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David Tippett

@taidesu

Open Source enthusiast and builder of search systems. Currently building search at GitHub. Former DA for open-source OpenSearch @AWS. Opinions are my own.

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29.06.2023
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Latest posts by David Tippett @taidesu

Why do editors, devrel, and the like feel the need to make so many asinine edits to my blogs? Like you changed

"With search being" -> "Given search is"

Is it more clear? Idk It just rubs me wrong when I've gone through these changes 3 times with each subsequent editor changing the voice.

25.02.2026 20:29 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

To be clear I am not just doing customer driven development. My goal is to show them a future they didn't even realize was possible.

One where each persons learnings helps create a more whole picture.

25.02.2026 17:03 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Along with that another contender for tank tracking software has hit the market. I'm honestly not checking them out at all.

I believe in what I am building. I can only hope that they're listening to their users and doing the same. It is encouraging though since it means others see the need.

25.02.2026 17:03 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Tanki

I am 2 months into building my saltwater aquarium tracker tanki.dev and sent a newsletter out asking for feedback.

And my users showed up! #1 bit of feedback? "Make auth sessions longer" - people who track aquariums typically do so only once per week and auth logged out after 7 days.

25.02.2026 17:03 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Me logging into outlook this morning πŸ₯΄ this is not the land of milk and honey anymore.

25.02.2026 14:24 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

GitHub is going for the other four nines of availability.
9.9999% available.

24.02.2026 18:08 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

WELL. That was not the result I was expecting

24.02.2026 03:42 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Toxic

Soundtrack ready for my change: open.spotify.com/track/0pMLuF...

24.02.2026 03:38 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

βœ… Change checklist ready
βœ… Fail back plan ready
βœ… Pager assigned to me
βœ… Monitoring up
❌ Getting up the gut to make a hard change to avoid an inevitably worse incident tomorrow...

24.02.2026 03:36 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Not me about to take GitHub down for the second time today.

24.02.2026 03:30 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

I want to ensure we're making the right moves at the right time and Elasticsearch isn't aggressive enough at balancing these settings.

20.02.2026 15:17 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I am doing my best to resist building an operator for Elasticsearch. I dont think I can for much longer though. We need a stable way to automatically change cluster settings.

Rolling upgrades? Reduce merge pressure and increase shard move speed.

Low QPS times? Lets bump up merge concurrency.

20.02.2026 15:17 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Book cover of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition". It has a similar wild boar on the cover as the first edition, but it uses O'Reilly's new cover design, and the boar is now slightly colourised.

Book cover of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition". It has a similar wild boar on the cover as the first edition, but it uses O'Reilly's new cover design, and the boar is now slightly colourised.

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. πŸ˜…

(BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

18.02.2026 11:09 πŸ‘ 669 πŸ” 140 πŸ’¬ 27 πŸ“Œ 19

🧡 ANNDDDDDDD MY SSD's WONT MOUNT because the Kingston NV2 wont train on the CM5 and buying new drives is not ideal because storage cost is up 3-4x because of the DRAM shortages.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. 🫑 See you in 10 years when I finally finish this project.

13.02.2026 16:03 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

🧡 CM5's are ARMv8 so a few of them and I can do it! Of course none were available because of the initial shortage.

Finally get the CM5s and then I have to wait for the availability of heat sinks. Wait for a while and finally get a community made version. Now to install the CM5's FINALLY πŸš€

13.02.2026 16:03 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

🧡 No worries, others are posting OpenSearch containers right?

Get it running for a bit using the bitnami/opensearch containers and BOOM - Bitnami pulls their containers and moves to a paid model -_- (I know I could make my own but I don't want to maintain that infra 😭)

13.02.2026 16:03 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Dang. My Compute blade project is literally pandoras box. I initially got a bunch of the Uptime Compute blades to run an OpenSearch cluster.

After months of waiting I get the blades in, go to start up OpenSearch and BOOM. Craps out because the Amazon Linux containers can't run on ARMv7.

🧡

13.02.2026 16:03 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

New favorite move. Introduce drama for no reason. Example:

I got my wife ice cream. Before handing it to her I assured her no blood was spilled getting her ice cream.

The concern that followed was priceless.

11.02.2026 02:54 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Time to fight fire with fire. Even worse AI generated PR reviews.

09.02.2026 17:10 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
A picture of the github.com status page showing issues with Pull Requests, Notifications, Copilot, and so forth.

A picture of the github.com status page showing issues with Pull Requests, Notifications, Copilot, and so forth.

Me ships a really cool update that makes issues and prs pages faster.

GitHub:

09.02.2026 16:44 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The right way to think about it is to say that Refresh writes segments to disk. Translog "stamps" them as being official (Lucene commit).

If the Translog reaches it's flush size it'll trigger a refresh before committing the segment.

They're related but not as an either or but a both and

06.02.2026 15:31 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I just realized my understanding of the Elasticsearch/OpenSearch refresh + translog operations was INCORRECT.

I'd always had the mental model that refresh or translog flush would write segments. That's partially true...

06.02.2026 15:31 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Now with copilot instead of writing just a few hundred lines of bad code a week I can scale to TENS OF THOUSANDS of lines of bad code a week.

26.01.2026 15:51 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The amount of logistical things needed to build a startup is so frustrating. I don’t want to build a company I want to ship code that helps people.

Today I:
- created a bank account
- migrated emails
- mailed so compliance documents

22.01.2026 18:46 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
What is Web 5.0 - Explained Did you hear about the Web 5.0, the most recent transformative version of the web? Let’s dive in to learn about the Web 5.0 explained here in detail. The

Okay maybe just 6.0

101blockchains.com/web-5-0/

Who knows what happened to 3 & 4

20.01.2026 12:31 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I’m pretty sure we’re on like web 7.0 according to a bunch of random crypt bros πŸ˜†

20.01.2026 12:30 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

So it’s funny the bus thread was right above this one in my feed but the β€œI didn’t get enough likes” I’ve not yet seen… πŸ”— πŸ‘€

20.01.2026 12:28 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Relevan Β· Yet Another Search Site Relevan β€” Relevancy as a Service

Okay, so not only did I do a thing with Tanki I am actually starting a serious company:

relevan.dev

We're building the future of relevancy based search. We're pre-launch (despite me launching this technically here). But we want to talk to small e-commerce businesses about their search problems.

19.01.2026 20:58 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Tanki

Got bored… made an app this weekend to help me track my aquarium

tanki.dev

In case anyone else with a #reeftank wants a free place to track parameters over time πŸ‘€

12.01.2026 22:04 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Together though we nailed the problem down in probably 1/10th of the time it would’ve taken before.

09.01.2026 04:12 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0