Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide

Foreword

One of the most nerve-wracking periods when releasing the first version of an open source project occurs when the IRC channel is created. You are all alone, eagerly hoping and wishing for the first user to come along. I still vividly remember those days.

One of the first users that jumped on IRC was Clint, and how excited was I. Well… for a brief period, until I found out that Clint was actually a Perl user, no less working on a website that dealt with obituaries. I remember asking myself why couldn’t we get someone from a more “hyped” community, like Ruby or Python (at the time), and a slightly nicer use case.

How wrong I was. Clint ended up being instrumental to the success of Elasticsearch. He was the first user to roll out Elasticsearch into production (version 0.4 no less!), and the interaction with Clint was pivotal during the early days in shaping Elasticsearch into what it is today. Clint has a unique insight into what is simple, and he is very rarely wrong, which has a huge impact on various usability aspects of Elasticsearch, from management, to API design, to day-to-day usability features. It was a no brainer for us to reach out to Clint and ask if he would join our company immediately after we formed it.

Another one of the first things we did when we formed the company was offer public training. It’s hard to express how nervous we were about whether or not people would even sign up for it.

We were wrong.

The trainings were and still are a rave success with ...