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Managing Elasticsearch Cluster Restart Time
While building a fairly large index (8TB total for 500 million docs), I ran into some very long restart times for the cluster. That prompted me to start a discussion about long restart times. There’s...
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2013 in review
My personal blogging goal for this past year was to actually have an Annual Report that I would not be ashamed to look at. Goal Achieved! A pretty large part of my traffic is from search engines for...
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Scaling Elasticsearch Part 1: Overview
We recently launched Related Posts across WordPress.com, so its time to pop the hood and take a look at what ended up in our engine. There’s a lot of good information spread across the web on how to...
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Scaling Elasticsearch Part 2: Indexing
In part 1 I gave an overview of our cluster configuration. In this part we’ll dig into: How our data is partitioned into indices to scale over time Optimizing bulk indexing Scaling real time indexing...
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Elasticsearch, Open Source, and the Future
This essay started as a response to a comment on my multilingual indexing post. The comment is mostly an advertisement, but brings up some interesting points so I decided to publish it and turn my...
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Presentation: Elasticsearch at Automattic
I gave a presentation at the Elasticsearch Denver meetup last night covering some of the bigger changes we had to make to scale a cluster to handle all WordPress.com posts. This is a cherry picked list...
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Scaling Elasticsearch Part 3: Queries
See part 1 and part 2 for an overview of our system and how we scale our indexing. Originally I was planning a separate post for global queries and related posts queries, but it was hard to break into...
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Elasticsearch: The Broken Bits
A post like this carries a heavy risk of this: Translation: “Your time is far less valuable than mine, open source slave.” pic.twitter.com/D1AkwxG5qg — Ryan Grove (@yaypie) August 5, 2014 So, some...
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2014 In Review
Another year at Automattic, another 3 million emails sent to users to point them at their annual reports. This is my fourth year helping to send the annual reports, and as usual it makes for an...
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Colemak: 0 to 40 WPM in 40 Hours
On April 1st my first child was born and I started a wonderful month of paternity leave. Holding a sleeping infant leaves you with lots of sleepy hours where its (sometimes) possible to do repetitive...
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Six Use Cases of Elasticsearch in WordPress
I spoke at WordCamp US two weeks ago about six different use cases I’ve seen for Elasticsearch within the WordPress community. I also mentioned two projects for WordPress.org that are planned for 2016...
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Learning About Modern Neural Networks
I’ve been meaning to learn about modern neural networks and “deep learning” for a while now. Lots to read out there, but I finally found this great survey paper by Lipton and Berkowitz: A Critical...
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Openness, Supportiveness, and Leadership
In the Fall of 2015 I took the Emerging Leaders Program at the University of Denver. I really enjoyed the class. Gave me a great framework and space for thinking about how to improve my ability to lead...
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The Walsh Standard v Automattic Creed
I’m reading Bill Walsh’s book The Score Takes Care of Itself on his methodology for getting the San Francisco 49ers to perform at a high level in the 1980s (and win 3 Super Bowls in the process), and I...
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2014 In Review
Another year at Automattic, another 3 million emails sent to users to point them at their annual reports. This is my fourth year helping to send the annual reports, and as usual it makes for an...
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Great Links to Lucene/Solr Revolution 2015
A great list of links to slides from Mani Siva’s blog. A lot of things I’m currently thinking about: overlaying graphs on Elasticsearch to do content re-ranking, improving search relevancy, what is...
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No Handlebars
Was listening to the Flobots earlier on a run. Feels very appropriate to be thinking about the impact of technology on society and how to do better. Uniform priors now seem much less appropriate to me...
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Struggling with Content Ordering
I agree in freedom of speech. I agree in democratizing publishing. I agree with giving a voice to everyone with as small a barrier to entry as possible. I’m not sure anymore what I think about...
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Technology Apathy
Someone is wrong on the Internet. Sure, personal apathy and sarcasm in the face of lots of people being wrong is understandable. Life is busy, and it takes a lot of energy to discuss something. But...
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Is This Post True?
There’s a lot of discussion about what constitutes fake news, what impact it has, and whether blocking it is the bigger threat. I’d like to instead talk about the perception of truth. How do we change...
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