On October 15th we proudly hosted SF-Text at our Meltwater HQ in San Francisco. SF-Text is a popular NLP themed meetup in the Bay Area. The event was well-attended (+70 people) with plenty of NLP professionals and experts in the audience.

Our very own Babak Rasolzadeh (Director of Engineering, Data Science, Meltwater) gave a talk about NLP and Data Science at Meltwater with the title “The Importance of Entities”.

We recently decided to open source our high-performance batch-percolator plugin for Elasticsearch. This article tells the story of how and why it was developed, and also gives you some insight into the scalability and performance problems we face daily in our engineering team.

“Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design.” - http://coderetreat.org/about

“a day to celebrate passion and software craftsmanship” - http://globalday.coderetreat.org

The Meltwater Engineers are very passionate about software craftsmanship so it was an easy decision to host and sponsor the inaugural #gdcr event in Gothenburg, Sweden. Sign up here to join the fun!

What starts like a joke is really a serious post about large distributed systems. This is what we run at meltwater - and while there is a lot of fun designing and administering these systems, we run into odd problems from time to time. In this case: some well-meant Red Hat memory optimisations interfering with Riak performance.

Here’s another small update from Meltwater Engineering Sweden. We are co-hosting an Elastic(search) meetup in Gothenburg together with our friends at Findwise on April 9, 2015!

When Findwise reached out we were eager to collaborate since this is something we have wanted to do for a long time. Please have a look at the meetup page, sign up, and spread the word. It’s going to be fun and interesting.