Neo4j has been a passion project for the author, who is a Neo4j consultant at GraphAware, for the last four years. The graph database was used to provide recommendations for holiday house accommodations in just two weeks, and it provided flexibility to make changes over time, which was essential for clients who often weren't sure what they wanted. The author uses natural language processing and Elasticsearch integration with Neo4j to provide graph-aided searches and has been able to go into production much faster than with traditional relational databases. They also use Apache Spark computations within Cypher, allowing the Neo4j JVM to remain quiet while performing computations outside of the main database. Overall, the author is impressed with Neo4j's capabilities and flexibility, which have helped their company increase their customer base.