Get to know the Elastic Community series: meet Sagar Patel

Sagar Patel started his IT career in 2016 and started working on enterprise search tools. He is an Elastic Certified Engineer with 6+ years of experience in the development of cognitive search and log monitoring applications. Sagar has hands-on expertise with various search technologies, including Elasticsearch, and a track record of creating enterprise search projects to assist content processing, including document classification and relevance optimization. He worked on extracting content from scanned files or images using the optical character recognition (OCR) process and has experience with extracting structured and unstructured content using machine learning (ML)/natural language processing (NLP).

When did you first embrace Elastic as a technology?

I started my career by working on proprietary enterprise search tools and have always been curious about how search works internally. After one year of working on a search tool, I learned about this software called Elasticsearch which was used by many organizations for various use cases. So I started to explore it using Elastic documentation, blogs, and videos. Then, I set it up on my laptop and started learning from more hands-on experience.

How did you learn about the Elastic Contributor Program, and what inspired you to join?

I was having good hands-on experience with the Elastic Stack, but I am always curious to learn more about Elastic and how people are using it. I started answering questions on Stack Overflow to understand better how people were using it. After contributing for some months, people noticed my contributions, and one morning I got a ping from Amit Khandelwal, another active Elastic community member. He told me about the program and asked me if I was interested in participating. He is one of the inspirations for me to join the program. Getting recognition from the Elastic community and building a good network that will help me professionally and personally were also big motivations for me to join the program.

Elastic’s Contributor Program highlights community engagement among other criteria. As a Gold Contributor, can you tell us a little bit about your journey? 

I was active on Stack Overflow and the Elastic forum. Still, I realized that my contributions should not be limited to only answering questions and that I should make some content around Elastic’s different functionalities. So, I have started writing blogs about different topics and posting on Medium to help the community in various ways. I never thought that this would land me the opportunity to write a blog for Elastic’s corporate blog! By contributing in various categories, I became a Gold contributor for the 2023 cycle.

What were the most significant benefits you reaped from the program?

I have benefited from many things after participating in the Elastic Contributor Program. I gained more comprehensive visibility, and people know me for my contributions to the community. I got a chance to learn so many things about Elastic and the Elastic Stack. Additionally, rewards like certification exam attempts, Elastic training, Elastic Cloud trial, and many more we got from the program will benefit me to grow professionally and continue learning. In the end, whatever contributions I have made throughout this program will benefit not only me but other developers who are working on Elastic Stack as well.

What are your favorite things about the Elastic community?

I love that Elastic community members are always ready to help and support each other. I am also happy to see the Elastic community growing and more people contributing. That will only help people to learn more about Elastic Stack.

Any final thoughts you'd like to share?

I want to thank the Elastic Contributor Program and the people who are organizing it, as it encourages people to contribute and share knowledge. It was a great opportunity to participate and give back to the community. I am eager to contribute in the coming year as well.