to do that kind of thing. Now, there are some trade-offs. You lose some speed. You lose some rights because of this kind of thing. But if you have a domain that’s very graphic in general, like asset management, security, people, information that is connected, then we’re a great database to put your data in. Right. And as far as being involved in the community, I know you ‘re involved with a GraphDB user group. Here in Chicago, can you tell us a little bit more about that and kind of bring us up to speed on what’s going on in that world? Sure. So I just came off winter. The last meetup I had was in February at PwC, and thank you to those guys for sponsoring us. I don’t have a real office downtown, so I’m kind of in the air as far as where I host the meetups, and I try to vary them. So actually, if you have a meeting place and you’d like me to come and do a talk at your place, please invite me, and I’ll be happy to do it. Hopefully, you tend to get more going this… The meetup group in London, for example, has 2,000 members. They’re the biggest no-sequel meetup group in Europe because they have an office there, and they have multiple people kind of taking care of it. I’m a one-man army trying to do it here, plus I fly a lot, so it makes it a little bit tougher. Yeah, but if you have a space and would like to learn more about GraphDB, just please let me know, and we can work something out. So working in a community, I mean, there’s Avid and Flow when you’re helping to run a community or trying to facilitate it. I mean, is it something that’s been… And just, you know, life circumstances have been kind of pulling on you and making it hard to do the user groups, or is it maybe a waning interest here in Chicago? What is the dynamic that you’re feeling? No, it’s not so much as a schedule. Yeah. I was home for a few weeks, and then I was in Atlanta, I was in Boston, I was in Houston, and I’m here again. And I try to schedule something a month out, but if Neil says you need to go to see a customer in Delaware, on Friday night, I’ve got to be there on Monday morning, whatever plans I had are out the window. You don’t know how many plays I missed, musicals, and so on , doing this kind of stuff. But, you know, my company needs me to be where they need me to be, and I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do. Right. So the community kind of comes secondary. It’s been hard to find other folks who kind of would do some presentations. We have a few customers, and they’ve done presentations, but I’ve kind of run out of those. So if you are working on a Neo4j project or a proof of concept or something you want to share, I’d be glad to have you as well. So I’m not the only one doing all the talking either. You know, I talk on Neo4j for hours, my God, but at the same time, you know, it’d be nice to hear somebody else’s perspective. Right, right. And it’s GraphDB focused, so it could be anything that’s, I mean, I don’t know, are there any other players out in the GraphDB ecosystem? Sort of. I mean, we had Titan for a little bit, and then they kind of went to hibernate into the data stacks sort of things. Orient is also, I guess, number three, or now number two, but they’re just not around in Chicago either, so I wouldn ‘t know anyone. I wouldn’t even invite to come to a talk. Yeah. So it’s kind of in Chicago, GraphDB is kind of niched to Neo4j. At this point, I mean, I think eventually that will change as the space gets bigger. You know, we could venture out into some of the graph processing engines, so Spark is getting a lot of attention, maybe do some graphics or Spark Lab type stuff. If someone’s interested in wanting to do a talk about that, you have a built-in audience who kind of already knows graphs and can relate quickly, so you can jump into, hey, show me something cool with graphs, not just what they’re all about. Yeah, it doesn’t always have to be an intro to graphs. No, absolutely. Well, intros are fine, though. I mean, for everything that you learn, someone else doesn’t know it. Right, right. So the more you can share online, the more you can share with people, you’re making someone’s day better. Yeah. I mean, we do not have the capacity to learn everything that’s going on out there. You know, there’s 300 databases, there’s all these frameworks. Every week a new JavaScript framework comes along, you can ‘t learn it all. If someone learns it for you and then tells you the good parts, that’s nice to know. Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. Appreciate it. Mm-hmm.