Several weeks ago we welcomed a group of Algolia developers, customers and partners into our SF office to have a conversation about search. It was also an opportunity to say “Hey, thanks for working with us!”
Fireside Chat
The evening kicked off with a fireside chat between Algolia co-founders Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine. Some fun facts came out, like Nicolas and Julien having a combined 27 years of experience working on search. The conversation touched on company history, culture, and a few technical topics including our new premium SLA and the assistance we provide to customers for relevance tuning.
During the Q&A someone asked “How many records is Algolia storing today across all applications?” “We don’t know” answered Julien, the candid response getting a nice chuckle from the crowd. He added “Today we count overall operations but not records, but maybe someday we will count those too.”
Community Projects
After the fireside chat I dismissed the crowd for a break—to get up, stretch their legs and grab a drink from our (deserted) island-themed bar. This was actually a mistake :/ It took several minutes to get people to quiet down and return to their seats. Lesson learned for next time!
Once things settled down I gave a presentation called 10 Community Projects in 15 Minutes. At Algolia we believe search is a conversation, a dialogue that helps you learn what your users want. Each of these 10 projects helps facilitate that conversation in some way:
- Algolia Places
- DocSearch
- instantsearch.js
- Algolia JS Helper
- Jekyll plugin
- Zendesk plugin
- Magento plugin
- WordPress plugin
- Oval Quotes
- Searchstone
What do these projects have in common? They either use Algolia or help you use Algolia, and they’re all looking for feedback, beta testers or contributors.
Photo Booth
We handed out brand new community-themed stickers and t-shirts—and then there was the photo booth The booth was stocked with every search-related knickknack we could get our hands on, as well as a few heavy-duty magnifying glasses I found at Pottery Barn.
Who needs Snapchat when you have old school photo filters:
That’s Yonas from StackShare trying to hide back there
What are *you* looking at?
Last Call
Photos of the event are available on our Facebook page in two different albums: Search Party #1 and Search Party #1 Photo Booth. If you couldn’t make it this time don’t worry, just stay tuned to hear about the next one.
Big thanks to everyone who came out and helped make it a very special evening. All of us at Algolia really enjoyed hanging out and hearing from you. Until the next #searchparty!