Elastic London User Group

📅 Date: Thursday, October 15 from 6:00-9:00 PM
📍 Location: Elastic London Office
Davidson Building, 1st Floor, 5 Southampton St,
London, WC2E 7HA
👉 Important: Please use the Exeter St entrance as the main entrance is closed after 6 PM.
⚠️ Entrance will be on a first come, first served basis, subject to room capacity — arrive on time to guarantee your spot.
⏰ Agenda
Arrivals, pizza and drinks: 6 PM
Welcome: 6:30 PM
Talk #1: 6:45 - 7:15 PM
Talk #2: 7:15 PM - 7:45 PM
Networking: 7:45 PM
Closing: 8:30 PM

Talk #1 by Amir Hossein Rassafi | Head of Platform at Condukt
Title: From PostgreSQL to Elasticsearch: Migrating a Fuzzy Name Search at Scale
What happens when your search quality is good but your database can't keep up? In this talk, we'll walk through a real migration from PostgreSQL's pg_trgm to Elasticsearch — driven by growing latency and database pressure.
We'll cover how to preserve trigram-like behaviour using n-grams, prefixes, keywords, and shingles, how to validate the new system with real queries and synthetic typo cases, and the production details that made the migration safe: replication, checkpointing, lag handling, and replayable indexing.
A practical talk for anyone dealing with fuzzy search at scale — or planning a migration where quality, performance, and reliability all matter.

Talk #2 by Akbar Gumbira, Senior Machine Learning Engineer and Antonio Morais, Machine Learning Engineer | Elastic
Title: Power of Three - turning scanned documents into ranked answers with Jina OCR, Omni and Reranker on EIS
Take a folder of scanned documents and convert it into a searchable index with the help of three Jina models: OCR extracts the text, Omni v5 embeds the image and text into a shared vector space, and Reranker v3.5 surfaces the right page at the top. We will detail the inner workings of each model, and then show how you can build an end-to-end pipeline with Jina on Elastic Inference Service

​Everyone's demoing agents that write code. Almost nobody shows you what breaks when you let one loose on your repo. Two builds, two honest reports, zero hype.

📅 Date: Thursday, October 22
⏰ Time: 18:00-20:30 PM
📍 Location: Tessl AI Limited, 210 Pentonville Rd, London N1 9JY, United Kingdom
✍️ Limited spots so make sure you grab yours!

🖇️ ​Agenda

• ​18:00 Venue opens
• ​18:30 Talk 1: A Software Factory Build Report: What Worked, What Broke, What I'd Do Again by Simon Maple
• ​19:00 Talk 2: Harness Engineering is not new by Carly Richmond
• ​19:30 Networking with pizza and drinks
• ​20:30 THE END

🗣️ Talks
​Talk #1 A Software Factory Build Report: What Worked, What Broke, What I'd Do Again
​In this session I'll present a full, honest account of building an autonomous issue-to-PR factory for my open-source project. I'll cover how I built a factory in layers, the decisions that paid off (versioned review lenses, deterministic gates), and the ones that cost me. I'll show where autonomy earned trust and where a human still has to step in, and how the developer's job quietly shifted from writing code to architecting changes the pipeline can execute via issues. The goal is to give you a realistic build plan, with potholes marked, so you can follow the same route with fewer scars.
​Simon Maple, Developer Relations at Tessl
​Simon Maple is the Head of Developer Relations at Tessl, and AI Native Dev co-host. Previously, Simon was the Field CTO, and VP Developer Relations at Snyk, ZeroTurnaround, and IBM. He became a Java Champion in 2014, JavaOne Rockstar speaker in 2014 and 2017, Duke’s Choice award winner, Virtual JUG founder and organiser, and London Java Community co-leader.

Talk #2 Harness Engineering is not new
​Prompt engineering. Context engineering. And now Harness engineering. We love acronyms in the AI ecosystem. Yet much of the differences between context and harness engineering lies in practices, with a few tweaks, that we would consider traditional software engineering best practices. Join me as I walk through harness engineering and show what is a changing discipline, such as aspects of prompt and context engineering, and what is a traditional best practice in a different guise such as CI/CD pipelines, testing, monitoring and evaluation.
​Carly Richmond, Developer Advocate Lead at Elastic
​Carly is Developer Advocate Lead at Elastic, based in London, UK. Before joining Elastic in 2022, she spent over 10 years working as a technologist at a large investment bank, specialising in front-end web development and agility. She is a UI developer, who occasionally dabbles in writing backend services, a speaker and a regular blogger.