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ES year 3

Once upon a time: Make your dreams come true

Oh wait! Already 2 years spent working for Elasticsearch? Time flies!

After the first year, I wrote that I did 58 talks in 4 countries, 37 towns for about 18 000 kilometers traveled. I was pretty sure that things would continue to grow.

This year, I spoke 78 times! Around 2 talks per week! I did around 48 000 kilometers. 8 000 km more than the earth's circumference! I still can't believe it... 12 countries. And no need to say that I love giving talks and sharing my enthusiasm about Elasticsearch!

I think that I'll put all this data together in Elasticsearch in the coming year, then create a Kibana dashboard to have a better overview of the talks I'm giving. :) "Eat your own dog food" is something Shay often says....

What did I do this year?

There are always a lot of nice folks to meet at each event: speakers, organizers and attendees. I come away from these events with a lot of good vibes and energy.

The French community grew a lot as well this year and we have now the fantastic [Livia](Livia Froelicher livia.froelicher@elasticsearch.com) on board to organize all the things. So if you want to give a talk to the French speaking community, please contact her!

From a 10 person company to more than 100

Elasticsearch clusters scale horizontally very well. Documents are distributed within the cluster. I feel the company functions this same way. We are a distributed team, all around the world and we are adding more and more brain power to our company. And what additions! We are building a very strong team in every single field in the organization. The hard part now is to recall everyone's name or job function! I guess I'll need to add more memory to my own brain really soonish! :)

A lot of babies were born last year, and new ones are coming in 2015. That's super great. We love families and babies at Elasticsearch! We can always find a good balance between our personal life and job duties. That's an important part of our company spirit.

As I wrote last year, building company core values is not hard at Elasticsearch, as we talk to each other on a daily basis and all hands company meetups happen every 6 months or so. But for the last one, in Amsterdam, it was hard to fit everyone in the same room!

So? What is the solution? Let's create a user conference and bring all the folks there! Welcome to Elastic{ON}!

I am super excited going to San Francisco in March, meeting up again with all the colleagues I already know and seeing all the new comers in real life. And meeting... Users! I love users! They are contributing back so much to our open source projects by submitting code, documentation, issues or simply talking about their use cases at meetups!

By the way, if you are a meetup organizer, you must see our dedicated meetup page!

We will give an update on the State of the Community from all of our Developer Advocates at elastic{ON}, so if you are around, come and meet us!

What's new? What's next?

It's not new, but we're hiring! Want to join us? Have a look at our open positions here. Feel free to ask me any questions about these roles and what its like to work at the company!

Great improvements came to the codebase this year. Elasticsearch is now 1.4.2, Logstash 1.4.2 and Kibana 4 is in Beta. Some commercial plugins has been released or announced, such as Marvel for cluster monitoring and Shield which is all about security. It's great seeing so many people involved on those projects. I think that we probably invest 80 to 90% of our development efforts today on open source projects.

Of course, when you start to release commercial products, you always getting some feedback, such as: "Hey, it must be free!". We actually don't have a specific Elasticsearch, Logstash or Kibana version for customers and a community version - our stack is the same for all using it. And that's something really important in my opinion. It means that people can create plugins on top of Elasticsearch & the ELK stack and provide services to their users.

We are actively working on Elasticsearch 2.0 (ie. Structured Document Enrichment, New Aggregation Types, Resiliency), Logstash 1.5 (Performance, Kafka, Migrating from Rivers to Logstash inout plugins) and 2.0 (Persistence, Clustering, Performance) and Kibana 4.0 which is already available as a Beta. Plus our work on clients, plugins and other ecosystem tools. We have also an infrastructure team who are busy behind the scenes providing services like continous integration, which helps a lot to uncover issues! Our support team gives the best support you have ever dreamed of, and we developers continue to work really closely with this team.

From startup to success...

I can remember the day I started to speak with Shay, then with Clint, Uri and Steven about working at Elasticsearch. I never regretted taking the "risk" of joining a startup.

We are already a succesful company. So many customers are paying for our support subscriptions, such as PayPal, Facebook, Cisco, Adobe, Swiss Life, Banque de France, Société Générale, Tom Tom and the list goes on....

I can not obviously talk about the details of our financial numbers, but I can tell that we are always above our business plan which is very unusual for a startup.

My only regret is that days have only 24 hours. Not enough time to do all what I'd like to do.

What about you? Are you ready to make your dreams come true?

@lhawthorn
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I have some feedback on the English grammar bits, which I would be happy to send along if you would like it. :)

Your enthusiasm is palpable in this post. It's so wonderful to see your passion shine through.

I love that you mentioned the dedicated meetups page. Even more love for the mention that we don't change the underlying functionality of Elasticsearch to suit our commercial needs / have a community vs enterprise version that causes users headaches as they move to become customers.

Other feedback:

  • If you are interested, you could add a plug for we're hiring to the "From a 10 person company..." section. I believe we're full in engineering for now but are actively hiring for other roles. Garrett Walsh should have a good idea of where we're looking for sales folks, and of course Robert Greene will have a great global overview.
  • Maybe mention the update from the DevRel team coming at Elastic{ON}? It would make a great addition to the user conference paragraph. Something as simple as "an update on the state of the community from all of our Developer Advocates" would be great.
  • I know we do not want to make pre-announcements about our products, but Shay mentioned that we could discuss "release themes." (Gaurav and team will have a good handle on our upcoming release themes if this does not automatically sound familiar to you.) Adding in a sentence or two about how we're looking to improve our stack in the future - referring to these themes - would be a good addition to the "We are actively working on elasticsearch 2.0, logstash 1.5 and Kibana 4.0, on clients, on plugins" paragraph.
  • For the dashboard to show all the talks you are doing, we could easily make the existing DevRel dashboard show this information. Would you like to feature it in a later post? Jason Kendall would be happy to help you make that happen.
  • I do not believe we discuss revenue figures or numbers of customers, but it would be really great to make reference our success with customers as part of the end of this post. (Assuming you are comfortable doing so.) Our business success is yet another reason to be really excited about the future.

Other than this feedback, LGTM. I would be happy to help with review of another draft and edit for native English speaker grammar, etc.

@dadoonet
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Hi @lhawthorn

It sounds like I did not see your comment! I was waiting for it but did not get any notification... :(
Sorry about that.

I modified based on your content. I'd love that you fix my bad english! :)
You can clone this GIST and modify it or send comments as you wish.

Thank you so much.

Best

@kimchy
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kimchy commented Jan 17, 2015

Hey David, great post. One minor change, remove the Structured Document Enrichment from the 2.0 features of ES, this is still actively discussed internally if we are even going to do it at all.

I would love not to fix the english (reading through it, I didn't really notice it, got swept by the enthusiasm), this is so authentic. (this is a realization I had with blog posts as well)

@dadoonet
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Haha! Leslie already edited my english :)

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