MovieHackDay Berlin Recap

It was really a great event. Perfectly organized by MoviePilot.de (@Jannis) where Pere works as well.

You can find all information about the event on their site moviehackday.com and of course @moviehackday and #moviehackday (wiki)

There was free pizza, drinks (also beer), food coupons and cake from Pere, ping pong, lots of space, great conversations.

Some people have heard of neo4j and graphs some didn’t so Achim, Pere and I did a quick intro into graph-databases.

For hacking 3 teams decided to go for Neo4j for recommendations / connections etc. which is great (two of which never used it before).

MoviePilot are using/going to use Neo4j for their international site (moviepilot.com) they have 60 people working, running everything on ruby on rails. Their german site is running on mysql, but the german team got interested
in neo4j too so they will perhaps add it for recommendations and such and (imho: should replace mysql in the long run, we should work on that :)

They have a really great, golden, light-flooded office (previously a dance school, with mirrors and such, my wife even knew that one).
It is also a good location (Mehringdamm 33), easy to reach via subway and very cheap and great ho(s)tels around the corner (complete room for 3 w/ bathroom & breakfast for 42 EUR).

I sponsored a Kymera Magic Wand as 2nd prize, courtesy Neo4j.

I also announced the Graph Database Meetup Berlin there (during the demo show-off), even got a good location suggestion (c-base).

By the way, our team of four won the first prize (http://moviehackday.com/alien-egg.jpg), an Alien Collectors Set with “MovieTrail” a different visualization of a movie (like a twitter stream with geo-loc of the movie and appropriate images), all just extracted from the movie-script doc-file.
We didn’t use any storage so far, as we wanted to concentrate on the parsing, geo-lookup and visualization.

Public MovieTrail URL (dam’n it doesn’t show the images, although the urls are correct)
Repository is on github

I’m looking forward to the next movie-hackday, there were also suggestions on twitter to hold another one this year in the US which would be great.

Thanks again to the organizers.

Tags: neo4j