Elastic Goes Back To School
Just when you think you’ve graduated from university, there’s always something that pulls you right back in. We all remember the fun of exams, the deadlines, the never ending books, the long days, and of course, the partying. And then there’s that amazing moment when you finally graduate and say goodbye to university. But who would’ve thought that going back to school could actually be quite interesting?
We’re happy to say that we got invited to give a guest lecture at the VU University in Amsterdam to teach computer science and engineering students the basics of Elasticsearch. Boaz Leskes, one of our core software engineers, was the lucky one to give this presentation to around 100 students. Surprisingly enough only two students have heard about Elasticsearch and Lucene before but guess what, that was about to change...
Boaz explained the lifecycle of a single document in Elasticsearch (see slides below from his presentation at Elastic{ON}15). The talk covered many different aspects including what happens when you index a single document in Elasticsearch and how Elasticsearch ensures a document is replicated and found across the whole cluster reliably.
After some term descriptions to lay the ground Boaz got the students’ attention and he even started cracking his jokes as he usually does to get them even more ‘awake’. And yes, they were actually answering some of his questions and they were pretty good at it!
At this point, the students were captured including the one sitting in front of me who wrote down pretty much every sentence Boaz said. Boaz continued with his talk and explained more about the how, when and where a document is stored and processed in Elasticsearch. At the end of his presentation, it was question time! Despite a tough start being confronted with a completely new topic, students were asking a lot of good questions.
The two students with the best questions got offered an Elasticsearch book at the end - no, it’s not just a JSON document within the presentation, the book actually exists. :)
All in all the guest lecture was a great success, at least from our perspective. Let’s hope the students see it the same way! And in my opinion, going back to school was totally worth it!
If you are interested, Boaz’ presentation slides can be downloaded from here.
Applause, Applause!