Brett_1

[00:00:00 ] Brett_1: [00:00:00 ] My guest this week is Jay Miller, a podcaster, developer, and as of recently, a developer advocate for a Elastic. How’s it going, Jay?

[00:00:08 ] Jay_1: [00:00:08 ] I’m excited to be here. This is, this is several years of dreams come true. Finally.

[00:00:13 ]Brett_1: [00:00:13 ] It’s really nice to hear that. I have been on your show before, and I would say that if you feel like reverting to interviewer mode and ask me questions, it’s totally cool because that’s what makes my job way easier.

[00:00:28 ]Jay_1: [00:00:28 ] I would just say, just stop me and be like, Hey, no, this is my show. Where are you doing?

[00:00:32 ] Brett_1: [00:00:32 ] You are now a developer advocate for elastic first. Tell me what is Elastic? What do they do?

[00:00:39 ]Jay_1: [00:00:39 ] So elastic is the search company. I’m not going to say a search company. We are the search company. That’s right. Google shots fired. Let’s do this. But the way that I explain it to people, when I’m doing the advocacy thing, is that. Elastic is the search that you want to work. So you don’t have [00:01:00 ] to go to Google.

[00:01:01 ] And I mean that in, when you go to Yelp, you want to find tacos in your area. That’s powered by elastic search. When you want to go to, you know, When you’re on Uber and you want to like, you know, hail a ride and it’s checking your area, checking for cars in your area. It’s making sure it has a list of, you know, who you’ve worked with in the past and who you don’t want to have, you know, driving you that’s elastic search working in the background.

[00:01:25 ] We are search company through and through. And what we’ve kind of been able to do learn is that search works. Beyond a UI bar and a little magnifying glass. In fact, we can search logs. Um, I think I showed you a picture of this, but we can search RSS feeds and look at trends in history. Of people’s posting frequency and things like that.

[00:01:51 ] And I know of course, when you start talking about data and the consumption of data, it can get creepy. But the general idea is [00:02:00 ] we’re only able to collect the things that people give us and looking at it from the database perspective, we are simply a database that focuses on retrieving the information that you’re looking for as you’re looking for it, or really, really fast.

[00:02:15 ] Brett_1: [00:02:15 ] The creepy thing happens when it’s gathering data, you don’t realize you’re putting out there. And when you find out that they’re selling that data, that’s, that’s when it gets creepy using actual public data. That’s what data is for. That’s what it’s there for. I, uh,

[00:02:35 ] Jay_1: [00:02:35 ] actually started working on the San Diego police call records for the last five years to see if there’s any trends and over-policing in different districts based on their nine one, one calls.

[00:02:48 ] Brett_1: [00:02:48 ] Really? I would, I would be curious to see your findings.

[00:02:53 ] Jay_1: [00:02:53 ] uh, right now I’m just trying to get the things to work. So we’re getting there.

[00:02:57 ] Brett_1: [00:02:57 ] I did. I noticed with your, [00:03:00 ] uh, your, your analysis of my RSS feed. Um, it made a pretty clear graph of my bipolar disorder. You can see where I was manic and then these lulls where I was depressed, it was, uh, perhaps the, uh, the best mood meter I’ve seen yet.

[00:03:18 ]Jay_1: [00:03:18 ] Well, a lot of that comes from the idea. I’m sure, you know, Wolfrem from Wolf from alpha fame, but one of the things that he’s done is collect so much data on himself that he’s able to just make these correlations to things that no one else would think of. And hearing about that. I’ve wanted to do something similar.

[00:03:42 ] And you mentioned like working with RSS feeds and seeing if it has a way to track, like, you know, mental health or having peaks and valleys. If you, if you have to track, you know, your mood to me, being able to log that data in it in a [00:04:00 ] way that you can make those connections is something that. I don’t think is necessary for the business end of companies.

[00:04:08 ] I think that’s a personal journey because I think everyone’s data is different. I mean, that’s kind of where we start to fall off in productivity is everyone tries to follow the one way when there really isn’t the one way, it’s your way, whatever you decide to do, that’s what’s going to work for you. And I mean, not to be too much of a shell, but one of the things I like about elastic as a company is that all of our products are open source.

[00:04:32 ] So we, we get paid post data when it’s asked of us. But in terms of all of our products, anybody can download them. Anybody can run them on their machine, you can set up your own system and you can configure it. And we see none of that data ever. And to me, that is the package power of an amazing product, not an amazing company.

[00:05:00 ] [00:04:59 ] Brett_1: [00:04:59 ] Um, I, it’s probably not your fault, but I’m surprised I’ve never heard of elastic before.

[00:05:05 ]Jay_1: [00:05:05 ] I think that that’s a victim of doing our job because you know, the internet outrage machine doesn’t yell at us too much. And in fact, the only advertisements that I’ve seen that are like, talking about competitors are often, like, do you have all of these problems that other databases have. Well, I’ll try our database cause you’re not going to have them with us.

[00:05:28 ] So I can, I can tend to, uh, definitely understand that the common world doesn’t really know of us, but I mean, I didn’t know that I was working for a company that, you know, we’re trying to reach like a billion dollar company status and like we’re publicly traded and all of these things. And I didn’t know that until I got the offer letter and it was like, Oh, Oh wow, we’re bigger than I thought we were.

[00:05:54 ]Brett_1: [00:05:54 ] So, so you you’re obviously you’re advocating for them right now, but what does a [00:06:00 ] developer advocate do?

[00:06:01 ]Jay_1: [00:06:01 ] So I like to