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A “remake” of my talk at Que Du Web 2017 in Deauville.
It’s about graphs, history (with a small h and a capital H), algorithms and practical applications, SEO in particular.
In this first episode: “Graphs are everywhere, including in everyday life”.
(See the overview of the talk with all the episodes)
Here are the matching slides:
The transcript
A quick word about me:
I’ve been self-employed, in development and the web, since 1997.
I worked on big engineering projects, and over time I fired all my clients, refused to sell my time, and now I live almost entirely off the income from my websites and my tools, the best known of the latest ones being xSpin, Qualispin and Cocon.Se.
I have to say that putting this talk together was very frustrating: there’s a wealth of material, I had to cut and cut again, so I’ll have to summarize.
So. Do you see graphs everywhere too?
Let me tell you about an almost ordinary day…
I usually start my day with a bit of tech watch. That day, quite fittingly, I was reading up on graph databases. And there are loads of them, it’s booming. I kept running into articles listing not the top 5 or the top 10, but the top 30 graph databases…
A bit later, it was AI and neural networks’ turn, and I came across a classification of neural networks drawn as graphs.
9 a.m.!
Right, time to get to work; and here, every developer knows it: we swim in graphs all day long, especially for versioning with Git…
Now, so far you’ll tell me I was asking for it, these are super technical examples.
But my day isn’t over yet…
Noon.
For once, I turn on the TV.
It was right when the Panama Papers scandal broke.
And bam: the journalists are using graph databases to show the connections between companies on the evening news.
1 p.m.
Before getting back to work, a quick TV-series break.
And yes, no escape there either…
The graph, the ultimate tool for tracking down a serial killer, a terrorist or a drug lord.
I dive back into work, and before I know it, it’s 6 p.m.
My wife and I are planning a trip to London. And there’s no doubt about it: road maps, city maps, and it’s even more obvious with things like the Tube map here, they’re all graphs…
I felt that was a lot for a single day, it was turning into an obsession, so I went to see my doctor; I tell him about my day and of course I wrap up with “Give it to me straight, doc: is it terminal… node?”
He answers, looking worried: “I don’t want to sound Euler-arming, but your case is serious, it looks like bipartite disorder. Let me check a few references,” and he pulls a brand-new book off his shelf.
At that point, I felt like I was in the Matrix.
I felt a node forming in my stomach, and I thought “this has to stop”, I was a bit un-directed.
But when the doctor offered to walk me out, I told him “thanks, I know the path”.
I’ll stop the little story there,
but we’re not done with History, because this “Metro” style of graphics, which looks modern,
is in fact only relatively Modern, since we owe this design, now adopted everywhere, to an English designer, in 1933.
By the way, notice that this is NOT a map: it doesn’t represent reality, the distances, etc…
It’s a simplified model.
But the history of graphs, of trees, goes back even further…
And that’s what we’ll see in the next episode 😉