International guests: Lee Hinmann & Britta Weber of Elasticsearch

To kick off our meetup in 2014, Elasticsearch have kindly provided us with- not one- but two international speakers!

Custom Scoring Functions in Elasticsearch by Britta Weber

In this presentation, Britta Weber will start with a quick introduction to the inner workings of document scoring in Apache Lucene. She will then walk through the different options within Elasticsearch to define custom scores for your documents.

About Britta:

Britta Weber was lured away from a career in academic research on image processing by all that’s awesome in Elasticsearch. She joined the company in May 2013 as a software engineer in the company’s Berlin office. When not writing code and thinking about machine learning, she enjoys singing renaissance madrigals.

Introduction to Logstash by Lee Hinman

Logstash, an open source tool for centralizing and managing events & logs, may very well be a sysadmin’s best friend. In this talk, Lee Hinman will provide an introduction to Logstash, including an architectural and plugin ecosystem overview and a quick look at setting it up. He’ll conclude with a brief discussion of how Logstash interfaces with Elasticsearch and Kibana to provide you with more happiness as you manage your log data.

About Lee:
Lee Hinman is a big fan of Clojure. After a gig at Sonian, he joined Elasticsearch as a software engineer in August 2013. He will soon be moving to Elasticsearch’s EU HQ in Amsterdam, where he looks forward to writing more code and eating better cheese.

As usual, the presentations will be accompanied by beer (sponsored by Aconex) and pizza (sponsored by Elasticsearch) and some interesting chats to boot.

Paul & Tal