🎂 12 years: from a dinosaur to a teenager

Friday, Jan 10, 2025 | 12 minute read

David Pilato
🎂 12 years: from a dinosaur to a teenager

We are not a lot of people who can say that we are working for Elastic for 12 years. I’m one of them. And I’m proud of it. I really think that I took one of the best decisions in my life when I decided to join this startup as it was risky to leave a confortable position with a permanent contract in a french governement organization. But I did it. And I never regretted it.

The teenager

Ninja Turtles: Teenage Years is a 1989 arcade game produced by Konami. It is a scrolling beat ’em up type game based mainly on the 1987 animated series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The game was ported to the NES in 1990, retitled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game, and released in 1991. In 2009, the NES version was re-released for the Wii’s Virtual Console in Europe and Australia.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I’m not a Ninja Turtle but I’m a teenager. I’m still learning every day. I’m still making mistakes every day. I’m still growing every day. I’m still having fun every day. I’m still enjoying every day. I’m still sharing every day. I’m still helping every day. I’m still loving every day. I’m still Elastic every day.

AI is everywhere

2024 has been a super active and busy year for me with one of the talk I ran the most: “Search: a new era”. It’s a talk which describes:

  • “Classic” search and its limitations
  • What is a model and how can you use it
  • How to use vector search or hybrid search in Elasticsearch
  • Where OpenAI’s ChatGPT or similar LLMs come into play to with Elastic

I’m really enjoying playing this talk as it explains in very simple words what are vectors and why they are so important in the search world.

Vectors

Vectors

I’m even sharing some basic maths so people can “easily” understand what is happening behind the scene.

Cosinus

Cosinus

But the funniest part of the talk is when I’m showing how to use those principles with sound, to search for similar musics. It’s super connected to my other passion: the art of DeeJaying.

Deejay at conferences

That has been something very new. It started last year when I was invited to play at the Camping des Speakers conference in Baden, France. In 2024, I was invited to play at the Riviera Dev conference in Sophia Antipolis, France. But the wee before, I was manning the Elastic booth at the Sunny Tech conference in Montpellier, France. I met Julien Briault for the first time and learned that he used to be a DeeJay too, known as Krytek:

I proposed him to play together at the Riviera Dev conference and he accepted. We had a great time together doing a B2B set, and we met then (Nikita Rousseau ) who also joined us and ran the warmup.

I loved it at it’s another way to share passion and knowledge with people.

At Elastic, we can spend up to 5 days for non profit activities. This year, I played for the Lisa Forever association which is helping kids with cancer. It was a great honor to be part of this event.

For the December Fest event, at Elastic office I was also invited to play some music for my colleagues.

It was one of my best DeeJay set ever which you can listen from here .

The Elastic design team created a nice design for a t-shirt or a poster I will use for my next events.

DJ Elkie

DJ Elkie

Elkie was also having fun

Elkie is the plush I got in the early days of Elastic. And like in Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain movie, I’m taking pictures of Elkie everywhere I go and I’m posting on X social network. If you want to have an idea of where Elkie was in 2024, you can have a look at the Elkie’s 2024 posts .

Sometimes, I’m very lucky because I can come with my daughter to some events. Like for the JPrime conference in Sofia, Bulgaria:

Elkie was also with my family and I in South Korea.

It was a great time for me as I could meet again with Jong Min Kim!

Elkie was also at the Olympic Games in Paris, France which was a really great event, very well organized!

2024 in numbers

The most shamefull moment of 2024

Something weird happened in November. As you can see in the list above, I travelled A LOT this month. My mental load was so high that I made one of the biggest mistake of my entire life. I was travelling back from Amsterdam to Brussels by train with my luggage, my backpack and a very small flight case with some video recorders that a friend of mine lent me for the ElasticON Amsterdam conference.

Flightcase

Flightcase

I was so tired that I forgot the flight case at the central train station. I realized that when I was in the train on my way to Brussels. I heard then a voice asking if someone left a luggage at the station. I told the train agent that it was me. He asked me some questions about it as they closed the station. In Rotterdam, the Police came on board and asked me to explain what was inside the flight case, to open my other luggages. They checked obviously my identity, checked my phone where I was chatting with a colleague to take it back with him from the lost&found office. I felt so ashamed by the situation and all the trouble I caused that day. Then I was allowed to continue my trip to Brussels.

At the end of the trip, the train agent told me that they blocked the Amsterdam Centraal station for some hours because of me. I felt so bad even though I knew I did not do that on purpose and it was “just” that I was so exhausted by all the trips. I was feeling like a teenager who did something very stupid!

So if you suffered from that situtation that day, I apologize!

2025 to be like

I was super exhausted at the end of 2024 as you read above so I was happy to take some days off to rest and to be with my family. I have to say that I accepted probably a bit too much events and I was running from one place to another with no real space time for my family and for my other Elastic activities, like managing the Elastic Advent calendar or organizing the ElasticON Paris 2025 community track . I will probably reduce a bit the cadence of my talks and events in 2025 to make sure I’m not burning myself out.

Although the list of expected events is yet quite long:

  • Paris, France, for the ElasticON Paris 2025 community track and then for the ElasticON Paris 2025 conference . If you don’t have your ticket yet, you can still register to both events. It’s free!
  • Grenoble, France, for the SnowCamp conference where I’ll be manning the Elastic booth.
  • Tours, France, for the Touraine Tech conference. I’ll be giving a talk about “ES|QL: the new way to query Elasticsearch” and I’ll be deejaying again.
  • Bordeaux, France, for the BordeauxJUG meetup with again a talk about ES|QL.
  • Nantes, France, for the ENI Tech fest event with my talk about the new era for search.
  • Las Vegas, NV, USA, for the Elastic engineering all hands, where I’ll be meeting my amazing colleagues, from the developper relations team but also the rest of the engineering team.
  • Niort, France, for the DevQuest conference.

And it’s not including yet the other proposals I applied to. Speaking of that, if you are a speaker, I can highly recommend to check out the website made by Aurélie Vache : Call for Paper . It’s a great tool to find CFPs and to submit your talks.

So if you have a chance to be nearby, and even if we don’t know each other, please come and say hi! I don’t really look like a teenager but the t-shirt and the ripped jeans but more like a dinosaur as my colleagues like to call me.

3D Monster Maze on ZX81

3D Monster Maze on ZX81

But I won’t eat you! Instead, there will always be a smile for you! ♥️

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Details

I discovered Elasticsearch project in 2011. After contributed to the project and created open source plugins for it, David joined elastic the company in 2013 where he is Developer and Evangelist. He also created and still actively managing the French spoken language User Group. At elastic, he mainly worked on Elasticsearch source code, specifically on open-source plugins. In his free time, he likes talking about elasticsearch in conferences or in companies (Brown Bag Lunches AKA BBLs ). He is also author of FSCrawler project which helps to index your pdf, open office, whatever documents in elasticsearch using Apache Tika behind the scene.

Who am I?

Developer | Evangelist at elastic and creator of the Elastic French User Group . Frequent speaker about all things Elastic, in conferences, for User Groups and in companies with BBL talks . In my free time, I enjoy coding and deejaying as DJ Elky , just for fun. Living with my children in Cergy, France.

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