Career at Elastic

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.

The biggest milestone ever - 🎉 10 years at Elastic

Would I have been able to imagine such a thing when 10+ years ago I met Shay at Devoxx Belgium after his talk “Search, the Final Frontier”? 10 years! I have been working 10 years at Elastic. I have never working so long for a company. That’s my biggest work milestone ever! Remember the time Have you noticed that I’m frequently using a music in my blog posts. Well, it makes sense as I’m often DeeJaying for friends so music is everywhere in my life.

La potion magique pour faire avancer ta carrière

Voici la transcription d’une présentation que j’ai eu le plaisir à donner lors du Camping des speakers 2022, dont il s’agissait de la première édition. La potion magique pour faire progresser ta carrière 10h15 - 15 minutes - Autour du Feu La recette de la potion magique ne se transmet qu’aux seuls druides, normalement. Mais exceptionnellement, le conseil des druides de la forêt des Carnutes m’a autorisé à vous révéler quelques uns des ingrédients qui constituent ce breuvage.

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.

7 years! Finding the right balance

What a ride! 10 employees to around 2000 now. As I imagined 8 years ago, I still think that Elasticsearch (the product) and elastic (the company) are successful. Becoming a public company did not change a lot my daily activities. I’m still on the road meeting/building the community, specifically in France and making sure people are sharing the same love that we have internally for the products we are building. I’d like this year to focus this anniversary blog post on some items:

From a startup to a listed company. 6 years of fun!

When I joined Elastic (formerly Elasticsearch) it was a startup with 10 employees + the founders. As one of those first employees I was invited (with #elkie and my wife) to the NYSE event where Elastic went listed as ESTC symbol. Some of us there (Rashid, Karel, Myself, Igor, Costin, Luca, Clinton). Yeah. You are not probably used to see us wearing a suit! :) If you want to read again my story, it’s there:

5 years. What a milestone!

What a milestone! Can you imagine how changed the company in the last 5 years? From 10 employees when I joined to more than 700 now! If you want to read again my story, it’s there: 2013: Once upon a time… 2014: Once upon a time: a year later… 2015: Once upon a time: Make your dreams come true 2016: 3 years! Time flies! 2017: 4 years at elastic! Before speaking about what happened the last 5 years for me, let’s modify a bit the script I wrote last year.

4 years at elastic!

This post is starting to become a long series 😊 Yeah! That’s amazing! I just spent 4 years working at elastic and I’m starting my happy 5th year! If you want to read again my story, it’s there: 2013: Once upon a time… 2014: Once upon a time: a year later… 2015: Once upon a time: Make your dreams come true 2016: 3 years! Time flies! This year, I will celebrate this by writing a new tutorial…

3 years! Time flies!

3 years! Can you imagine that? Already 3 years spent working at elastic? Time flies! 2015 has been an uncommon year for me. Not because Marty Mc Fly and Doc Emmett Brown finally arrived… Not because, Han Solo, Leia and friends were finally back again… But for technical and also personal reasons. On a personal side, I had to deal with two major issues which cause some slow down in my professional activities. I had to cancel some conferences for instance.

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!

Once upon a time: a year later...

I joined Elasticsearch Inc one year ago. Those were pretty exciting days! But now… It’s more than that! Really! You could think that after one year, my motivation would start to decrease. I have the total opposite feeling. Still excited by my job, by the company and by the project, but most of all by the amazing team I’m lucky to work with! Everyone is different and each of us adds different value to Elasticsearch. Personally, I learn a lot from my co-workers.

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time… In fact 2 years ago, I was looking for a way to make Hibernate search distributed on multiple nodes. My first idea was to store indexes in a single database shared by my nodes. Yes, it’s a stupid idea in term of performances but I would like to try to build it. Digging for source code, I came to the JdbcDirectory class from the compass project. And I saw on the compass front page something talking about the future of Compass and Elasticsearch.

Il était une fois : un conte de fées élastique !

Il était une fois… En fait, il y a 2 ans, je cherchais un moyen pour distribuer Hibernate search sur plusieurs noeuds. Ma première idée était de stocker les index dans une base de données partagée par les différents noeuds. Oui ! Il s’agit d’une idée stupide en terme de performances, mais j’avais envie d’essayer et de construire ce modèle. Après avoir cherché du code source, je suis finalement tombé sur la classe JdbcDirectory du projet Compass.