Weaviate Newsletter - new year, new website, new company name

Hello Weaviate friends, 🤗

It has been a few weeks since the last newsletter, but I promise we have a very good reason for it – or multiple reasons, but one theme: "CHANGE"

A small note, since it has been a month since the last newsletter, this one is a bit longer than usual. But trust me, it is all great info. 😉

Change is the only constant

Over the last few weeks, we've gone through several changes:

1. We changed the name of the company

2. Redesigned and rebuilt weaviate.io and the Weaviate docs

3. Changed the Newsletter provider

Company Name Change – "call me Weaviate"

We noticed that the awareness of the Weaviate brand among developers and customers had outpaced awareness of the company behind it. So last week, we changed our company name from SeMI Technologies to Weaviate!

You can read more information in our press release.

As an added bonus, if you ever see a Weaviate employee at an event, you will not get confused by our badge saying something else. The badge will say "Weaviate"

Old Website Migrated

In case you were a regular-ish visitor of our old company website, we've moved all the pages under weaviate.io

• About us – an overview of our company values and people at Weaviate

• Playbook – our blog on how we run our company. This used to be called meta, but we believe that playbook makes more sense.

• Careers – well... it is our job page 😉

Updated Weaviate.io and Documentation

Last year, we realized that the Weaviate documentation was a bit hard to edit and run locally, which made it harder for us and our contributors to keep the documentation fresh and with the content you need.

So, we decided to migrate the documentation and the whole weaviate.io website to a new project. (cue: enter 🦖) We chose Docusaurus, as our framework of choice, which comes with a lot of great features:

• support for MDX (it is like markdown on steroids)

• it is React-based – this will allow us to embed js for demos and code examples

• great navigation experience for documentation

• built-in blog module

• dark and light mode

Documentation changes

As part of the documentation reconstruction, we:

• updated the navigation – this would change most of the links, but hopefully, the redirects put in place should take you to the new locations

• refreshed content – some of the pages required an update, our JP has spent a few weeks rewriting some of the pages and moving related segments closer together (like vectors 😅).

Redesigned and Rebuilt

While we were updating the docs, we decided to give weaviate.io a new coat of paint.Svitlana (our head of Design) worked tirelessly, coming up with amazing designs,while we (with our Weronika in charge) were busy translating her vision into code.Check out weaviate.io and let us know what you think.

Feedback is welcome

Let us know what you think. We would love to hear your feedback – both positive and (constructive😉) negative.

New Newsletter

In November last year, we were notified by Twitter that Revue (the service we used for our newsletter) was going to be discontinued at the start of 2023.Luckily, Femke (our marketing superstar) researched several newsletter providers and recommended Beehiv.

Femke also figured out a way to migrate all the subscribers and old posts here.You can see the page with all previous posts at newsletter.weaviate.io.

Community - Meet Us

Meetups

This week was very exciting community-wise. We have hosted two meetups, one in San Francisco and another in New York.It was really fun to meet so many people, exchange ideas, and demo some cool new stuff that we are working on.

We enjoyed ourselves so much that we decided to host more meetups in February.I don't have the official dates yet (around 16-28 Feb), but if you are in any of the following cities, you should watch these meetups:

• Amsterdam

• Boston

• New York – this one is a maybe for February

• San Francisco

• Toronto

Weaviate Air

On the 11th, we hosted Weaviate Air – Episode #4. The episode was packed full of amazing speakers and content:

• (watch) Juraj Bezdek (community guest) – talked to us about Labelator, a product built with Weaviate

• (watch) Etienne – the Outlook for Weaviate in 2023

• (watch) Zain – Weaviate Spark Connector

• (watch) Connor – Weaviate BEIR Benchmark

• (watch) Erika – Community Questions

• (watch) Sebastian (me 🙋‍♂️) – Weaviate.io Migration

Next episode - next Wednesday

The next episode is planned for the 8th of February.

Weaviate Air playlist

You can see all previous episodes in the Weaviate Air playlist.This is also a good place to see all future planned sessions, although the usual pattern is the first Wednesday of each month. 😉

Content

Blogs

• ✍️ read Weaviate 1.17 release – to learn about Replication, Hybrid Search, BM25, faster startup and imports that were all introduced in Weaviate 1.17

• ✍️ read The Details Behind the Sphere Dataset in Weaviate – by Zain, to get a better understanding on how we imported almost a billion objects from the Sphere dataset

• ✍️ read Hybrid Search Explained – by Erika, to learn about the freshly added Hybrid Search

• ✍️ read Pulling back the curtains on text2vec – by JP, to learn how Text2vec modules work in Weaviate

• ✍️ read Vector Embeddings Explained – by Dan, to get a better understanding of Vector Embeddings

• ✍️ read How A.I. Creates Art - by Zain, for a gentle introduction to Diffusion Models

Podcast

• 🎙 (watch and listen) – Weaviate 1.17 release

• 🎙 (watch and listen) – You.com and Spark – with Sam Bean

• 🎙 (watch and listen) – Cohere Embedding Models – with Nils Reimers

• 🎙 (watch and listen) – Neural Search Frameworks – with Dmitry Kan

Did you know that we have a Spotify playlist for Weaviate podcasts?No?... Well... now you do. 😆

Thank you

Thank you for reading this far.I hope you enjoyed the first newsletter of the year.Thank you, and see you in two weeks,Sebastian