9 years! A whole new world.

I have been missing you!

Indeed, last year, I have not been able to publish my anniversary blog post as I’m used to do every year since I joined Elastic 9 years ago.

That was for a technical reason actually. I was using a old and not updated blogging platform and it took me a looooong time before I was able to invest time to switch everything to Hugo.

So here we go! This year celebrates my 9 years anniversary at elastic but also a new blogging system.

I have been missing you!

Well, not writing article anymore for almost 2 years is not the only reason. As you might have noticed, the world has changed since 2020 and my last article.

2020 and the COVID19

2020 started with some trips, following my 2020 travel policy:

• Niort, FR: 1 BBL
• Paris, FR: 1 conference, 2 BBLs, 1 meetup
• Lille, FR: 1 meetup and 1 BBL
• Montréal, CA: 1 conference, 1 meetup and 1 BBL
• Montpellier, FR: 1 BBL and 1 meetup

And then, Emmanuel Macron announced that the country is going to be locked down.

That started a new era for a lot of companies and jobs like mine where meeting people is one of the key points. For Elastic, in general, it did not change a lot the way we are working because the company started as a distributed company. It’s part of our DNA.

But we started to move from in person to virtual events to keep the community members connected to each others.

2021, pandemic does not stop

So at the end, we tried to invent new ways to communicate with our members. With my team we did:

• EMEA Virtual meetups
• France meetups: we went from one in-person meetup every 6 weeks to virtual meetups every 3 weeks. I tried to keep the content as short as possible (~20 minutes) to avoid the “zoom fatigue”. We are fortunate enough in France that a lot of users are voluntering sharing their stories with the community.
• Elastic Daily Byte: 3 series of 15 short videos (around 8 minutes), live before lunch. I really enjoyed doing that with my team as it was a way for us to build something together. We covered:
  • Elasticsearch
  • Kibana
  • Observability
• Elastic Community Conference: 24 hours, non stop to propose talks from EMEA to NASA and finally to APJ. Same as for daily bytes, I really enjoyed doing it because it was a team effort where we tried to build something from scratch.

Coding

As I was not travelling, I had more time to code on different things:

• FSCrawler is a project I started in 2011. I realized that I never really shared information about it with the community. So I started to give some talks and also to implement new features like connecting FSCrawler to Workplace Search so users can now have for free a very powerful UI to search for their files within their shared storage in addition to Dropbox, Google Drive amongst many others…
• Some contributions in Elasticsearch, specifically in the Ingest Attachment plugin with more metadata now extracted and an easy way to remove automatically the binary content from the source.

2022?

I have been missing you!

This is still true. Although I have been able to meet again some of you…

Today #elkie is in La Rochelle for the @jugsummercamp. 😍 pic.twitter.com/Fjhqcaainb

— David Pilato 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇫🇷 (@dadoonet) September 10, 2021

Il y a des masques, certes. Mais il y a toujours des sourires derrière les masques. Que cela fait du bien de se retrouver en vrai ! Merci @DevoxxFR d'avoir osé cet événement. Merci cher public d'être venu à ma conférence. ❤️ #DevoxxFR pic.twitter.com/eaTQ7tySdQ

— David Pilato 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇫🇷 (@dadoonet) September 29, 2021

…I’m still mising a lot our interactions.

So let’s hope we will have some fun together this year and will be able to gather in some places around the world. If pandemic gives us some rest, I should be able to meet my coworkers this year in Las Vegas. I really hope that it will happen as my team has changed, with new colleagues, new faces I never met yet in real life.

On a personal side, I’m like on a balance. I want to travel again but on the other hand, staying at home, taking care of your family, is priceless.

Let see how all that goes in the next weeks.

If we have a chance to meet again, please don’t be a stranger and come to say “Hi”! I’ll be more than happy to chat with you.

And remember that behind the mask, there’s a smile! 😉