The new decade - 🎉 celebrating 11 years at Elastic

Here we go again… 2023 is yet over and it helped me to realize what I love to do.

2023

I’m so happy to be part of the Elastic family and to be able to help people around the world to be successful with the Elastic Stack. I can definitely say that interacting with the community is what I love to do.

It’s taking several forms.

Of course, I’m still enjoying going to conferences. You don’t need to be a rock star to be a speaker. You just need to be yourself and share your passion. That’s what I’m doing. It’s also a way to meet again old friends, make new ones.

Sometimes, you attend “non standard” conferences. I really enjoyed the Camping Des Speakers conference in Baden, France. I was pleased to share a bit about my other passion: the art of DeeJaying. It creates a different kind of connection with the audience.

It was also an opportunity to meet with some elasticians as we are all distributed around the world. I’m always happy to meet with my colleagues and to share a good time with them.

In 2023, another great event to meet my colleagues was the Engineering All Hands in Orlando, Florida. It was a great opportunity to meet with people I’m working with on a daily basis but also to meet with people I never met before. And doing things as simple as sharing a meal together is a great experience.

People! Technology is great but people are the most important thing to me. At the JUG Summer Camp, in La Rochelle, I was pleased to share a good time with the French community in nice spots I know, because it’s where I was borned and raised. Funny story: I was wearing the Elastic T-Shirt and someone in the restautant asked me if I was working for Elastic. I said yes and he told me that he was using Elasticsearch for years and that he was very happy with it. Unexpected interaction. Which is what I’m enjoying a lot!

I visited Morocco again in 2023. Everytime I notice the official photographer taking pictures of me, I’m pausing my talk and I’m posing. Two reasons for that. First, it makes the photographer and the attendees smiling while we are doing that. A way to say: “Don’t be serious! We are here to learn and have fun!”. And actually, there’s no second reason. I just love to do that! 😅

Again, making new connections is great. Anytime you are in a place you don’t know, seeing a friendly and smiling face makes you feel much more relaxed.

In 2023, one of the thing I started again after a long pause was to run trainings. I was doing this the first years I joined Elastic but I stopped doing it for a while. I’m happy to be back on track and to be able to share my knowledge with people who want to learn more about the Elastic Stack and also nice stories about the company, some decisions we made, the thoughts behind a feature, etc. And attendees love when we are not just “reading the slides”.

The story of “Elkie” is always a good one to share.

It’s a good way to explain how we are working at Elastic. Lot of managers in French companies don’t really understand the value of being distributed. Sharing the message within the community could answer to some of their fears. At Elastic, we are all working from home. We are all working asynchronously. We are all working in the open. We are all working with passion. We are all working with respect. We are all working with empathy. We are all working with a common goal: to make our users successful.

In 2023, the main event for me was not really connected to work but was connected to Elastic in a way. In 2013, I met for the very first time in Amsterdam, NL, with Aaron and Diana. Aaron joined Elastic to work on Logstash, while I was working on Elasticsearch. After some smiles, some discussions, it was obvious that we were making a friendly connection. Aaron and Diana came to Paris, France, to visit me and my family some years ago. But this year, I was super honored to be invited with 2 of my children in Salem, UT, USA to share an amazing journey. We visited so nice places (see main picture of this post). But more than that I’ve seen my kids like never before, interacting in English with a whole family, sharing the US way of life, understanding another culture, being just happy. And I think we built strong memories for all of us. I’m so grateful for that.

2024

So, meeting people, humans, in a world where we are moving towards more and more AI related technologies is something I love to do. I’m not saying that AI is bad. It’s just a tool, a powerful one for sure. And I’m pleased that Elastic started to work on that some years ago before it became a buzzword.

So 2024 will be still about this: meeting people, sharing with them, learning from them, helping them, making them successful and of course meeting my co-workers.

For what is planned so far, I’ll be in:

• Paris, France, for the Elastic Cruise event
• Tours, France, for the TADx meetup
• Grenoble, France, for the SnowCamp conference
• Tours, France, for the Touraine Tech conference
• Prague, Czech Republic, for the Elastic Engineering All Hands
• Pau, France, for the AgnosTech meetup
• Sofia, Bulgaria, for the jPrime conference
• La Rochelle, France, for the CoTer numérique conference
• Montpellier, France, for the Sunny Tech conference
• Of course some BBLs and ElasticFR Meetups

If you have a chance to be nearby, and even if we don’t know each other, please come and say hi! There will always be a smile for you!

PS: if you are curious, here are some stats about my 2023 year. It does not show everything but gives an idea.