Neo4j’s founder Emil Eifrem shares a bit of history about the way Neo4j was started. Way back in 1999, his team realized that the database that was being internally used had a lot of connections between discrete data elements. Like many successful companies which grow out of a founder’s frustration with status quo, Neo4j began its life from the founding team’s frustration with the fundamental problem with the design of relational databases.

Cypher is a query language for Neo4j graph database. The basic model in Neo4j can be described as Each node can have a number of relationships with other nodes Each relationship goes from one node either to another node or to the same node Both nodes and relationships can have properties, and each property has a name and a value Cypher was first introduced in Nov 2013 and since then the popularity of graph databases as a category has taken off.

Git and Github have revolutionized the way one creates, maintains and shares software code. It is said to be the Linus Torvald's second gift to the world, first obviously being the Linux operating system. Nowadays it is common for job seekers to showcase their work in the form of several github repositories so that various employers can evaluate the job seeker in a much better way. Open source projects are thriving because of easy to use git based social coding platforms.

Books such as these, give visual images that are necessary to make learning stick. It is fair to say that I do not remember anything much about cell biology nor anything related to DNA. It was way back in my high school that I had crammed something, held it in my working memory for a few years in order to write exams. Some bits would have percolated to my long term memory, but since I have never retrieved them, they lie somewhere in some inaccessible part of my brain.