My first lightning talk

The tech-talks at work have fallen by the wayside since they no longer have an "owner" so during their downtime I've been arranging lightning talks as they're far more informal and take a lot less time to arrange.

My first talk in front of an audience at work was during these first run of lightning talks. I was joined by four colleagues: Daniel, Mike, Mark & Charlie (blog) who talked about:
Bundler, Sketch algorithms, Fictionary, CAP theorem & Riak

Deciding to be a bit cute I chose the subject of "Speed" for my first lightning talk and aimed to address the issue of choosing a language for a given project based on the ability to learn it, write it, execute it, run it & fix it.


Speed from James Doig on Vimeo.

Five minuets is not a long time and that is quite an in depth subject, well you live and learn and hopefully it will serve as a good warm-up for my full length Clojure talk in a couple of weeks.

Initial thoughts: Graph Databases

We've recently had some very interesting tech talks given by our talented developers and guest speakers.The first one was regarding graph databases (e.g Neo4J) and how we may use such a tool to store our routes data.

After the talk I was jotting down some of the ideas talked about to help get my head around graph databases.

I really liked the thought of storing not only route data but also pricing and user search metrics within the graph.
For example if a user was to choose Edinburgh as their point of origin a lot of relevant information about their, potential, requirements would be within only a couple of hops of the graphs nodes.

In the image (not at all based on real data) we can see a relationship going from Edinburgh to Spain that represents a large percentage of searches with Edinburgh as an origin have Spain as a destination (we can also see the price and distance/journey time between these relationships).

There is also a relationship going from Edinburgh to Glasgow that shows a large percentage of searches that start off with Edinburgh as an origin often see the user switching to Glasgow airport as their origin (perhaps due to ticket price or availability of flights to a given destination). In conjunction with this we can see that Italy is the main destination searched for when Glasgow is the origin.


Lastly there is a link from Edinburgh to Amsterdam telling us that Amsterdam is the most popular "via" location in a multi-hop journey and that Dubai is the most popular destination from Amsterdam.

I haven't gotten a chance to see how such a database would work in reality... But I do like the idea of being able to take a user origin as soon as its selected, e.g Edinburgh, and be able to immediately come back with information like:

Flights from Edinburgh to Spain from £30 (journey times around 2 hours)
Flights from Edinburgh to Dubai from £432 (journey times around 10 hours)
Flights from Glasgow to Italy from £51 (journey times around 4 hours)
Train from Edinburgh to Glasgow from £18 (journey time < 1 hour)