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?
- 5 elasticsearch or partner events
- 5 trainings. Don’t miss our next sessions in Paris! Hands On Workshop ELK and Core elasticsearch.
- 6 meetups. I really encourage people to come to the next one in Paris, January 22nd.
- 28 BBLs. I love doing talks at companies. It’s a very nice way to understand our users’ needs. I talk about course about the ELK stack but you can find many different speakers now on the brownbaglunch.fr web site. I’m also thinking of adding Elasticsearch to provide search features for the website. Let’s hope I can find some spare time for this project. :)
- 34 talks. Lot of conferences, including Devoxx, Code Motion, Sofshake, Drupagora, DotScale, JMaghreb, JavaZone, BreizhCamp, BDX.io, Solution Linux, Microsoft Tech Days and some Java User Groups.
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 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 1.5.0.Beta1 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 same services to their users.
We are actively working on Elasticsearch 2.0 (ie. New Aggregation Types, Resiliency), Logstash 1.5 GA (Performance, Kafka, Migrating from Rivers to Logstash input 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?
