Table of Contents
Introduction
I will tell you about Elasticsearch Contribution program in a minute but before that I want to show my first steps in Elasticsearch and explain why I started working with that technology.
First touch
Back in 2015 I was working for the telco project when all events like SMS, telephone calls were captured and analyzed by our team software and that software generate significant amount of logs. First approach was to simply run Linux commands and search for keywords like ERROR but this was ad hoc and not proactive logs research. Fortunately I spoke to my expert colleague who introduce me new tool on the market that can handle parsing and visualizing logs on the fly. That was Elasticsearch 2.0
cat app.log | more
cat app.log | grep ERROR
New standard
Since I started parsing logs with logstash and load them to Elasticsearch I really got interested in this document database. So I learned from how to setup the cluster, up to the final dashboard.
Funny but true
I saw group of people run commands to display log application and watch together multiple screens like football match. You may think right now it was a joke but no, it was not. These guys seriously tried to search for abnormal entries. Eyeball interface.
That might be still the case in many organizations.
Getting experience
To help my team I started installing open source version whenever it was possible and reasonable and that was noticed so I end up in real projects where have to setup and maintain production clusters. This help me get expertise so I could continue working with that technology when I change my projects. For last 6 years I am responsible for over 100 nodes of Elasticsearch on multiple environments from DEV to PROD.
This is significant work I have to admit as including software upgrades, cluster monitoring and training new team members.
Fortunately more and more can be automated but still …
Despite being Elasticsearch admin I am Scala developer working with Spark jobs.
Elasticsearch contribution program
I started blog at toughcoding.net in 2023 all together with youTube channel. I was posting multiple videos, articles and some of them were related to Elasticsearch so I contacted Elastic team in order to propose them to include my articles in newsletter that they were sending to people. I got an answer from Ully in which she told me about new alternative for newsletter called Elasticsearch Contribution Program.
It was fully align with my activity and interest so I decide to take an action and post videos, bugs and articles into program.
After one year of productive work I can summarize in below stats
- 25 video tutorials with total length of 3 hours 20 minutes
- 36 knowledge articles with ready to copy/paste code snippets
- 2 bugs reported
This scored 401 points so I took 1st place on the list and recently were contacted by Elastic team so they confirmed it and announced me I got an award.
Final thoughts
There will be more content published on my blog and video channel so stay tuned.
