Welcome everyone to our latest Meilistar interview! To our faithful readers, you already know the gist of it all, but if it’s the first time reading this type of blog post, the [Meilistars](__GHOST_URL__/2023-contributor-program-restrospective/) are Meilisearch’s very own contributors program, populated by some of our most talented or oldest contributors.

Who is Vishal?  

-----------------

Today, we’re sitting down with Vishal Sodani, Mumbai-based freelancer. Not only is he a self-taught polyglot programmer, he’s also been building web-based products, mostly in Django, since 2011. He’s the developer behind learned.vcreation.xyz to which he integrated Meilisearch. Aside from his dev experience, Vishal is an avid reader and a chess enthusiast!

But that’s not all:

> “I love exploring Rust now and then. I built learned.vcreation.xyz (a note taking and bookmarking site) in actix-web and published my only crate for a client [https://crates.io/crates/migamake-api-cloudflare](https://crates.io/crates/migamake-api-cloudflare)”

Not unlike our very own integration manager Bruno, [whose interview you can read here](__GHOST_URL__/hacktoberfest-stories-from-contributor-to-manager/), Vishal discovered Meilisearch at the occasion of Hacktoberfest, the yearly celebration of open source!

An October-themed adventure  

------------------------------

It is positively thrilling to know Hacktoberfest still remains a source of discovery for open-source enthusiasts year after year! Indeed, [Hacktoberfest 2022](__GHOST_URL__/hacktoberfest-2022-recap/) was far from Vishal’s first participation, but rather his fourth. We consider ourselves lucky to have managed to catch Vishal’s attention last October, especially considering it’s the only time of the year he’s able to contribute to various projects due to his busy schedule, but the developer returned our love tenfold:

> “I love the easy setup and usage of Meilisearch.  
> While searching for open-source projects to participate in Hacktoberfest, I unexpectedly came across Meilisearch. Having already implemented full-text search using Postgres, my curiosity piqued when I learned about Meilisearch, and I became increasingly interested in exploring it.”

This is definitely a point we take great pride in: being able to easily get into the Meiliverse and use Meilisearch right away! We’re glad Vishal got that feeling too!  
  
Coincidentally, we’d also written a blog post about Postgres ([that you can read here if you wish](__GHOST_URL__/postgres-full-text-search-limitations/)), so we were curious to know if Vishal agreed with the content we wrote or if he’d had a different experience on his side:  

> “When it came to utilizing Postgres full-text search, I had a rudimentary understanding. Getting started with it involved delving into documentation and articles. Subsequently, I developed code in Golang to execute queries to the back-end for conducting searches. It was a trial-and-error process, but eventually, I managed to make it work. However, in contrast, using Meilisearch for the same use case was a breeze.”

Seeing as Vishal discovered Meilisearch during Hacktoberfest, we were curious to know how his contribution journey went at such a frantic time. Thankfully, he only had good things to share about our maintainers:

> “The experience was smooth. I was able to set up the repository easily. And, during my contribution I was given timely excellent guidance. So, this made my journey enjoyable.”

The battle for constant improvement isn’t over!  

--------------------------------------------------

As a final point, we were eager to hear about which features were Vishal’s favourite, and which ones could still use some work according to him:  

> “Right now my favorite features are - ease of setup, client library in golang which makes it easy to add documents from my golang web app, documentation is good which makes it easy to know the features available and their usage.  
> I think it would be good to have more complete examples in repository; though I have not looked at repo since sometime; collection of advice/notes from real-world usage shared by other users. Sometimes when I browse issues I find interesting comments by users which helps one to learn.”

Especially valuable feedback as we’re constantly working on improving our [SDK](https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/learn/what_is_meilisearch/sdks#sdks) documentation!  
  
A big thank you to Vishal for his time, it was lovely hearing about his experience and we hope his story, as well as [Bruno](__GHOST_URL__/hacktoberfest-stories-from-contributor-to-manager/)’s, will inspire many more to join us during future events!

Vishal Sodani: POV of a Hacktoberfest contributor

Today, we’re very happy to be sitting down with another of our Japanese language experts whose help was absolutely invaluable to reach the point that we have in support of the language: Miiton!

Getting to know Miiton
----------------------

As usual, we wanted to start the interview by getting to know a bit more about Miiton:

> “Hello, I'm @miiton, and I live in Japan. While I don't have a specific area of expertise, I've been involved in a variety of fields from networking to application development. Before I got into the kind of development work I'm doing now, I spent a lot of time setting up and configuring server racks. Recently, my work has been centered around developing and maintaining an EC site, primarily for B2B transactions, using React and Go mainly.”

We were impressed with the variety of his background, which prompted us to ask how he got into the field in the first place:

> **“**I used to work setting up and configuring server racks, configuring network, server machines, storage, etc. However, with the advent of VMware and the growth of AWS and GCP in the background, I shifted to software engineering while learning programming on my own. I originally liked things like automating deployments with PowerShell, so the transition was smooth.”

Milton also shares that he initially found Meilisearch on GitHub while trying to add an Algolia-like search feature to his support documents.  
  
Is his experience similar to any of our other contributors or users? Do let us know if it’s the case!

A constant work for the improvement of Japanese support
-------------------------------------------------------

  
We then asked what, according to him, could be improved about Meilisearch at this point in time:  

> “Japanese language support and analysis functions. Japanese language support has [progressed quickly starting with PR](https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia/pull/70), but it is still not enough to handle Japanese. [](https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia/pull/70)I am impressed that @ManyTheFish actively listens to me in Discussions and on Twitter. I respect him because he understands Japanese even though he doesn't speak Japanese. [](https://github.com/meilisearch/product/discussions/532)The [analysis function](https://github.com/meilisearch/product/discussions/532) is an important indicator for us to know what users are looking for and what content we need to provide.”

  
Indeed, Many, search engine engineer at Meilisearch, has been doing his best work to tame verious languages! The least we can say about it is that it’s far from a walk in the park. If you’re curious and wish to read more on that topic, you can [find Many’s interview here](__GHOST_URL__/improving-meilisearchs-language-support/).  
  
It is not the first time we heard that Japanese is a particularly tricky language to tackle, and we wondered if Miiton would be able to explain to us why it is the case:

> “This is because it is difficult to determine whether a "Kanji-only strings" is Japanese or Chinese. The current implementation of Meilisearch recognizes "Kanji-only strings" as Chinese, so 東京 is normalized to 东京, making it impossible for Japanese users to search for Tokyo. This has been worked around because @ManyTheFish private-release a prototype that forces Japanese, but I hope it will somehow be resolved and incorporated into the main branch.”

  
We can only imagine how bothersome the current situation is for our Japanese users, which is also why we’re so grateful for contributors such as Miiton or [Mosuka](__GHOST_URL__/meilistar-interview-minoru-osuka/) for their continued support in improving the language.

Milton then goes on to explain that Meilisearch is the only open-source project to which he contributed in recent years! Naturally, we were intrigued to learn what motivated him to take that first step and start contributing:

> “It made me think, "I want to use this." Because I was shocked that I could start it up without thinking, just throw in some JSON, and use it right away.”

We were genuinely curious to hear about his firsthand experience contributing to Meilisearch, especially considering it was his first time contributing to an open-source project in a very long time:

> “Contributing to Meilisearch has allowed me to reconsider the multitude of factors involved in implementing a search system. It also gave me the option of using Meilisearch for now. I am convinced that this experience will definitely be useful in my future work. It was also a good opportunity to get in touch with Rust ”

And what a surprise to learn Miiton wasn’t familiar with Rust before contributing to Meilisearch!

A further insight into Miiton’s projects  

-------------------------------------------

Finally, we asked Miiton to share more about the projects he’s been using Meilisearch with:

![Image](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/qEIsc8BYgC7K5i5TUuLlqU3oGP4tHgWNDOuw8iGtKE4oTJeApun7gutJBUaJ63q0lR0-i1H0hOR3LxzTT2ee_-O0RVYN5RcQZ_eaKLLqjNcYk-8ULyMGRCwpxO-gDpot79Igrz5pH0bHDHz_Nz6x-y4)

> “(I'll refrain from disclosing the specific site, as I can't.) An interesting recent effort is the integration into Shopify. Shopify has a standard & easy-to-use search function, but it only supports up to 1,000 products, and beyond that, you need to consider signing up for a third-party Shopify App. Furthermore, few of these apps are optimized for Japan, and even if they were, they were expensive. Using self-hosted Meilisearch has been a good fit so far. (I'm using the Prototype version with force Japanese language support, so this is not a implementation we can recommend to everyone at this time.) I'm operating a site with roughly 10,000 products on a 2GB memory instance, and I have plenty of resources to spare. I'm also using Prometheus' Metrics (experimental implementation) to create and monitor Grafana screens like this one.”

But that’s not all! As a hobby, Milton also created a public site where he showcases the search experience of Meilisearch in Japanese. You can find the website here, so don’t hesitate to give it a look and lots of love: [https://meilisearch-example-jp.miiton.dev/](https://meilisearch-example-jp.miiton.dev/).

And aside from language support, did any feature catch his attention in particular?

> “Of course response speed and UI development experience. I like that it is InstantSearch.js compatible because of the good development experience. It was very easy to create the above demo site. I don't have to tell you how fast the response time is.”

We couldn’t be more appreciative of Miiton’s time for this interview, and for all his continued support for the improvement of the Japanese language in Meilisearch.  
  
If like Miiton you’re also fluent in a non-european language and are interested in seeing your language improved in Meilisearch, our [Charabia repo is always open to you](https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia)!

Miiton: a master of Japanese has entered the fight!

Today, we’re joined by Gregory, or you may know him as GregoryCongad on Github, for yet again one of our Meilistars interviews!

Meet Greg!
----------

Let’s start by learning a little bit more about our latest Star: just last spring, Greg finished his undergrad in computer science at [WPI](https://www.wpi.edu/) and started contributing to Meilisearch at the end of 2022.  
He actually got introduced to Computer Science all the way back in 5th grade. That’s 10 years old for all non-Americans out there! And that’s all thanks to him stumbling across [Scratch, the famous MIT website](https://scratch.mit.edu/). It was love at first sight and Greg has been passionate about programming ever since.

But he didn’t stop there!

> “In middle school, I self-taught Python, C++, and Java by reading some books and by coding up some miscellaneous side projects. I've dabbled in many languages and projects over the years, but have finally picked up Rust after hearing so many good things about it (and the hype is there for a reason!)”

Truly a young prodigy! And that’s not even half of it, for the past two summers, Greg has been interning at Amazon under the Alexa project, focusing on internal tooling, creating products for internal consumption across the organisation. Not much more can be shared on this matter of course due to his NDA, but this sure looks like high profile work.

A serendipitous discovery
-------------------------

With all this experience and knowledge under his belt, we couldn’t help but wonder how he’d discovered Meilisearch. And why change a successful method? Just as with Scratch, Greg confesses he simply stumbled upon Meilisearch:  

> “I was looking for a full text search engine to embed in a Flutter library and was going to settle on TypeSense. TypeSense wasn’t exactly what I wanted though, and eventually I found Meilisearch through one of TypeSense’s comparison pages in their docs. I realized Meilisearch was perfect for my use case, especially since I saw it was written in Rust and I wanted to pick up Rust at the time.”

We really got lucky to have caught his attention! We wondered what had convinced him to give Meilisearch a try as opposed to TypeSense, and Greg shared two main reasons:  

> “1. Persistence on disk. Since I was embedding it, having persistence across application open/close was pretty important  
> 2.The license. Meilisearch is licensed under MIT, whereas TypeSense is GPL. GPL is pretty restrictive, so I try to stay away from it whenever possible”

Our curiosity got the best of us once again, and we couldn’t help being nosey by asking which features of Meilisearch he preferred, and which one could do with a bit more work:  

> “My favorite aspect is how well everything is architected—it’s super easy to embed Meilisearch in other Rust applications and only grab the features you need. Of course, the typo tolerance and relevance that are builtin/require zero configuration are probably my favorite aspects of the product! As far as what I’d like to see, I’d love to have the engine auto-update/have compatibility across versions. Currently, you need to make dumps between versions, but it’d be very nice for that process to be automated (and some work is being done toward that end, like updating how Settings are stored internally)”

A lot of food for thought for all, which we’re very grateful for since hearing our users’ feedback is the best way for us to stay relevant and truly offer you all the best possible search experience.

And what of Greg's personal projects?
-------------------------------------

  
Seeing Greg’s impressive experience despite his young age, we asked whether he’s had the chance to use Meilisearch in a professional context or for a personal project:  

> “I’ve used/embedded Meilisearch to create [Mimir](https://github.com/GregoryConrad/mimir), which is a Flutter library that gives developers an on-device NoSQL database with typo-tolerant & relevant full text search. I originally created Mimir with an application of my own in mind, but I’ve since put that application on hold. Now I just work on Mimir and contribute back to Meilisearch as a hobby project, since I enjoy working on both! The Meilisearch team is really welcoming and nice, which is a great change when compared to other open source projects. Really easy to land your first contribution!”

Go give [Mimir](https://github.com/GregoryConrad/mimir) some love if you have the chance! And we’re very touched to hear Greg’s first experience with us was a positive one, that’s definitely something we aim for!

Embedding Meilisearch to Mimir was actually how Greg first noticed that there were some points of improvement he could contribute to in order to make Meilisearch better! His [first contributions](https://github.com/meilisearch/milli/pull/706) were actually created as a way to solve the issues he ran into when embedding Meilisearch to Mimir! That PR was even featured in one of our release blog posts. Clearly, Greg and Meili were a match made in heaven.

A big thank you to Greg for his time and his answers, we were delighted to be able to spend a moment with him!

Gregory Conrad: POV of a raising young star

  
Hello, have you met Paul?
----------------------------

Today and for the third time, we’re very happy to share another one of our Meilistars interviews! The Meilistars are some of our top contributors, they all have a plethora of experience they kindly agree to share with us.

The Meilistar we’d like to shine our spotlight on in this article is Paul Sanders, or [sanders41](https://github.com/sanders41), as you may know him on GitHub! Paul has worked in various positions throughout his tech career, for instance he was a data manager as well as a software engineer.

Aside from that, Paul also enjoys spending his free time working on open-source software, both as a maintainer and contributor, which is how he got involved with Meilisearch.  
  
We were curious to know whether someone had mentioned the project to him or if he discovered us by himself:

> “I stumbled upon it. I believe it was Twitter where I saw it mentioned and it sounded like an interesting project. Looking through the repo on GitHub I saw some open issues that I knew how to fix and have been contributing ever since.”

We’re grateful he found his way to Meilisearch! We then wondered on the reasons that motivated him to keep on contributing all this time:  

> “The way Meilisearch does open source makes it a great project to contribute to, regardless of the repo. With a lot of other open source projects it's not unusual to have PRs sit for weeks before getting any review, then there are several weeks between each review. I've even had PRs sit for almost two years before getting reviewed on some projects. With Meilisearch the team is good about getting reviews done and seems to really appreciate the help. After contributing for so long the team there know me and I know them which also makes new contributions easier.”  

Upon first discovering us, Paul felt like Meilisearch and Elasticsearch were quite similar but that Meilisearch was easier to set up and maintain, which was interesting to him then.  
  
When asked about how Meilisearch today holds up in comparison to Meilisearch at the time, Paul shares:

> “The biggest difference I see from when I first found Meilisearch to now is all the work that has gone into indexing. Work done on indexing speed and batching of jobs have been big improvements. One difference that I haven't used myself, but I see a lot of talk about and seems to be a popular addition is the addition of geo search.”

We were delighted to hear his positive feedback, and we wondered if there was anything he’d noticed could be improved upon:

> “One thing that would be nice is some kind of configuration file for the settings. This is especially true for development when you are frequently starting fresh. What I have done for this so far is created a startup script that runs and updates the settings, but it would be nice to have a configuration file to do this.”

We’re very grateful for his feedback since Paul is such an experienced contributor.

A career in tech
----------------

Indeed, on top of contributing to Meilisearch on the regular, he worked, up until recently, for his former’s company’s open source [Fides projects](https://github.com/ethyca/fides). Fides is an open-source privacy engineering platform made to manage the fulfillment of data privacy requests and the enforcement of privacy regulations in code. And that’s without mentioning his personal projects:

> “ From my own projects the one that Meilisearch people may find interesting is Meilisearch [Python Async.](https://github.com/sanders41/meilisearch-python-async) As the name implies it is an SDK like Meilisearch Python, but for code bases using asyncio.”

  
During his time contributing to Meilisearch, Paul mentions he hasn’t had the chance to talk much with his fellow contributors outside of PRs. However, he would be keen to change that! Especially for anyone looking for a mentor:

> “Most of my time these days is spent in Python so if there is anyone that wants to get started with Meilisearch using Python, or contributing to the Python SDK and has any questions they can reach out to me and I'd be happy to help.”

With his extensive experience, we are sure he can provide valuable insights and guidance, so don't hesitate to reach out to him.  
  
Knowing that Paul works in tech, we wondered whether or not he’s had the chance to use Meilisearch in a professional environment:

> “I was building a system at a previous job where I was using Meilisearch, but ended up moving to a new job at a different company before it was finished. The idea in that system was in clinical trials there is a lot of free text data, audit trails and communications being a few examples. Because this was free text there was traditionally no good way to search this data (typos, misspellings, etc.) so people just had to know that the data existed and where to find it. With typo tolerance in Meilisearch I finally had a way to do it.”

  
And on his free time?
------------------------

Aside from his work, Paul also tells us a bit more about the way he uses Meilisearch for a pet project of his.

> “I am currently working on a personal project where I plan to use Meilisearch. My sister is a school teacher and she has been having me help her with some tracking data the school systems have to do on students. They are currently using Google Sheets to do this, and there are multiple issues with this in my view. For one it just wasn't made to do what they are trying to do, and for two each student is his/her own file so there is no way to search across students. How far this one goes depends on how interested the school system is in solving their pain point.”

As a final thought, Paul also shares with us an alternate way to look at Meilisearch:

>   
> “ I feel like a lot of times Meilisearch only gets looked at for it's ability to search through millions of records because that is impressive and has the "wow factor". I think there is a potential to bring a lot of value in using Meilisearch for much smaller datasets also. Manually searching through even hundreds of records is not something people are going to do, and with Meilisearch being so easy to setup I think this is a missed opportunity for people in these situations. ”

  
We’d like to extend a warm thank you to Paul for his time and candor during this interview. Don’t hesitate to check out more of our Meilistars interviews and the future ones as well!

Paul Sanders: an open-source veteran among the Meilistars

Meet Markus
-----------

To kick things off, we asked Markus to introduce himself.

> “I'm Markus, a software developer at [devjob.at](https://devjobs.at/). I enjoy experimenting with new technologies and packages, prototyping ideas, and improving the code base. My main area of interest lies in backend and infrastructure topics. During my free time, I read a lot of tech articles and follow Tech Twitter to see what's new in our ever-changing dev world.”

You can find him on Twitter as [@m4ch4tschek](https://twitter.com/m4ch4tschek)

> “Apart from the tech stuff, I also enjoy spending time in nature. Since owning a dog, I got interested in dog training. I dedicate a significant amount of time to it and consider it time well spent.”

Curious minds want to know! We couldn’t help but ask for account recommendations. If you are dying to know too, don’t worry, here’s the list of Markus’ top Twitter accounts:

*   [@marcelpociot](https://twitter.com/marcelpociot): Markus praised Marcel Pociot for creating the best developer tools around Laravel and other projects, and for quickly providing working solutions to developers' issues.
*   [@JackEllis](https://twitter.com/jackellis): He finds Jack Ellis' journey as a CTO challenging Google's analytics business to be very inspiring.
*   [@mathemagic1an](https://twitter.com/mathemagic1an): This account covers all things AI, and he recommends it to anyone interested in the field.
*   [@mattpocockuk](https://twitter.com/mattpocockuk): Markus believes this account owner has "TypeScript superpowers"
*   [@tobias\_petry](https://twitter.com/tobias_petry): For SQL content, he advises following Tobias
*   [@mjackson](https://twitter.com/mjackson) and [@kentcdodds](https://twitter.com/kentcdodds) were recommended for their work with Remix

And, of course, he also suggests following [@meilisearch](https://twitter.com/meilisearch) 😎

Love at first sight
-------------------

Markus discovered Meilisearch in late 2020. While he couldn't recall exactly how he first heard of Meilisearch, he did remember being drawn to its simplicity:

> “Finally, something fast and configurable, that I can easily understand and deploy without a PhD.”

He ended up implementing it into two projects, with one of them, [DEVWorkplaces](https://en.devworkplaces.com/), being highlighted in our [newsletter](https://mailchi.mp/meilisearch/newsletter-6025733?e=[UNIQID]). DEVWorkplaces focuses on job search and dev workplace discovery in the DACH region. It was already using Algolia in production, but it didn’t fully meet the product’s needs.

When asked what Meilisearch brought to the table that Algolia couldn't, Markus listed a few key advantages. First, **Meilisearch offers a self-hosting option**, which was a big plus for his team. Second, he appreciated the **local development environment** and the fact that Meilisearch is open-source. Finally, Markus found that Meilisearch was **easy to use and understand for team members**, making it a more accessible tool for everyone involved.

We were curious to know Markus’ take on how Meilisearch has evolved from 2020 to 2023. Has Meilisearch gone from good to great, or has it gotten worse? Thankfully, Meilisearch seems to have evolved in the right direction 😀

> “Seeing the community grow is the biggest point. Increased adoption of framework/language integrations has been wild. Also, there are a lot more team members now. Everything is way more professional (in a good way), from the releases, product decisions to communication, blog posts, and community interaction.”

As a developer advocate and one of the earliest team members, I love to hear that! The truth is that everyone at Meilisearch is very proud of how far we have come and very excited about the future!  We are moved to see that there are people who have been supporting us from the beginning 🥰

From user to contributor
------------------------

We're always intrigued by how individuals take the leap to contribute to a project. In Markus’ case, it was a matter of necessity. When he encountered an issue, he saw no other option but to fix it himself. As he became more involved with open-source projects, Markus began contributing to [Meilisearch](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch) and [KeystoneJS](https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone), two projects that he uses in his work.

> “As open-source projects are mostly dependent on user contributions, this was the way to go. Also, contributing to an open-source project (no matter which size) is something I enjoy, even though I would like to contribute more.”

Markus’ contributions have evolved over time. Although he still contributes to code fixes, he has become more involved in non-coding tasks. Markus is particularly interested in [Laravel Scout](https://github.com/laravel/scout)\-related issues or questions and tries to provide helpful answers whenever possible. He’s been also participating actively in product discussions.

> “I've subscribed to topics that make my daily usage of Meilisearch easier. [Guillaume Mourier](https://github.com/gmourier/) (Meilisearch's Product Manager) makes a big effort to try to collect as much information as possible about new features or changes. This is great as we (contributors and users) can add input to any product decision before it gets implemented.”

It's feedback like this that has helped us continue to improve Meilisearch over time, and we are grateful for Markus’ and our community's contributions. We are excited to continue improving our product with his and our community's input. That's why we asked him about the features he would like to see in the near future, and he did not disappoint! He’s got plenty of ideas:

> “I think it would be great if Meilisearch would be [upgradable without the need of creating dumps and re-importing them](https://github.com/meilisearch/product/discussions/213). Just shutting down Meilisearch and starting it with a newer version. Currently, if we want to implement a zero downtime deployment (having the old Meilisearch instance and a new one and syncing the changes to both instances until everything is up to date), it leads to extended downtime on the search endpoint and overhead on the implementation side.”

> “Furthermore, for my current project at work, we would appreciate [multi-geopoint](https://github.com/meilisearch/product/discussions/508) support. As this is missing, we need to use the distinct attribute feature, which unfortunately is extremely slow on search requests with a lot of hits.”

It was great chatting with Markus and learning about his experience with Meilisearch. It's always a pleasure to hear from our community members and learn about the diverse ways in which they are using Meilisearch. We are grateful to Markus for taking the time to share his thoughts and experience with us, and we look forward to continuing to work with him and our community to create fast, powerful, and reliable search experiences.

If you are interested in learning more about how Meilisearch is being used by other developers and organizations, check out our [previous Meilistar interview](__GHOST_URL__/meilistar-interview-minoru-osuka/) with Minoru Osuka, one of our main language contributors.

Markus Machatschek: POV of a long-time Meilisearch contributor

This year, we’ve launched Meilisearch's very first contributors program: the Meilistars. The aim of a contributors’ program is to gather top community contributors and foster our relationship, highlight the fantastic work they produce, and maybe even help create connections. We won’t go much in-depth on this topic at the moment as we’re hoping to share more in a dedicated blog post, so watch this space!  
  
As an initiative to bring the spotlight to our amazing community members, we’ve asked if they would be interested in participating in a series of interviews so that we can get to know them better.  
  
And we’re kick-starting our interviews with Minoru Osuka. You may have already met him on GitHub as [Mosuka](https://github.com/mosuka) or on Twitter as [@minoru\_osuka](https://twitter.com/minoru_osuka).

Let’s hear all together a bit more from him!

Meet Minoru
===========

First things first, we’ve asked him to introduce himself in his own words!

> “I'm Minoru Osuka. I work as a software engineer and tech lead for a company that provides a job search engine in Japan. I'm mainly involved in search platform development. My hobby is software development, and I've released some of the software I developed as OSS on GitHub.”

So not only does Minoru work in tech, but he also considers it his hobby! We were very curious to know how he got into the tech field.

Minoru explains that he started in a technical school as a programming instructor, but he wished to increase his practical experience and decided to join a software development company.

> “This was the start of my career as a software developer. As I used search engines in my work, I became interested in how they work, so I moved to an Internet portal site and have worked in the search engine field ever since.”

Minoru + Meiliseach: it was meant to be
=======================================

Hearing that Minoru actually worked with search engines, we couldn’t help but ask when he heard about Meilisearch and how he started using it.

> “It was about May 2022 when Meilisearch started supporting the Japanese language. Meilisearch used the Japanese morphological analyzer [Lindera](https://github.com/lindera-morphology/lindera) as their Japanese tokenizer. I maintain Lindera, so it was a very fortunate event.”

Minoru is very grateful to [Kination](https://github.com/kination) and [Miiton](https://github.com/miiton), who respectively created the [first pull request](https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia/pull/70) to add Japanese language support in Meilisearch and implemented it. It is thanks to their combined work that the Japanese support of Meilisearch has become what it is today.

> “I have yet to actually use Meilisearch in my work, but [voluntas](https://github.com/voluntas) introduced [a case study using Meilisearch](https://zenn.dev/voluntas/scraps/77ae77d06deadc) for their Japanese document search service, which attracted a lot of attention.”

Open source to the bone
=======================

Minoru's frequent references to other members of the Meilisearch community during the interview were too significant to overlook. He expressed great satisfaction at having had the opportunity to connect with fellow community members.

> “Ever since Meilisearch adopted Lindera, my Twitter followers have increased. I am happy to have met them. I'm very grateful to Meilisearch.”

It's truly remarkable how deeply involved Minoru is in the open-source community. In addition to contributing to Meilisearch and maintaining Lindera, he has also built his own [distributed search server](https://github.com/mosuka/bayard).

> “I had been using Elasticsearch and Solr for a long time, but using them was not enough for me, so I decided to build a distributed search server while also learning Rust. It was tough, but I learned a lot.”

Oddly, it was this project that led him to maintain Lindera:

> “I started working on Lindera because I developed a distributed search server on my own. \[...\] My friend, who is developing a full-text search library, also developed a Japanese morphological analyzer, but it was not registered on [crates.io](https://crates.io/). When I contacted him to see if he would register it on crates.io, he gave me a surprising answer: ‘I want you to take over this project.’ I was also interested in morphological analyzers, so I decided to take over the development.”

Minoru also thanked [fulmicoton](https://github.com/fulmicoton), the developer of [kuromoji-rs](https://github.com/fulmicoton/kuromoji-rs), the original software that eventually evolved into Lindera, describing it as “a wonderful OSS.”

A vision for the future
=======================

Given his extensive contributions, it's no surprise that Minoru knows Meilisearch inside out. Its immediate usability is what Minoru values most about it. In fact, he particularly values a specific feature that contributes to this accessibility.

> “Meilisearch's automatic detection of what language the indexed documents are written in is great. This is a very helpful feature for users unfamiliar with search engines.”

During our conversation with Minoru, we couldn't pass up the chance to ask him about any improvements he'd like to see in Meilisearch's near future. Unsurprisingly, his suggestions focused on language support. Specifically, he suggested implementing a mechanism to normalize characters **before** they are tokenized.

For those unfamiliar with the process, it currently happens the other way around. A text is tokenized—segmented into words—and then, each word is normalized based on language particularities. For a romance language like French, this process includes lowercasing and removing diacritical marks such as accents or anything that doesn’t impact the meaning of the text. To those interested in the subject, you can join the discussion on [GitHub](https://github.com/meilisearch/product/discussions/532#discussioncomment-3812425) or [read more](__GHOST_URL__/improving-meilisearchs-language-support/) about how we handle language support.

Minoru's suggestions for language support included customizing the normalizer for each field. Suppose there is a document with an address field, and he would like to be able to instruct Meilisearch to convert the Kanji numbers in the address field into Arabic numbers. In his words:

> "Right now, Meilisearch does not have a normalizer for Japanese, but it would be nice to be able to customize it for each field \[…\] I would also like to contribute to Japanese normalizers."

We look forward to working on improving our language support with Minoru, and any language aficionados that would want to support our efforts!

It was a real pleasure talking with Minoru, getting to know him better, and understanding his insight on Meilisearch, his usage, and the people he managed to meet through it.

As a reminder, you can find [Minoru on GitHub](https://github.com/mosuka) or contribute to [Lindera](https://github.com/lindera-morphology/lindera).  
We hope you found this interview as interesting as we did and look forward to meeting all of our incredible Meilistars.

Minoru Osuka: POV of a main language contributor

These past few years, our team has observed the growth of our community across multiple online spaces such as Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, and especially our public Slack workspace. We were and are thrilled to see more and more people interested in our work and our company, and applied ourselves to making everyone feel welcome. Eventually, however, we began to consider a new option: the possibility of migrating our community from Slack to [our very own brand new Discord server.](https://discord.gg/meilisearch) It was only a matter of time, since Discord has established itself as _the_ reference in terms of community platforms.

Such a change had to be carefully considered since it meant migrating our quite large Slack community onto a brand new platform. We didn't want to go through with it without a good reason and even better plan of action.

**First of all, why did we decide to move to Discord?**

Discord is difficult to ignore. It has become an extremely popular and highly democratized platform, with an average of 150 million active monthly users\*. Discord’s large user base was a very good argument in its favor, but it wasn't the only reason for our decision. Discord is already the happy home of various online communities from within the tech space, including our friends at [AppWrite](https://appwrite.io/) and [Orbit](https://orbit.love/). As such, the platform is very well designed for maintainers. Some of its benefits include:

*   A large variety of moderation tools, many of which can be automated thanks to bots
*   A variety of roles that can be assigned with different permissions, to both valorize community members and identify moderators
*   The option to make the Code of Conduct mandatory before joining the servers to help protect the space from bad actors
*   Unlimited and expiration-free invites
*   Many inclusive options, such as allowing people to assign themselves their preferred pronouns

When considering all of this, the general consensus was that a move to Discord was the best option for both our community members and the moderators.

Luckily, we aren't the first ones to consider this move and go through with it! After taking the decision, our next step was to diligently do our homework: research how other companies had handled the change and apply their best practices.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/Screenshot_2022_11_28_at_16_26_14_a0a03dd987.png)

**Secondly, how to manage the migration?**

As we embarked on the actual migration, the very first step taken well in advance was to prepare our future Discord server. We asked around internally to figure out which features would be expected and whether each team wanted its own space. Based on the initial feedback, we created the first proposal and invited the team to have a look around and share their impressions. At this time some team members raised issues around inclusivity, especially concerning the text-to-speech feature, and we did our best to address these in order to ensure a good experience for as many people as possible. Based on this second wave of feedback, the server was adjusted accordingly and the design was locked in.

There was also the question of timing. Our original plan was to have a post-new year 2023 migration. However, we had to consider the impact of other upcoming announcements. We recently announced and are soon to release our Cloud offering and v.0.30 of our search engine, which we expect to translate into an increase in awareness and an influx of newcomers to our community. We were concerned about having users join us only to be told a month later they would have to migrate to a completely different platform. Alongside this, we were preparing for our first sponsorship of the [Advent of Code](https://adventofcode.com/), a month long event offering challenging programming puzzles, for which we also wanted to create an [original coding challenge](https://aoc.meilisearch.com/). It is common for tech-oriented servers to host their very own Advent of Code channel; without a Discord, it wasn't something we could easily offer.

A December migration seemed very interesting from a strategic standpoint, the only issue being the short turnaround to communicate the upcoming changes to our Slack users.

**Finally, what happens now with our Slack?**

As we mentioned earlier, this change was greatly motivated by our desire to offer a more friendly space to our community members. Our aim isn't to take people by surprise and rush them around. Our Slack workspace will remain open for the next few months so that members who missed the initial announcement won’t simply be cut out and left to wonder what exactly happened. We will keep publishing regular announcements throughout these next few months to explain the situation and instruct people on how they can join us on this new platform. These efforts will also be supported on our various social media to get the word around as much as possible. We strongly encourage our community members to ask any questions they might have so that we can answer these queries transparently and reassure anyone feeling uncertain about this decision.

This migration was very carefully considered by Meilisearch, and we look forward to hearing your opinion about our new server. We intend to take full advantage of Discord's new options, and are excited to have you [joining us](https://discord.gg/meilisearch) in this new adventure. Thank you for your continued support!

\*[https://www.cloudwards.net/discord-statistics/](https://www.cloudwards.net/discord-statistics/)

From Slack to Discord: our migration

Time to close the door behind Hacktoberfest 2022! What an event it was, the time has come to sum up our learnings for this year to better prepare for the future.

For the third time in a row, everyone at Meilisearch was very excited to be participating in Hacktoberferst, probably one of the most popular celebrations of the open-source community online.

We were very grateful for everyone support and contributions throughout the month, please find below the recap we’ve shared internally.

Our teams really enjoyed taking part into the event, leaving us no choice but to go for one more round next year: Hacktoberfest 2023, here we come!

Here, you can find the slides of the presentation with a few comments for context:

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_636027ab45.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_3_082f4c1b7d.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_4_54734eb823.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_5_f0c74dca0b.jpg)

It’s important to keep in mind the way we count our PRs might be slightly different from the official counting. In the following graph, we counted any PR merged during October, and we included the PRs that were validated but not merged in time on October 31st. Some PRs were open before October 1st but still benefited from the “Hacktoberfest approved” tag since they were completed during October.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_6_cbd60a838b.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_7_7b0c2029be.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_8_d35b08263e.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_9_4c4e155893.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_10_1_78e13c206c.jpg)

We were truly blown away by the number of contributions we received this year! We didn’t quite reach our fourth goal, but we set it as such, knowing it was definitely going to be a challenge. At the same time, we were thrilled to see we weren’t that far away from it!  
  
These objectives being hit isn’t just an ego boost for us. It also translates directly into monetary donations for various organizations we’ve selected before the start of the event. The following organizations were selected on the basis of causes that are important to us. We also tried to find some groups that were geographically close to some of the employees of Meilisearch. This second criterion is because we wish to establish a stronger link with the organizations we donate to. We’d love to remain in touch with them and maybe see how our donation- by extension yours!- has potentially improved things for them.  
  
As we mentioned briefly, these donations wouldn’t have been achievable without your support and contributions throughout the whole month of October! We wish to extend a big thank you to everyone for that.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_11_1_8804545d22.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_12_a474cd83ac.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_13_625ef09d3b.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_14_00a1b66b56.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_15_1_ba4bae4f61.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_18_2_c65de291a9.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_19_70512c60c4.jpg)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/External_Hacktoberfest_2022_A_recap_20_ad1a2df74e.jpg)

Hacktoberfest 2022 recap

We're halfway through Hacktoberfest, an excellent time to look back and see how much we have accomplished so far. It's also an opportunity to recenter ourselves for the next couple of weeks and conclude this event with a bang.

We're incredibly proud to share that, so far, we've merged 92 pull requests! We're baffled by our contributors' enthusiasm and involvement. We wish to extend a warm thanks to everyone who participated.

And to express our gratitude, we'd like to share our plans for additional Meilisearch swag and common goals, as we teased in our previous Hacktoberfest [blog post](__GHOST_URL__/contribute-hacktoberfest-2022/).

**Meilisearch exclusive swag**
------------------------------

Last year, we sent reusable bottles and some stickers to our contributors. When it came to shipping, it was not all smooth sailing, but we learned a lot from it and have adjusted our strategy this year.

We had settled on reusable bottles in the spirit of eco-friendly and reusable gifts. These values are fundamental to us as we wish to offer goods people can reuse for a long time. Given that most  of our contributors are developers, we've considered that tech-related presents might be particularly appreciated. This is how we came to our current choice.

We're very excited to be able to give all participants a swag box containing a duffle bag, a webcam cover, as well as a touchscreen tool shield.

![Picture of the swag box products such as a dark duffle bag, a black webcam cover, a white touchscreen](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/Untitled_design_6_1f6a37b53c.png)

(This isn't the final design of the goods you'll receive :) )

The touchscreen will ensure you won't have to touch public surfaces and keep your hands germ-free. The webcam cover will guard your privacy. And finally, you'll be able to put all your gifts in your snazzy duffle bag-both, a fashionable _and_ green choice.

If you've had one of your PRs merged or will get one merged before the end of Hacktoberfest, you're eligible to receive your box! Our maintainers will share a link to a simple online form where we will collect the information we need to start the redeeming process.

**Common goals** 
-----------------

As we did [last year](__GHOST_URL__/hacktoberfest-2021-recap/), we strive to not only contribute to the open-source community throughout Hacktoberfest but also hope to pay it forward. This is why we come back again with some collective goals to benefit a greater mission.

For Hacktoberfest 2021, we donated to open-source maintainers, climate activist groups, and groups that support diversity in tech.

This year, we identified local groups that might benefit from our contributions and with whom we hope to foster a closer relationship. We'd love to see how our donations -achieved thanks to you!- will impact their work.

These are the different groups we plan on supporting this year:

### **Group 1. Diversity in tech**

Diversity in tech is, now more than ever, a hot topic. We strive for a world where diversity isn't a debate topic but a simple reality. Within Meilisearch, we do our best to encourage inclusion and acceptance, and we are very grateful for the opportunity the diversity our mostly remote team offers us.

This is why we wish to keep supporting such topics through the following associations:

👩🏿‍🦱 [Women on Rails](https://women-on-rails.github.io/ressources/) - This LGBTQ+-friendly association works hard to support women that want to practice coding on Ruby and Rails, specifically.

👩🏾‍💻 [Ladies of Code Paris](https://ladiesofcodeparis.netlify.app/) - This Paris-based group supports women's careers in tech.

👥 [Becometech](https://becomtech.fr/en/why-support-us/) - Once again, this Paris-based group strives for inclusion and diversity in IT.

### **Group 2. Climate activism**

As a tech company, we are aware of our carbon footprint. To further our efforts in minimizing this impact, we wish to continue to support some climate activist causes such as:

🌊 [Seasheperd France](https://seashepherd.fr/) - This group works on protecting oceans and raises awareness against aggressive fishing practices.

🌏 [Teragi](https://www.teragir.org) - This association supports sustainability projects through five different active programs

🌴 [Reforestaction](https://www.reforestaction.com/nos-solutions-pour-les-entreprises) - This group pushes hard on reforestation efforts.

### **Group 3. Societal organizations** 

Finally, our third group this year tackles social issues. The members of Meilisearch hope to leave this world in a better state than we found it. In these uncertain times where it's so easy to feel divided, we wish to stand together and support the following groups:

👭 [MAS les Sophoras , Unapei Alpes Provence](https://annuaire.action-sociale.org/?p=mas-les-sophoras-130008402&details=caracteristiques) - This French, Marseille-based, association supports disabled adults throughout their lives by helping integrate them into society.

🇺🇦 [Urgence: santé des femmes Ukrainiennes](https://www.helloasso.com/associations/asf-actions-sante-femmes/collectes/urgence-femmes-ukrainiennes) - This group supports Ukrainian women's health who had to flee their country due to the war, especially with pregnancies.

👫 [Perce neige](https://www.perce-neige.org/) - This Marseille-based group works on supporting mentally handicapped adults. 

**How to unlock the donations?**
--------------------------------

This year, the sky's the limit! It will take 50 PRs to go from one stage to the other, meaning each merged PR represents 10€ of donation.

![Picture displaying the 4 goals we hope to achieve with the appropriate monetary donation next to each goal. ](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/Goal_1_a57a68e5ff.png)

To calculate the total number of contributions, we will count the number of  Hacktoberfest-related pull requests merged in Meilisearch repositories at the end of the month. We will also consider any PRs tagged with the “Hacktoberfest-accepted” label but have not been merged.

As we mentioned, we've already merged 92 PRs we're happy to announce we've already achieved the first goal on our list! Each of our three groups will be receiving 500€, and that's thanks to your efforts! Let's work hard to bring these donations to the next level by smashing through the rest of our goals.

### **How to participate?**

You still have time to participate for a chance to get your hands on our exclusive swag box and help in achieving our common goals!

You can find all our repos accepting Hacktoberfest contributions [here](https://github.com/search?q=org%3Ameilisearch+topic%3Ahacktoberfest&type=Repositories); alternatively, all our Hacktoberfest-eligible issues are [here](https://github.com/search?q=org%3Ameilisearch+label%3Ahacktoberfest&state=open&type=Issues).

There is an issue for everyone, with plenty of [good first issues](https://github.blog/2020-01-22-how-we-built-good-first-issues/) for more novice contributors and more challenging topics for our seasoned devs.

Here are our suggestions for repos that contain some interesting good first issues:

*   If you're a language expert, you'll find many issues in [Charabia](https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia) that require your knowledge of the language to improve our tokenizers and make it easier for Meilisearch to process foreign languages. 
*   Our [PHP](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-php) integration also offers some issues you might be able to tackle without too much trouble if you're interested.
    

And, of course, if your PR is not associated with an issue, but gets accepted, we'll be happy to tag it as "Hacktoberfest accepted", so don't let that stop you!

### **Join our community!**

Our [Slack community](https://join.slack.com/t/meilicommunity/shared_invite/zt-1g4juofj9-FAc_X_A_Ka8EJ6hUMauQCA) is always open to new members! We have a #[hacktoberfest](https://meilicommunity.slack.com/archives/C02G1H43J2X) channel where both Meilisearch employees and fellow contributors mingle, so don’t hesitate to join us if you’d like.

We look forward to your feedback on yourHacktoberfest experience.

Hacktoberfest 2022: Mid-October update

October is finally upon us, and with it comes Hacktoberfest, a staple in the open-source community. Once a year and for a whole month, we all come together and contribute to open-source projects.

But this won’t be the first time Meilisearch joins the melee! We've been participating since 2020, and each time you consistently blew us away with your passion and hard work. Looking back on everything accomplished last year, we're so proud that last year we merged 159 PRs from 90 different collaborators. We're very grateful for your input which allows Meilisearch to grow and progress so quickly.

<Callout>
  **And now, we're back for more, ready with 37** [**repos**](https://github.com/search?q=org%3Ameilisearch+topic%3Ahacktoberfest&type=Repositories) **and 185** [**issues**](https://github.com/search?q=org%3Ameilisearch+label%3Ahacktoberfest&state=open&type=Issues) **eligible for the event!**
</Callout>

### **A little bit about us**

Meilisearch is an open-source search engine built in Rust. Both team and community worked hard to build integrations with most of the popular development languages, frameworks, and deployment options so that Meilisearch fits seamlessly into most developer workflows. Our goal: a simple and intuitive experience for both developers and end-users.

Our main repository, [meilisearch](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch), handles the power of our core engine [milli](https://github.com/meilisearch/milli/) and other libraries it’s built on. These include  [Charabia](https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md), our tokenizer, which allows us to offer optimized  support for space-separated languages (like English and French), Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Thai.

 Does that sound interesting? Why not consider contributing to our project this year?

If you're keen on knowing which [Meilisearch repositories](https://github.com/search?q=org%3Ameilisearch+topic%3Ahacktoberfest&type=Repositories) are eligible for Hacktoberfest, then the answer is… a whole bunch of them! You'll be able to support our efforts by improving the [Ruby](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-ruby) SDK, the [Python](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-python) or the [Rust](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-rust) wrapper, and even polishing [Swift](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-swift) or [JavaScript](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-js) clients for the Meilisearch API. And that's to quote only a few of them. You can contribute to whichever repository you're most comfortable with or, on the contrary, decide to challenge yourself with something less familiar. Hacktoberfest is a great time to experiment and push your limits!

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/Frame_9_8c3e6d37fa.png)

### **Hacktoberfest guidelines @ Meilisearch:**

First, if you're keen on participating, why not look at our official guidelines right [here](https://github.com/meilisearch/.github/blob/main/Hacktoberfest_2022_contributors_guidelines.md). Following these ensures we can provide you with the best contributing experience, including efficient reviews of your PRs. In short, this is what the guidelines are all about:

*   Our official reviewing window is Mon-Thur worktime (CEST)
*   After our maintainers take the time to review your work, please make sure to address all their comments before requesting more feedback
*   We will not accept contributions to our documentation repo this year
*   We do not assign issues to contributors: instead, the team will approve the PR that best solves the problem at hand
*   We will not consider low-quality PRs. If you're unsure what we mean by "low-quality PR", take a look at how the Hacktoberfest organizers define it in their [participation guidelines](https://hacktoberfest.com/participation/#spam) 

We've tagged repos with the Hacktoberfest topic. All contributions to these repositories are eligible for the event, but we added the Hacktoberfest label to the issues  we feel  are the best suited for contributions. We hope this will also allow you to navigate our repositories more easily.

### **What type of contribution for Hacktoberfest 2022?**

Hacktoberfest is a time to celebrate everything open-source. Code-oriented contributions are more than welcome as always, but that's not all! The open-source community _is_ vast and multi-talented.

While the documentation repository is not taking part this year, you can participate in our [Awesome Meilisearch](https://github.com/meilisearch/awesome-meilisearch) repos by [adding new resources](https://github.com/meilisearch/awesome-meilisearch/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md). These resources have to be links to awesome blog posts, tutorials, demos, guides, talks, or just about anything else that teaches people how to do cool things with Meilisearch. You can also create videos if that's where your talent lies. Any demos and talks, use cases, or posts will be equally appreciated. 

### **Extra rewards and shared goals**

Last year, as a small token of gratitude to our contributors, we sent exclusive Meilisearch swag all over the world in the form of a reusable bottle and a few fancy stickers. Unfortunately, we faced dispatching and customs issues in some countries and not everyone received their package. We've learned from our mistakes and came up with  solutions that will allow us to circumvent similar problems this year. So, rest assured: we have  prepared new exclusive swag and this time we’ll ensure everyone gets it. These goods are additional rewards you can receive on top of the ones provided by the Hacktoberfest organizers.

In a similar spirit, last year we set common goals that, if reached, would translate into a monetary donation toward three families of organizations that strive for diversity and inclusivity in software engineering. As you might have heard, we smashed these  collective goals, donating a total of 4500 euros to nine different organizations, all tacking important issues ranging from inclusivity in tech, open source maintainers and climate activists. Motivated by last year's success, we will renew our commitment to creating common goals for a set of different organizations.

It's still too early for us to spoil the surprise, but be on the lookout for our future blog post sharing all the details of our goodies boxes and common goals.

### **Join our community!**

We invite you to join our [community](https://discord.gg/meilisearch) and our dedicated #[hacktoberfest](https://meilicommunity.slack.com/archives/C02G1H43J2X) channel where both Meilisearch employees and fellow contributors mingle. Hacktoberfest isn't only a good time to work on a project, it's also a fantastic opportunity to meet people passionate about open-source.

Questions? Doubts? Comments? We'd love to hear any feedback you may have concerning your Hacktoberfest experience.

###

Meilisearch latest news and company updates