This year’s winter in Berlin has been going on for far too long. Fortunately I managed to escape to Texas, USA for a few days to speak at and attend Lonstar ElixirConf 2018.

When I wasn’t eating BBQ and remembering what the sun looked like, I saw some great talks and met some amazing people. It was an excellent conference and a great showcase of the talented and vibrant Elixir community.

I’ve put together a short outline of the talks from the two days, along with my top five talks from the conference.

The Meltwater Bangalore team recently dedicated time to help out underprivileged kids in their local community. They collected donations in their office, and went to the Ashanilaya Orphanage in their neighborhood to spend time with the kids.

In this post Rupen Paul, who was part of this event, shares his personal account of how the team came up with the event, how they collected donations, and the experience they had when visiting the orphanage.

Are you curious about the Functional Programming trend that has been growing the past years? You should be! Many exciting new and old Functional ways are reshaping the software development world. In this post I will share my favorite talks from Lambda Days 2018.

I got the opportunity to travel to Krakow to attend the Lambda Days 2018 conference - its 5th edition. Lambda Days has been on my radar for a bit since A) It’s always good to go to conferences, and B) They have interesting Functional Programming talks. This year was no different.

Given the volume of many million posts per day that Meltwater has to process, we need a technology for search and storage that can handle this kind of volume.

We have been a pretty happy users of Elasticsearch since the 0.11.X days. While we have been through some up and downs, in the end we think our choice of technology was the right one.

Elasticsearch is used to back our main media-monitoring application, where customers are able to search and analyze media data, such as News articles, (public) Facebook posts, Instagram posts, blogs and Tweets. We gather this content using a mix of APIs and crawling, enrich them and make them searchable using Elasticsearch.

In this post, we share what we’ve learned, how you can tweak Elasticsearch to improve its performance, and which pitfalls to circumvent.

Meltwater just released awsudo, an npm package designed to make assuming AWS IAM roles on the command line trivial.

Assuming an AWS IAM role on the command line is not a simple process, and we wanted it to be a human-readable one-liner. Meltwater’s awsudo achieves this with a straightforward command that you can put in front of any awscli operation.

There are other packages out there that accomplish similar goals, but in this post we will discuss why we chose to roll our own.