Elasticsearch Hackday - let's build something with this great search software!

After last year's successful Hackday on Apache Solr (see the results here (http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/2013/07/29/meetups-genomes-and-hack-days-grant-ingersoll-visits-the-uk/) and here (http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/2014/02/06/how-we-built-a-search-engine-for-uk-mp-tweets-with-solr-python-stanfordnlp/)), this year we're going to be looking at Elasticsearch (http://www.elasticsearch.org/), another open source search platform built on Apache Lucene.

Elasticsearch has rapidly grown in popularity over the last few years with its combination of ease of use, out-of-the-box scalability and flexible and powerful analytics features.

We'll start with a brief introduction to Elasticsearch, then split into teams and see what we can build during the day. Bring some interesting data sets to index, an idea of an application or just yourself and a laptop - we'll have power and Wifi available but you'll need your own computer. The Flax team (http://www.flax.co.uk/who_we_are) will be on hand to help and advise - we've built several large scale systems on Elasticsearch and know it well.

Lunch and snacks will be provided, kindly sponsored by Elasticsearch (http://www.elasticsearch.com/) (the company), who have also provided various swag to take with you! After the day ends we'll repair to a nearby pub for a debrief and a pint.

UPDATE: BigStep are providing us with one of their fast Elasticsearch platforms to play with! Here's a relevant case study . (http://blog.bigstep.com/tag/elasticsearch-performance-benchmarks/)