Weaviate Newsletter - New Weaviate, new content and new team members

October 12, 2022

Hello Weaviate friends, 🤗

We had yet another great couple of weeks, with much new-new-new news to share.

Weaviate Air

🎉 Last week, we hosted the first live episode of Weaviate Air.

🎙You can watch episode #1 on YouTube.

In this episode we covered:

  • 📆 Weaviate Core roadmap – an overview of the new roadmap page and our plans for Weaviate v1.16

  • 🔬 New in ML research – an overview of 11 interesting research papers from September

  • 🐶 Weaviate demo – of a doggo search app using Weaviate and image2vec

You can already subscript to the second episode, which is scheduled for the 2nd of November. Basically, we will go live every first Wednesday of the month. I can't wait to see you there 🤗

Weaviate Updates

Earlier this week, our engineering team published Weaviate v1.15.4, which includes a few new fixes. For more info see the changelog.

Furthermore, we published an update to the following language clients:

Content

Blogs

✍️  How to choose a Sentence Transformer from Hugging Face – this is a great article by Connor, for those of us that are overwhelmed by the great number of Sentence Transformers in Hugging Face, but also for seasoned ML experts.

✍️ Vamana vs HNSW - Exploring ANN algorithms Part 1 – a fantastic debut post by Abdel Rodriguez – it is the first post in the series exploring different ANN algorithms – in this post Abdel reviews Vamana and contrasts it against our implementation of HNSW.

Podcast

🎙Vector Search in Production - with Erik Bernhardsson and Etienne Dilocker. It is a very insightful episode where Erik talks (ANN) Search, creating the ANNOY library at Spotify – before vectors were a thing.

Updated docs

🤔 After reviewing the general usage of the Weaviate docs, we noticed that the pages for the older versions of the Weaviate don't get much traffic (and most of it was from build systems or incorrectly indexed Google links).

📢 Following this observation, we decided to change the docs to only display the current version of the docs.

This has many benefits:

  • All links served by Google will always point to the latest versions of the docs

  • We can update and deploy the docs 4 times faster

  • It will be a lot easier for anyone to contribute to the docs

New team members

I am happy to share that two new 🥑 (read Developer Advocates) joined the Weaviate DevRel team.

🧑🏻‍🏫 Joon-Pill Hwang (he also goes by JP) joined us as a Technical Curriculum Developer. He is going to spearhead the educational content and the learning journey around Weaviate. He has been around a bit over a week and he is already rewriting the Getting Started guide.

🥑 Zain Hasan (pronounced Zen) joined us as a Developer Advocate. He will help us with a lot of blogging efforts, create cool demos, and speak at many cool events. He is already compiling a list of events in North America where you will be able to meet him in person.

You can follow them both on Twitter at @_jphwang and @ZainHasan6

Thank you for reading and see you in two weeks 🤗

Sebastian