As part of Data Day Texas, we invite some of the best speaker/instructors to come a day early and teach workshops. In the graph space, there are few people better at teaching core graph concepts than Will Lyon and Ryan Boyd of Neo4j. We are happy that they have agreed to teach a class while in Austin.

In this workshop, we explore full stack application development using the GRANDstack (GraphQL, React, Apollo, and Neo4j Database) for building web applications backed by a graph database. During this workshop we will build a simple movie recommendation web application . We'll cover how to build a React component, an introduction to JSX, an overview of GraphQL, how to build a GraphQL service, and why it is a game-changer for front-end development, and we'll learn how to model, store, and query data in Neo4j using GraphQL and Cypher to power our web application. This workshop will be a hands on series of three modules, together building the components for a full stack web app: 1. Querying Neo4j for movie recommendations 2. Building a GraphQL service backed by Neo4j 3. Building and connecting a React frontend to a GraphQL service using Apollo Client Materials for the workshop can be found here: https://github.com/grand-stack/grand-stack-movies-workshop

About the instructors

William Lyon is a software developer at Neo4j, the open source graph database. As an engineer on the Developer Relations team, he works primarily on integrating Neo4j with other technologies, building demo apps, helping other developers build applications with Neo4j, and writing documentation. Prior to joining Neo, William worked as a software developer for several startups in the real estate software, quantitative finance, and predictive API fields. William holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Montana. You can find him online at lyonwj.com.

Ryan Boyd (Linkedin) is a SF-based software engineer focused on helping developers understand the power of graph databases. Previously he was a product manager for architectural software, built applications and web hosting environments for higher education, and worked in developer relations for twenty products during his 8 years at Google. He enjoys cycling, sailing, skydiving, and many other adventures when not in front of his computer.