Evolving with Elastic: GetSet Learning

1. 1
Evolving With
Elastic
Ray Myers and Eric Bjerstedt
GetSet Learning

2. 2
Who we are
Ray Myers
Lead SRE @ Morningstar
Former Chief Engineer @ GetSet
Eric Bjerstedt
VP Product @ GetSet

3. 3
Background: About GetSet
GetSet is a private social network for colleges and
universities.
Students use GetSet to meet classmates, share tips, and get
questions answered.
Schools use GetSet for analytics and course discussions.

4. 4
Act I_
The Early Days

5. 5
GetSet "Orientation"
GetSet started as a linear
series of student "stories."
Our vision: build a community
around sharing these stories.

6. 6
From "Orientation" to "Community"
How do we build a
community around
these stories?
Enter Elasticsearch.

7. 77
Stemming sparked collaboration
Very quickly, we realized the limitations of simple text search
and introduced stemming, which was an inflection point in our
collaboration.
waited waiting waits
waited

8. 8
Act II_
The Recommending

9. 9
Recommended tags
We used Elasticsearch's
"More like this" function to
recommend tags that had
been used on similar posts.
Our experience building that
feature led to bigger ideas.

10. 10
Recommended feed
We used Elasticsearch's "More
like this" function to recommend
tags that had been used on
similar posts.
Two months later,
we released a
major update,
including a new
Home page,
featuring a feed of
recommended
posts.

11. 11
Act III_
Not as Hard as You Think

12. 12
Influence
Influence sends personalized
"microinterventions." We
rapidly prototyped it using
Elasticsearch for
recommendations.
It's now a highly profitable
product, with very few
changes from that prototype.

13. 13
Analytics

14. 14
Lessons Learned_

15. 15
Lessons learned
Elasticsearch enabled extremely productive collaboration
between product and engineering. Here are some behind the
scenes things that made that possible:
● Unified search framework
● Sync process
● Elastic Cloud

16. 16
Questions_