Weaviate Newsletter - Weaviate 1.16 and Getting Together

Hello Weaviate friends, 🤗

I am happy you are here to learn what we've been up to in the last few weeks.

I seem to say it every time, but the last few weeks were truly amazing. We released Weaviate 1.16, then hosted another fun Weaviate Air episode, and the whole company got together in one place.

Weaviate 1.16

By now, this is probably more of a reminder than news, but we recently released Weaviate 1.16. As always the release introduced many important features, UX & performance improvements and fixes.

You can read all about it in our customary blog post:

1. New Filter Operators – that allow you to filter data based on null values or array lengths

2. Distributed Backups – an upgrade to the backup functionality, which allows you to backup data distributed across clusters

3. Ref2Vec Centroid Module – a new module that calculates a mean vector of referenced objects

4. Node Status API – to quickly check on the health of your running clusters

5. Support for Azure-issued OIDC tokens – now you can authenticate with Azure, Keycloak, or Dex OIDC tokens

6. Patch releases – ready sooner – starting with Weaviate 1.15, we publish new patch releases as soon as new important fixes are available so that you get access to all updates as soon as possible

Weaviate Air - Episode #2

We were so excited about the new release, that we made the followingWeaviate Air episode (almost) all about the release. Then Connor topped it all off with his insightful summary of the "New in the AI" segment.

Episode #3

A quick reminder, we record these episodes live, which is a great opportunity to ask questions live.

📅 Save the date – the next episode is planned for the 7th of December. You can subscribe to it here.

If you have any ideas on what you would like us to cover in the next episode, feel free to ping me. 😉

Workation

Last week (almost) everyone from SeMI travelled to a small village in Italy – called San Sebastian, the name was a nice coincidence, but I will take it – for a week-long workation. For many, this was the first opportunity to meet in person and get to know each other. So, it was great to spend a week working, talking, eating, and playing together. Now, I can tell you all for sure, yes Connor is 📏 veeery tall. 👨‍👦

Also, isn't this a great group of people 👩🏻‍🤝‍👩🏼👨🏾‍🤝‍👨🏼

The Joy of Building Together

The key theme for us was #JoyOfBuildingTogether. This short(ish) hashtag includes 3 important elements that describe perfectly how we work at SeMI:

• Building – a big part of our daily activities (during workation and in general) we spend building projects, teams, content, demos company culture, etc. We strive to make every day productive.

• Together – we are surrounded by great people (both at SeMI and in the community), so we should make the most of all opportunities, and work together toward a brighter future.

• Joy – but most importantly, we should enjoy the ride and strive to bring joy to those (i.e. you) that will use Weaviate and everything that we work on

A great time to start

To make it better we had a couple of people joining the company at the workation. Can anyone think of a better way to start a new job? 🤔

I am super happy to see Dan Dascalescu (based in California) join the DevRel team, who will look after the community on the West Coast. Then we also had Ken MacInnis join the Customer Success team, who incidentally is also based in California.

Say hi to them and make them feel welcome in our community. Trust me, they are big community people and I am sure you will interact with them soon. 🤗

Projects Projects Projects

On the note of #JoyOfBuildingTogether, we spent the week working on some cool projects, some of them are PoCs and others were kickoffs for projects we hope to deliver in the coming weeks or months.

We will share the previews of some of these projects on Twitter and LinkedIn over the coming days and weeks.

Here are some of my personal favourites:

• [PoC] Weaviate import tool – a cool little tool that lets you connect to your Weaviate instance, select a JSON file, generate a schema, and import the data 📦

• [Kick off] Updated UI for Weaviate Cloud Service – it is too early to share the images, but the new UI will look amazing 🤩

• [Kick off] Documentation migration – after fruitful collaboration with Asmit (a fantastic community member), we decided to migrate weaviate.io and the docs to Docusaurus. This will help us make the documentation easier to use and contribute to 🦖

• [Planned for 1.17] Hybrid Search – we have a working demo of a hybrid search functionality, which right now allows us to combine BM25 and Vector Search in a single query 🤯

• [Planned for 1.17] Replication – will allow you to replicate your Weaviate instances across multiple servers.

Content

✍️ Enhance your applied AI solutions with vector database – a great article by Esraa Madi (an AI Educator) on how they use Vector Databases, it also contains a GitHub project. My favourite quote: "vector databases is the technology where we store & manage the AI view (data) of the world"

✍️ Stefan and JP paired to create this fantastic tutorial that teaches how to Backup and Restore in Weaviate – the tutorial comes with code examples in multiple languages, and it is a great starting point for setting up your Weaviate backups.

SeMI Meta blogs

✍️ The entire SeMI team will soon gather for the first time… in Italy! – a short article by Jessie, who explains the whole idea & philosophy behind the workation. If you also work at a remote company, this is definitely a great read.

Data Exchange Podcast (Episode 153) – an interesting podcast with @BigData and Bob, where they talk about Vector Databases and Weaviate.

Hiring

If reading all of this makes you excited about working at SeMI and with Weaviate, then you should check out our open positions. Currently, we are looking for a Golang Software Engineer and a Solution Engineer.