Neo4j's Education Lead Adam Cowley walks us through the redesign of GraphAcademy, the free self-paced online training platform for Neo4j. Start your graph database certification journey with the Neo4j Fundamentals, Cypher Fundamentals, and Graph Data Modeling Fundamentals courses at graphacademy.neo4j.com
Complete the Neo4j Fundamentals and Cypher Fundamentals courses within a week and provide feedback and you could be sporting a limited edition GraphAcademy t-shirt inspired by Experimental Jetset’s “John & Paul & Ringo & George” design.
Simply complete the courses, use the feedback widget to provide some feedback, and send an email to graphacademy@neo4j.com with a link to your profile and any likes or dislikes about the experience before 23:59:59 PT on Sunday 31 October 2021. See the blog post for more info.
William Lyon (00:00):
Welcome to GraphStuff. FM. Today we are talking with Adam Cowley, who's my colleague on the Developer Relations team. Hey Adam, how's it going?
Adam Cowley (00:10):
I am good. How are you?
William Lyon (00:11):
Good. Good. So we want to talk today about the new updated GraphAcademy site that you've been working on for a while. But before we jump into that, maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you work on at Neo4j. I know you've actually had a couple of different roles at Neo4j. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about those?
Adam Cowley (00:31):
Yeah, sure. My name's Adam. I am the education lead and diversity at Neo4j, at the moment. So previous to that, I worked as a professional services consultant for three years. Basically traveling all across Europe, teaching people how to use Neo4j and how to be successful with the Neo4j.
William Lyon (00:48):
What, what brought you to Neo4j in the first place? Did you use it as a software developer before joining, Neo4j at all?
Adam Cowley (00:56):
Yeah, so I started using Neo4j, I think back in around 2011, 2012, I was working on a streaming platform at the time, and we were looking at a better way to store and report on the data and the mice screen back in, we were using them and we had Neo4j just definitely became the best fit for that. And now it's as soon as I started using and Neo4j, I started to see graphs everywhere.
William Lyon (01:21):
That's a common theme that pops up for sure. Cool. So let's talk about GraphAcademy. First of all, can you tell us what GraphAcademy is? It's been around for a while now, already, right?
Adam Cowley (01:32):
Yeah. It's been around for quite long time. GraphAcademy is our free self-paced hands-on online training platform. It's yeah, basically the way you would go to get comprehensive training, free of charge.
William Lyon (01:45):
And you've been working on a big update to GraphAcademy, but I guess before we jumped into that and what's in the big update, maybe you could give us a little bit of the behind the scenes. What is the architecture for GraphAcademy?
Adam Cowley (01:57):
So GraphAcademy is built on top of a Neo4j aura database. So it's really important for me that we ate our own dog food with this project. So when I joined the developer team in 2020, I was mainly focused around improving developer experience. So as part of that work, there was an overhaul of the developer guides. And then later their reference documentation, which is produced by the engineering team. As part of my work in the early stages, was to do a complete overhaul of that, including design layout and publishing pipelines.
Adam Cowley (02:29):
So as part of that, the GraphAcademy was dragged along, kicking and screaming. And I guess, due care and attention wasn't given from my side as to how it works or how it looked and felt. So there was like a buggy client side log in, which made the screen flicker on and off. The progressions tickets were handled by some ADA vest landers that were all over the place, and what looks slow and inefficient and things were really all over the place. So I guess early 2021, I was asked if I could take a look at the educational side of Deborah, which included a GraphAcademy. So what I wanted to do is to basically take the current courses and present them in a new way to make some tweaks, to make things a little bit better.
William Lyon (03:13):
And so you knew that wanting to go through this redesign and improvement process, but I think that you really tried to look at the data when you're coming up with the sort of the overall design for re architecting GraphAcademy. What did that look like? What kind of data do you have available? And do you talk to users about their experience? What does that process look like?
Adam Cowley (03:34):
There were two sides to the corner really. In the three years I spent in the field team, I was running a boot camps on almost a weekly basis and using bit of the same sort of content. So the content that we have inside GraphAcademy is the same that we're delivering in professional services at the time. The content itself was good, there's a good mixture of theory, slides hands-on material. I always thought that there were areas that we could improve. You've done training yourself obviously, you probably know the pattern. So on day one, everyone is really enthusiastic, well most of the room anyway, and then you'd sit down and basically do two hours of theory, heavy slides, and you could start to see the enthusiasm drain, eyes glazing over, people starting to check their emails. But one thing I found from that is that the sooner that you opened Neo4j browser, and you started to write some ciphers, maybe double-click on some notes and then watch the graphics span front of your face.
Adam Cowley (04:26):
It starts to get people excited, people want to get involved. And I think from that point of view, we've got like a really cool cutting edge technology and really fundamental experience, but it's not something that I do very well in terms of the training. And it's not something that we got to the heart of is as quickly as possible. So from that side, I was aware that the way that we communicate and we talk about the company versus how we train things, but also taking a look at the data side, I think that there's some ways that we could restructure the courses in an interesting way.
William Lyon (04:55):
So trying to get people hands-on with Neo4j as soon as possible to really reinforce the concepts that folks are meant to be learning as part of GraphAcademy, that became a clear goal for the redesign then.
Adam Cowley (05:08):
Yeah. Getting people towards the what we call the graph epiphany is as soon as possible. So not only recognizing this cool technology that we're working with, but also something that solves real world problems by looking at them in a different way.
William Lyon (05:22):
I like that, the graph epiphany. Yeah. That's definitely a moment that I've had personally and that I've watched a lot of folks have during training or working on a project. That's a very magical thing for sure.
Adam Cowley (05:34):
I have my own opinions of what we should be doing and how I would like the training to be. But I didn't really want to be held back by my own bias as well. I added a little pop-ups in the bottom right-hand corner of the GraphAcademy pages, asking users, if they'd be interested in a quick 30 minute call to talk about the experience. So one of the great things about our community is that everyone is really friendly and always willing to provide feedback. The downside is everyone is too polite and no one's really ripping the work to shreds, which is what I was looking for. We're taking that qualitative feedback and then combining that with the quantitative feedback of the data to really help to shape what GraphAcademy is and what our roadmap will be for the next year.
Adam Cowley (06:12):
I took a look the enrollment data from the existing site, and to see how people use that site and also look at documentation. So I did a talk at notes 2021 about how we've improved developer experience using Neo4j. Basically what I did inside there was to basically track everyone's movements through the docs and developer guides to see what they were looking at and then to see how basically how people use the site.
William Lyon (06:38):
Are there any interesting takeaways from that? One thing I remembered that talk, that was super interesting. And again, I think a great example of where we can dog food Neo4j. I know the developer relations team and at, Neo4j in general, we try to use Neo4j internally as much as possible. But where there any kind of interesting takeaways as part of looking at that data, or maybe the user interviews that either did or didn't invalidates the ideas that you had going into that?
Adam Cowley (07:07):
Yeah. The most interesting thing that I found is that when you land on the Neo4j developer pages, so Neo4j.com/developer, the top free links on that page are the first three in the header. So they were links to, I'm a developer, I'm a data scientist, or I'm an administrator. And so it's clear that that people are trying to use the site in a way that matched their job role. So that's something that's really important for me to bring through, into the new site. I did a set of like mini questionnaires for the site, which popped up in the bottom right hand and which asks the user for like their job role and level of experience. And that then allowed me to drill into that data and understand what the user's journey was like and what their motivations were after learning at that point.
Adam Cowley (07:50):
So what I was able to do from that was to build a view of what a beginner data scientists would be looking for or an intermediate developer would look for. It turned out that there was some content which was shared across all users, basically all of the beginners would like to know things like information about what is a labeled Popsie graph? What is a graph database? How do I create this thing or the bounce they would decipher? And then how do I get data in so important data? So that was a common theme across everybody. And then after that content people started to drill down into the specifics for their job role.
William Lyon (08:27):
Gotcha. It makes sense. So we've talked a bit about looking at usage data again, using Neo4j by modeling the user's journey through developer documentation and GraphAcademy in Neo4j, we've talked about, you did some user feedback discussions with individuals and also your own learnings and experience that I guess, teaching Neo4j, both in person and online, that kind of informed a lot of the redesign goals for this. So I guess that's some good inputs. Let's maybe talk about where things ended up. So I've seen the new GraphAcademy. It looks really neat. It's really exciting, but could you maybe talk about some of the new features and some of the new things available in the redesign?
Adam Cowley (09:11):
Sure. So one of the pieces of feedback that came up quite often, it was that it was really difficult to navigate your way through the site. So that's something I needed to look and something I needed to treat with a little bit of importance. So using that and the data, we then create like a hierarchy of courses, which then allowed us to create a path towards certification, which isn't the end goal for us. With the previous site there was maybe 20 courses and there was no sort of clear path as to where you should be going, where you should start learning, and then where to go to next once you complete your course. What we did is look to the content that was available on the development pages. And then, so I guess used a little bit common sense as well to group those into paths that a user with a particular job role would be interested in.
Adam Cowley (09:55):
So for example, everyone would be interested in the fundamentals of Neo4j, the cipher fundamentals, maybe do some data modeling and get them some data into Neo4j. But then as a developer, you may want to build an application on top of Neo4j. So then at that point, you start to diverge off into your own path. And I think it was one of the important things for me was to give the users a clear goal and also something that they can take away from it. So they can feel like at the end of a particular path, they've achieved some things. So for example, the abdomen courses that we're working on at the end of that you'll get a working site, which works with an API built with the language of your choice. Serving certain content. For a cipher developer. For example, you'll have all of the knowledge information that you will need in order to build a working recommendation engine.
William Lyon (10:39):
Gotcha. One of the things that you mentioned earlier is trying to get users to experience this graph epiphany moment sooner, rather than making someone read through a whole bunch of content or look at a bunch of slides and really just getting hands on as soon as possible to really start building things. How did you try to surface that in the new course?
Adam Cowley (11:00):
So really my aim was to get the user to a point where they could see circles and arrows on a page together and then maybe start to double-click and go from there. So one of the points that was raised on the old courses that they were maybe a little bit long and a little bit daunting for the user. The first thing that we wanted to do really is to break things up into bite size chunks, surf user is, and maybe working for a course that gets distracted, gets called away to something else. It will be easy for them to pick up where they left off. And then we really just wanted to get them to write ciphers as soon as possible. And then to start querying the graph as soon as.
William Lyon (11:36):
And that's one of the things that I love about this new redesign is that you've brought in a cipher editor. This looks like you've brought in Neo4j browser or some component of Neo4j browser actually into the course platform. So while I'm going through these exercises, I'm actually using the tool that I'm actually going to be using as I'm really working on my project and building an actual application. I think that's a really neat feature of this is just having the same tooling embedded alongside the course as I'm working through it.
Adam Cowley (12:06):
Yeah. I think getting people to use the tools that they would use on a daily basis is an important thing as well. So we've got to areas to entry with the current courses for the course, a lot of them were just quizzes. So there wasn't really a challenge there. It's just about recognizing information more than anything else. So we look to barriers to entry, how we could basically remove any excuse for person not using the course or not taking the course.
Adam Cowley (12:32):
One of those is installation. Some people can or are unwilling to install something on their computer. And so once you... when you get in start with a new technology, it's not necessarily going to be able to fire up a database and query database. One of the things we built into the platform is depending on if we inside our own course, metadata defined by use case, then a Neo4j sandbox instances fired-up, which means that the user then doesn't have to install anything on their computer. So that barrier to entry there is gone. And then we can concentrate educating them on how to do something rather than how to install. And I think it's maybe three lessons into the cipher fundamentals course when you actually start to write a query for the first time.
William Lyon (13:14):
Gotcha. So as we're working through these courses and I'm writing cipher and querying the database, this isn't just some artificial UI built into the course, there's actually been a Neo4j instance provisioned specifically for me, that I'm interacting with in the cloud. That's pretty neat.
Adam Cowley (13:31):
Yeah, exactly. And then as you work the course, or maybe multiple courses, you will then start to build out and to modify the data that's in that sandbox.
William Lyon (13:42):
Cool. I think one of my favorite features about the new GraphAcademy is the public profile page. So previously you had certificates when you completed a course that you could share on LinkedIn or whatever, which is nice and fun, but now we have these public profile pages that I can share my progress through the different learning paths. That might be something to share at a potential employer, or maybe just something to game-ify with my friends. Right. How does the public profile page work? Is that something that is specific to each user?
Adam Cowley (14:17):
Yeah, exactly. An interesting factor that we have to consider when looking at the courses was the motivation. So if I think back to the bootcamp, I used to run, there were two types of people in the room. There were people with like in internal motivations. So there are people that are excited to learn this technology or excited to learn anything enthusiastic to learn in general. But then there also these people that had more of an external motivation. So these were the people that are checking their emails during day one. So basically the people that have been told by their bosses that they need to learn this new thing. They don't really know what it is. They really care. They just want to get something out of it.
Adam Cowley (14:49):
So somebody that has that internal motivation to learn Neo4j will have the drive and determination to complete the course, or continue on to the next course. But for externally motivated learners, they may need this extra incentive to complete the course. So this could be as simple as just like a PDF certificate or maybe something more concrete and physical. So stickers, badges, and clothing, something like that. The idea behind the public profile was to game-ify the experience a little bit. So when a user completes a course, or they get a batch, which then gets added to the public profile, which they can then start to share with their boss, with their friends, with their colleagues.
William Lyon (15:28):
Great. Really cool. So the new GraphAcademy platform is live. Anyone can go check it out now at GraphAcademy.Neo4j.com. and they'll see this new redesign definitely encourage anyone to check it out. Where did we go from here? What's next coming for GraphAcademy?
Adam Cowley (15:45):
So we're working hard on the course catalog at the moment. So we have, at the moment, three courses are ready to go and more become in soon. There are a lot of courses listed on the platform at the moment as coming soon. So we decided to develop the curriculum and reopen, and then also give the community and our learners, the ability to affect our roadmap. So if there's something that any of the listeners will be interested in, you can register your interest from any of the courses that are listed as coming soon. And what we're doing is we'll take that information as a count when we prioritize it. But for us in general, this is a case of working through the catalog and making the rest of the courses.
William Lyon (16:20):
Gotcha. Great. So if there's a specific topic you'd like to see a course about, be sure to check out the new GraphAcademy page and click on the register interest button. I see a lot of specific cipher features on there, including working with date and spatial, advanced cipher things that I think would be really useful. Cool. I believe that for a limited time, folks can get a special edition GraphAcademy T-shirt is that right?
Adam Cowley (16:49):
Yeah. The feedback on the new courses is really valuable to us. So whether somebody is completely new to Neo4j or they've completed a GraphAcademy course before, so we'd love to hear any feedback, good or bad. We've added feedback widgets on each page throughout the course. So you can give you your feedback there. And that information goes through to a dashboard that we're constantly monitoring. We're also offering a limited edition T-shirt to anyone who completes the Neo4j fundamentals and SIFA fundamentals courses and sends us some feedback. So if you head over to GraphAcademy.Neo4j.com. Enrollment, and complete in the two courses, then send an email to GraphAcademy@neo4j.com with a link to public profile, and any feedback on the courses, good or bad by the end of October, then you'll get a free T-shirt. Which is the part of one of my favorite T-shirts inspired by the experimental jet sets, John and Paul and Ringo and George Beatles at design. So, yeah if you send in your feedback by 31st of October 2021. Then we will get a T-shirt out to you.
William Lyon (17:51):
Fun. Yeah. And you've talked about how that input comes into the planning process going through these redesigns. So it is vital to get that feedback from the community. So I would definitely encourage you to take one of the new courses and send some feedback in order to get that T-shirt. Or even if you don't want the T-shirt let us know what you think of the new platform that is always super helpful.
William Lyon (18:12):
Great. I think that is all we wanted to chat about today. Be sure to check out the new GraphAcademy course platform at GraphAcademy.Neo4j.com. We'll also link in the show notes. The other things we talked about as well, but thanks so much for joining us today, Adam and everyone for listening today, and we will catch you on the next episode. Cheers.