A few weeks ago we spoke to [Guillaume Mourier](/blog/author/gmourier/ about [the product manager’s role in the release of Meilisearch v1.0](/blog/planning-v1-and-beyond/ But what is a product manager, actually? What is his role in Meilisearch? We decided to go after him and shed some light on this mysterious (but extremely important) job.

![](https://media.tenor.com/WqrGt08ogFwAAAAC/scooby-doo-mystery-machine.gif)

What is a product manager?
==========================

Guillaume says the product manager is a key role in software development and can be divided into three main tasks.

First, product managers need to understand how people use a product: what makes their lives easier, what makes their lives harder, what they want to do but can’t because the product lacks a specific feature.

Second, they need to define a strategic vision of the product’s future so development is coherent and efficient. In Meilisearch’s case, this fundamental step means Guillaume works very closely with Quentin, our CEO.

Third, based on the product’s strategic vision and user feedback, product managers decide what features to implement with the resources they have at hand.

Guillaume tells us it’s a difficult balancing act. Sometimes our choices do not please everyone. Sometimes we don’t prioritize popular requests because we believe they do not align with our strategic vision.

The good news is this is done hand in hand with our community. Guillaume first analyzes topics discussed on [GitHub](https://github.com/meilisearch), as well as issues raised with our support team in our [Discord server.](https://discord.gg/meilisearch) Then, he comes up with solutions to the problems the users described, and plans when they should be done. As you can imagine, this is made much easier by the fact Meilisearch is open source.

How did you become Meilisearch’s Product Manager?
=================================================

![](https://media.tenor.com/fiBaWJK3vQQAAAAC/how-did-this-happen-david-rose.gif)

None of this is enough to scare Guillaume. Though he had experience as a backend developer, his transition into product management was, in a way, rather natural.

First of all, he tells us, he was interested not only in writing code and shipping new features, but knowing how his work impacted others. Did users actually adopt the feature he spent weeks carefully implementing and debugging? What did they like about it? What did they hate about it? He had no way of answering these questions. For him, it was like marching forward with his eyes closed—and without a map.

Rather than seeing his former job as a different career he closed the door on, Guillaume is very grateful for his technical knowledge. It gives him valuable insight in the technical challenges developers might have when implementing a feature, as well as some measure of empathy with Meilisearch’s users. He knows first-hand how good it feels to use a well designed product.

Does the product manager work alone?
====================================

One thing Guillaume is particularly proud of is having integrated product squads in Meilisearch’s development process. These working groups include one member from each team and meet periodically to discuss a feature, bringing to the table insights, needs, and challenges a proposed change might entail for their department.

Prior to the creation of the squads, Guillaume observed that a single team would make unilateral development decisions and begin implementation almost immediately. However, as other teams caught up, they would point out problems with the initial decision. Fixing these often required reworking fundamental aspects of the implementation very late in the process, which was risky, inefficient, and sometimes frustrating for everyone involved.

Product squads made it easier to establish smooth communication between teams and resulted in clearer processes leading to better and solid solutions.

What are the most and least appealing aspects of your job?
==========================================================

![](https://media.tenor.com/2iXnRerU6XkAAAAC/i-wanted-to-be-clear-on-the-pros-and-cons-to-be-real.gif)

One of the best experiences for Guillaume is seeing how new features improve the lives of Meilisearch’s users, making their jobs easier and more pleasant.  
  
He confesses that being Product Manager isn’t your usual 9 to 5 that you can simply forget about when you clock out. He has spent more than a few evenings thinking about a particular insightful piece of negative user feedback or features being worked on at that moment. One must be truly passionate to be a product manager!

What features are you the happiest about?
=========================================

Out-of-the-box support for nested fields is one feature Guillaume is particularly satisfied with, especially because of the incredible amount of positive feedback. Sorting, which Meilisearch only implemented in 2021, had a similarly powerful impact for many users.

Multi-tenancy using tenant tokens is another personal favorite. He thinks the implementation is still not there and will certainly be polished in the near future, but it has nevertheless been a huge help for users working with complex applications and sensitive data.

What about the evolution of the product manager’s role?
=======================================================

Guillaume doesn’t truly belong to only one team within Meilisearch. This autonomy allows him to be involved with other teams and build bridges between projects and initiatives.

That said, he spends a considerable amount of time with the engine team. Right now this is good and necessary, but he would like to eventually take a step away from the search engine and look at the broader context of Meilisearch. For example, how can he help the many users of our SDKs and plugins? It’s a difference not so much in the things a product manager does, but in their scope and the potential reach of his actions.

* * *

That was an interesting peek into all the planning that goes inside Meilisearch, wasn’t it? A big thanks to Guillaume for his time. Stay tuned for more interviews with our lovely colleagues. Want to know more about a specific task, team, or internal process? Tell us all about it on our public [Discord](https://discord.gg/meilisearch) server!

Balancing business, technology, and user experience

The release day of Meilisearch v1 has come and gone. [We presented the major changes in our latest version](/blog/whats-new-in-v1-0/)nd [we spoke at length about all the features you get when you use Meilisearch](/blog/v1-enterprise-ready-stable/)oday we give the spotlight to [Guillaume Mourier](/blog/author/gmourier/)ur Product Manager.

Guillaume’s role is strategic in nature, and that comes with the privilege of having a very good idea about Meilisearch’s future, and how we plan to reach our destination.

Planning Meilisearch’s first stable release
===========================================

The process for v1 was a bit different compared to the past. This time, Guillaume tells us, the focus was not on including new features or even fixing major issues, but rather on the stability of the product and its API. He believes developers and businesses must have a predictable and stable product—they need to know they can depend on Meilisearch for their daily work. Our ever growing user-base also pointed towards this need. More and more people have grown to rely on our product, and it is our responsibility to not disappoint them.

Because of that, Guillaume planned 2022 as a year heavily focused on stabilization and performance optimization. To give our users the reliability they needed, we had to stop making changes that required programmers altering their workflows or reworking parts of their application. The first step was revising the API so it remained easy to use while serving as a solid and flexible base for new features. The second was adding more fundamental functionality. And the last, but certainly not the least important, was to find ways of improving performance and stabilizing the command-line interface.

Now these strong foundations have been implemented, Guillaume is very excited to start planning and implementing new features. It is time to move into a new era.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/balanced_rocks_a98f5966b7.jpg)

It’s the little things that matter
==================================

Now v1 is online, Guillaume wants to iron out a longer-term roadmap—there are quite a lot of ideas already, but in Meilisearch’s new development phase we need to be more careful. Users will certainly be more vigilant and demanding as they follow our next steps. 

In terms of new features, Guillaume has his sights on a few quality of life improvements.

First of all, he wants to focus on bringing multi-index search to Meilisearch. This much-requested feature would make it easier to create unified search experiences in applications pooling data from many different indexes. This is also sort of a pet project of his: multi-index search has been in the works for some time and it was with a heavy heart he deprioritized it in 2022. 

Multi-index search will be released in incremental iterations. A first iteration will make it possible to send multiple search queries in a single HTTP call. This lays down the foundation for the following step: to release a new iteration that natively aggregates search results from different indexes into a single list.

Another area ripe for incremental improvements is Meilisearch's faceted search, which could be much simpler and more intuitive. For example, it is not possible today to sort facet values by the number of matched documents or their name. It is also impossible to search among the facet values themselves. Guillaume is enthusiastic about finding solutions to these problems—he assures us both things will soon be possible with Meilisearch.

![](/blog/content/images/2023/02/gestion-planning-cabinet-expertise-comptable.webp

Planning and pacing
===================

As the Product Manager, Guillaume needs to think not only about new features, but about Meilisearch’s development process. He believes our current product development cycle is too short, which means we tend to be trapped in a constant rush, running from release to release without enough time to properly think everything through. 

He’s very excited with the chance releasing v1 gives him: being able to plan things better, trial more features with users for a longer period of time, and reflect more on the valuable feedback our community gives us. Taking the time for all that enables us to start working more efficiently and prepare things much earlier.

What about semantic and AI-powered search?
==========================================

Recently, there has been widespread hype in the field of semantic search and natural language processing. Guillaume says it's an area we're following closely. Though these ideas might be very exciting, it is definitely challenging to provide contextualized and personalized search to end users while maintaining excellent performance and keeping Meilisearch a tool developers love to use. 

In the future, Meilisearch could evolve to a hybrid search service, uniting the best of both worlds. For now, however, we are focused on continuing to build upon the solid foundation we have created with v1.0.

—

We hope that piqued your interest—if so, stay tuned for more information on the future of search! 

  
Remember, you can get started with Meilisearch v1 in just a few minutes—everything works out of the box, no configuration required. Want more? We also have a handy [Quick Start guide on our documentation website](https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/getting_started/quick_start.html).

Planning v1 and beyond

Today we’re sitting down with [Clémentine](https://www.notion.so/Cl-mentine-Urquizar-90214cbb5f1e4fa583546c7ed2be1362), Manager of the Engine Team at Meilisearch, to talk about how the open-source community shaped our company. Clémentine was among the first developers hired by Meilisearch, back in the distant times of 2019. She’s been with us since the very beginning and saw the company go from a pure SaaS model to fully embracing open source.

From SaaS to Open Source
========================

To many familiar with Meilisearch, it might be surprising to hear we initially launched our product as a SaaS. Clémentine explains the change:

_”Back in the day, the engine and the SaaS built around it were buggy, user experience was poor, documentation non-existent, and users required many advanced features from the get-go—they were expected to pay for our product, so of course they wanted a full fledged search engine. In addition to all this, being a paid service meant we didn’t always receive the relevant feedback needed to improve and grow as a company: what worked well, what didn’t, or what could work much better with a tiny bit of adjustment.”_

The founders of Meilisearch quickly realized their business model wasn’t sustainable and decided to do a 180: make Meilisearch open-source.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/Screenshot_2023_01_04_at_11_11_32_92c18bbda3.png)

GitHub chart of contributions to Meilisearch

Clémentine tells us that such a drastic change of direction was equally exciting and frightening. Exciting because the modus operandi was very different from what they’d been doing up until that point. Frightening because they weren’t sure the project was going to survive.

_“I decided to join the company because I had faith in the founders and their ideas. I believed in what they were trying to accomplish and that the people working in Meilisearch were competent enough to make it happen. Seeing things fail at that stage would have been seriously heartbreaking.”_

Working on a now-open-source project, Meilisearch put its focus on growing the project by making it more reliable and performant, and adding various integrations. This meant we wouldn’t generate revenue for a while, and thus that our survival depended on a successful fundraiser. To everyone’s relief, it was a fundraiser the founders did manage to secure.

In the day-to-day reality of development, the change from SaaS to open source wasn’t as difficult, but still very much radical. Clémentine shares the surprise she’d felt when she first saw people actually participating in the project through PRs such as [this](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-php/pull/13) or [this](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-php/pull/43): experienced and humble programmers who enjoyed seeing projects evolve and grow began to contribute. PHP and Rust developers were the first to bring their enthusiasm and support, she recalls.

_“I would never have guessed how much the open-source community would shape Meilisearch, but it was the best possible decision the founders could have taken.”_

A new structure in Meilisearch
==============================

These new and exciting times required the team to rethink itself to ensure a successful shift from SaaS to open source: we had to foster our community, we had to offer good documentation, and the engine itself had to become easier to use. 

Transparency became our focus. There’s nothing better for a company than live feedback: we get to know what is important for our users while still being able to decide how to implement new features in a way that moves Meilisearch in the right direction—the last one is a skill we’ve only learned to master with time. It was paramount to ensure our community was happy with our decision as our growth was (and still is) closely linked to their involvement. 

Since transparency is not the result of a single action but of continued effort, we used the money from our first fundraiser to help us nurture our open-source community. We hired technical writers to create great documentation, developer advocates to improve communication between company and users, and additional programmers to maintain repositories for our growing number of integrations. All of this was necessary to cultivate an ecosystem that made sure we were going in a direction that made sense to our contributors.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/star_history_202314_34fe7a3a6d.png)

Evolution of the number of Meilisearch's GitHub stars

Clémentine’s scope moved to integration and in November 2020 she became manager of the Integrations Team—the first official manager in Meilisearch! Shortly after, she also took on the responsibility of managing the Engine Team. From that point on, Meilisearch went from a setup where “everyone does everything” to real teams with synchronization and dedicated scopes.

She confesses she did not expect to become a manager, even if in hindsight her natural predisposition toward organizing people was clear to the founders:

_“I was a bit surprised, but the more I worked at Meilisearch the more I realized I liked pushing projects and people forward, seeing things growing and becoming the best versions of themselves. I don’t have much time to code anymore—only occasional bug fixes or CI work—but I really have no regrets. In retrospect I can see I wasn’t fully satisfied as a full-time developer. But it took some time to make peace with that idea, and to close that chapter of my life.”_

The future of Meilisearch
=========================

The next step is the long-awaited Meilisearch v.1.0:

_“Our users deserve to be serene when using our search engine. Releasing v1.0, our first major version, is a big and necessary step to show Meilisearch is stable and ready for production.”_

This goes together with the development of a SaaS setup:

_“Meilisearch has grown so much these past few years. Thinking back at what we had in 2019, when we first tried developing a SaaS, and comparing it with the product we have now is amazing—and it’s all thanks to the open-source community. One of our main goals moving forward will be to keep giving back to all our users, even as we begin to dedicate resources to the SaaS solution.”_

In conclusion
=============

Reflecting back on all that was accomplished, Clémentine shares:

_“Meilisearch grew, grows, and will keep on growing thanks to the open-source community. No matter what we build in the future, the open-source community is our biggest strength. We will always need our contributors, and we intend to do our best to keep them in the loop and show our appreciation for their support.”_

Open source became part of our DNA. Its values—asynchronicity, pragmatism, transparency—are also reflected in our company policies and the way we operate internally, from our programmers to our managers, writers, and developer advocates.

Clémentine herself never stopped growing alongside the organization: after starting as an intern, she became a full fledged developer, then moved on to lead the Engine Team. Finally, she’s just recently been promoted to the position of Head of Engineering, overseeing the work of programmers across the company !

We wish to extend a warm thank you to Clémentine for her candor and to the contributors that allowed us to grow and evolve as we did.

How Meilisearch became open-source: a retrospective

Today, we sit down with one of Meilisearch’s Rust developers, [Many](https://twitter.com/ManyTheFish), to talk about  the work he’s been doing with [Charabia](https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia) to improve Meilisearch’s language support. 

A bit of historical context
===========================

Though Many’s first contact with Meilisearch’s language parsing started two years ago, he only began focussing on tokenization around the end of 2021. You might be asking yourself: what is tokenization? Well, Many tells us it is one of the most important steps when indexing documents and, in short, means breaking down search terms into units our engine can process more efficiently. The part of Meilisearch’s engine that takes care of tokenization is called a tokenizer.

Many felt the way we handled content in different languages wasn’t efficient and that, even if Meilisearch already worked very well with languages like English and French, the same could not be said about other language groups. Many explains that a lot of it comes down to the different ways we type in different languages, as well as the various ways in which we make mistakes when writing in them. A typo in Japanese or Chinese, for example, might follow a different logic than a typo in Italian or Portuguese.

A different perspective
=======================

One main issue was immediately clear to Many: it would be impossible for us at Meilisearch to master all the languages in the world and improve our tokenizer alone. Luckily,  the open-source community is a diverse and generous bunch, with people from literally all over the world fluent in more languages we can possibly name. So Many’s focus shifted from directly improving language support to making contributing as simple and painless as possible.

Two main aspects go into improving a language with our tokenizer. First, we can work on **segmentation**, which means understanding where a word starts and where it ends.  
  
_“It appears pretty obvious for English or European speakers: “split on white spaces and you get your words!"; but it becomes harder when you face other types of Languages like Chinese, where there is no explicit separator between characters”_  
  
Second, we can work on **normalization**, which encompasses canonical modifications (upper or lower case), compatible equivalence (recognising the same character under different forms; e.g: ツ and ッ), and transliteration (transposing from one alphabet to the other, e.g.: Cyrillic into Latin)—we avoid this last one  as much as possible because it often results in information loss.

_“Here it’s the same, each Language has its specificities and we have to adapt the normalization for each Language. Take the case of capitalization: we have two versions of each Latin character, a capitalized version, and a lowercased version, but this specificity doesn’t exist for all Language in the world!”_

Many’s job, then, is less about writing a lot of code, and more about researching and understanding the ins and outs of a particular language so he can judge whether a contribution is going to work well with Meilisearch.  
He explains: 

_“This all boils down to the contrast between traditional translation and a field called information research (IR). Whereas translation focuses on preserving meaning, IR can afford to be less strict and account for mistakes such as misspelled words. Focussing on IR over translation allows us to offer search options that might be irrelevant in translation work.”_ 

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/Word_explanation_0d5b8b3fac.png)

If a user typed “mais,” they would see results for both  “but” and “corn” because Meilisearch  takes into account that a user might have forgotten or simply did not feel like using the appropriate accent when typing.

So, whenever we wish to improve support for a language, it’s not only about having the right language experts contributing to our project. It also involves an enormous investment of research time on Many’s side, so he can determine whether a change to the tokenization process of a specific language is going to return more relevant search results.

What languages have we worked on so far?
========================================

As you might have read on our [blog post about v0.29 release](/blog/whats-new-in-v0-29/)n the past two months we’ve done extensive work on improving our support for Thai. This is a feature we’re very proud of and which was only possible thanks to the open-source community.  There’s a lot of room for improvement, though: Thai segmentation in Meilisearch is great, but normalization still requires work.

We also recently improved Meilisearch’s Hebrew normalisation. Before that, we made good advances on  Japanese segmentation, but want to polish Japanese normalization to better account for things like the differences between  ツ and ッ,or ダメ and だめ.

Right now, Many is very interested in Chinese tokenization, a language that comes with  its own set of challenges. For example, Chinese comes with a number of variants depending on the location where it’s spoken: Mandarin, mainland China’s various regional uses, and Cantonese, to name just a few. Though all these variations share mostly the same characters and meanings, they are not always used in the same way, can correspond to different sounds, and thus aren’t typed by everyone in the same fashion—all of which makes it really tricky when it comes to IR. At this point, we’re unable to have competing normalizations, which led us to base normalization on the dialect with the biggest number of users.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/rs7352_thinkstockphotos_493800479_low_1_45c0b2cea2.jpg)

Future ambitions
================

Accommodating competing normalizations for the same language (the tolerance of multiple variants of a language) is one of Many’s top priorities right now. 

He also feels the number of languages we support is too low, so an important step is devising strategies to get more contributors involved. You might ask: what languages Many wants to focus next? He tells us it’s a complex choice: he needs to balance his own personal preferences, the languages our contributors bring forward, as well as a strategic choice based on the number of speakers of a language.

Not all languages are equal, he explains. Some are easier to handle: agglutinative languages like Turkish, for example, could be next! _“However, if a contributor would like to push forward their language, we are happy to consider their suggestion and reprioritize,”_ assures Many.

Next on the list: parsing accents, diacritics, and other non-spacing marks. Remember our “maïs” and “mais” examples earlier? At this point, the tokenizer simply remove accents, but some users may want to take these diacritics into account. Accomplishing this isn’t technically very complex, according to Many: in short, it requires establishing two distinct normalization processes—one loose (which overlooks accents) and one strict (which doesn’t ignore anything). The challenge is integrating them without slowing down the search terribly or doubling the size of the index.

How can I contribute?
=====================

Want to help? You can contribute in various ways, many of which have little to do with coding:

*   Upvote a [discussion](https://github.com/meilisearch/product/discussions): this helps Many prioritize a specific topic or language
*   Create an [issue](https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia/issues) on GitHub explaining language-related problems you experience:  for example, if you notice Meilisearch is returning erroneous results when you search for a specific word or expression
*   Know a language like the back of your hand? We’d [love to hear](https://github.com/meilisearch/product/discussions) your thoughts on challenges and possible solutions when creating segmenters and normalizers
*   [Propose tokenization libraries](https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia/issues): it’s very helpful to know about existing tools you like and think works very well for a given language
*   [Submit a PR](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/pulls) solving a problem you experienced when using Meilisearch with a specific language. Tip: clearly explaining the problem and the solution in the PR itself or in a [GitHub issue](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/issues) definitely increases the chances of getting your contribution accepted 

If you’re participating in `Hacktoberfest` right now, most of the [issues listed on Charabia’s repository](https://github.com/meilisearch/charabia/issues) are eligible for the event! PRs without a corresponding issue are also welcomed—we’ll be happy to tag it as “hacktoberfest approved” if your contribution is accepted.

Last but not least: our work wouldn’t be possible without the fantastic input we receive from the community. Thank you so much for all your effort and generosity!

Improving Meilisearch’s language support

With Hacktoberfest in full swing, contributors and maintainers alike are busier than ever. But this month is not only about writing code and opening PRs—it is also about connecting with people and becoming part of a community. We would like to take this time to share a Hacktoberfest story that’s very dear to us. 

Meet [Bruno Casali](https://meilisearch.notion.site/Bruno-Casali-49a83569f1e54ba1b3276e257ff4d165), Meilisearch’s very own Integrations Team Lead! Bruno was scouted last year following his participation in Hacktoberfest, going from occasional external contributor to a key Meilisearch employee. He kindly agreed to share his thoughts and experience with us.

![Portrait of Bruno Casali](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/rsz_1rsz_05_1_c1b1d3380e.jpg)

Contributing to Hacktoberfest
=============================

First of all, it’s important to know last year wasn’t Bruno’s first rodeo. 

_“I have participated in Hacktoberfest since 2016 (the second year). I have always been that developer who tries to find good repositories to contribute to, and suddenly, with Hacktoberfest, I could be rewarded in some way for doing that. I immediately saw it as an opportunity to meet people from different countries making contributions to open-source and found out it was also a way for me to validate my programming knowledge.”_

We were curious to hear about what made Hacktoberfest such a peculiar time of the year for the participants. He explains to us that the atmosphere is very different, for both maintainers and participants, who are 100% focused on their objectives:

_“You can expect a lot of activity in your repositories (sometimes even 20x more than usual) and meeting people from around the world. Big projects receive even more attention. It’s a good time to show up and do great things: not only can you learn a lot, but maybe the people you’re collaborating with can see you as a potential employee.”_ 

When it came to his favourite part of Hacktoberfest, Bruno was emphatic: it was all about connecting with the community. _“I enjoyed Hacktoberfest for many reasons. It was a time to meet new people (mostly people from outside of my native country) and show I'm a good developer. It was also an opportunity to create a portfolio for my work.”_

Communication is not always easy nor smooth, though: 

_“Unfortunately, some maintainers neglect communicating with contributors. Sometimes honest attempts at solving an issue are completely ignored and this represents for me the worst possible thing. Because I, as a contributor, am not paid for that work. I invested my time and I expect something in exchange, even if it is just a ‘hey, you did it wrong’ so I can learn from that experience. And of course I don’t get that if the maintainers just disappear.”_ 

Which is a very good reminder for us maintainers to respect the time and energy invested into our projects by Hacktoberfest participants.

![Hacktoberfest x Meilisearch crossover logo](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/Frame_9_4389751892.png)

From contributor to maintainer
==============================

We were of course interested in knowing how Bruno found Meilisearch and why he decided to contribute:

_“Hacktoberfest 2021 was the first time I heard about Meilisearch. I was looking for projects offering extra swag for contributors and found Meilisearch in a [random list](https://hacktoberfestswaglist.com/list/#meilisearch) out there. I checked if they had any repositories I could contribute to and found the [Ruby](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-ruby) and [Ruby on Rails](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-rails) integration repos.”_

A lot of repositories take part in Hacktoberfest, so we wondered: how was working with the Meilisearch team when compared to other companies?

_“The first contact was amazing! The Integrations Team answered quickly, so it made me want to keep contributing, because I felt I was part of the project, that Meilisearch was a place where I could actively make a difference. It was a very positive experience and I could feel that Meilisearch was different.”_

This eventually led to an unexpected (but very pleasant) surprise:

_“Then, 10 days after my first contribution, [Morgane Neff](https://meilisearch.notion.site/Morgane-Neff-ce9c8e7d86ab46a6bdd64b3164bbec25), Meilisearch’s HR Manager, reached out to me with a job offer. I was quite surprised about that, because I've never had that kind of response to one of my contributions before, I felt amazing.”_

One year later, we asked Bruno to reminisce on his transition and if the change from participant to employee was an easy one.

_“I maintain my own open-source projects, so in some aspects the transition was easy. Something I was not used to was dealing with interpersonal conflicts during code reviews. Other situations can be a bit awkward, like external users complaining about something in our repositories. Also, my role at Meilisearch is to manage the Integrations Team, which means I'm responsible for 30+ repositories with multiple tech stacks. Keeping on top of each one of them requires a lot of context-switching, which can be difficult.”_

Open-source ♥️ 
===============

In the end, Bruno says, the secret to a great Hacktoberfest experience is very simple:

_“Love the process of contributing to open-source, love the idea of meeting people who can teach you, love the idea of teaching others through your own contributions. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by doing that._

_“And, if you want to work for an open-source company, you can see your contributions as a coding test. Do your best, be kind with the maintainers—rinse and repeat 😊”_

We are super grateful to Bruno for sharing his experience! We hope his story can motivate anyone out there wondering whether they should get involved in open-source development. If you wish to contribute to Meilisearch during Hacktoberfest and get some of our exclusive swag, find all our Hacktoberfest eligible issues on [Github](https://github.com/search?q=org%3Ameilisearch+label%3Ahacktoberfest&state=open&type=Issues) and check out our dedicated #[hacktoberfest](https://meilicommunity.slack.com/archives/C02G1H43J2X) channel on Slack.

And again, to all Hacktoberfest participants: good luck and keep up the great work!

  
  
  

=========

Meilisearch latest news and company updates

Balancing business, technology, and user experience

Planning v1 and beyond

How Meilisearch became open-source: a retrospective

Improving Meilisearch’s language support

Hacktoberfest stories: from contributor to manager