iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Hot take for spooky season: "AI Search" for most companies means "we added embeddings." Embeddings don't learn from clicks. They don't test ranking changes. They don't get better next week. Same label. Different machine. 🎃

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

So we asked Jev if people should use Relevan for their Agentic search and the answer was a resounding yes! Then we tried to do some real work with and and were super happy with the outcome. Check out our blog (which links our open source eval repo) for the methodology: relevan.dev/blog/decisio...

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I was today years old when I learned YAML was renamed from "Yet Another Markup Language" to -> "YAML Ain't Markup Language"

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Relevan is officially live! The beta is capped so you may get added to the wait list as you login. We are slowly letting people onto the platform. If you're interested in becoming a design partner we still have a few slots open so reach out! Join at relevan.dev

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Each company has different data, language, users and goals. Most platforms give everyone the same tools. Relevan is building a relevance loop per customer: measure quality, learn signals, test improvements and tune to their use case. Beta tomorrow: relevan.dev

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Agent-first search isn’t a chatbot bolted onto an old console. Relevan uses LLM-driven onboarding. Bring any agent, point it to our LLMs.txt, OpenAPI spec, and per-index skills, then let it configure, ingest, and search. Beta opens Wednesday: relevan.dev

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Relevan wouldn’t exist without open source. We’re built on @opensearch.org and @valkeyio.bsky.social but open source shouldn’t be a one-way transaction. We're excited to contribute code, knowledge, and improvements back. Join the beta @ relevan.dev

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Agents break the old “query then click” feedback loop. They branch, refine, and use results without clicking. We’re working on that problem in the open through the UBI standard: github.com/o19s/ubi/issue

The orange number four on a black background.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Relevan launches its beta Wednesday, August 19. We’re building search for a world where agents configure it, query it, and help improve it. No more need for a dedicated search engineer. Join the waitlist: relevan.dev (click Join Beta) #AgenticSearch #AISearch

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I have come to a newfound hatred of slacks account system. I hated it before but now that Google allowed me to change my email handle slack seems to be the only place that is freaking out. Despite claiming to support OAuth slack requires me to set a password to change the email on my account...

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

"who's that?" moment when someone asked me what I thought about Glean and Coveo Should I drop a dis track?

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Another day. Another person asking, can't we just replace GitHub search with Azure AI search. no.. you cannot... 🎤

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I hate poking the GitHub commits search cluster. That thing is a behemoth and any mess up means probably a month or more of cleanup jobs. That said it needs a lot of work since it's gotten so large. We're doing some much needed segment merge work.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Wow today's just the day, first the DNC and now I got my first live lead. Can't wait to see what happens with the remaining 4 days this week 😆

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Dang got my first Do Not Contact for my startup. Gotta have pretty tick skin for these types of things. I believe theres a world for better search! Just need to find the people who are aligned with the mission. :D

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Prospecting for my startup is eating my soul alive. I got pretty thick skin but not hearing back after all the outreach I have done is killing me. For every 1 outreach I do I have like 7 that I disqualify. I mean we are going for a niche but I didn't realize ti was that niche.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

This is definitely the best photo of me from Haystack. For context, I am keeled over as a pain response to someone simplifying my career to flipping on a switch 😆

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

How do you determine what users want to see at internet scale? We ask Tito Director of Product Management at @yahoo.bsky.social on this next episode of For the Sake of Search! #SearchRelevance #Ecommerce #Search youtu.be/BarHKGXknXA

youtu.be

Understanding users at internet scale with Tito Sierra

YouTube video by Relevan-Dev

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

A watched website never breaks. Literally had my marketing site crash twice yesterday for two different people. Loading it up to debug today? NUFING sat there for 15 min like a dummie waiting for it to break.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

I just got cup-jacked at Starbucks. The barista accidentally put some one else's drink into my cup and handed it out. Instead of realizing: hey... this isn't a normal Starbucks cup... and it doesn't have a lid... they person just took it. 🤪

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Why do editors, devrel, and the like feel the need to make so many asinine edits to my blogs? Like you changed "With search being" -> "Given search is" Is it more clear? Idk It just rubs me wrong when I've gone through these changes 3 times with each subsequent editor changing the voice.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

I am 2 months into building my saltwater aquarium tracker tanki.dev and sent a newsletter out asking for feedback. And my users showed up! #1 bit of feedback? "Make auth sessions longer" - people who track aquariums typically do so only once per week and auth logged out after 7 days.

tanki.dev

Tanki

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Me logging into outlook this morning 🥴 this is not the land of milk and honey anymore.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

GitHub is going for the other four nines of availability. 9.9999% available.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

WELL. That was not the result I was expecting

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Not me about to take GitHub down for the second time today.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

I am doing my best to resist building an operator for Elasticsearch. I dont think I can for much longer though. We need a stable way to automatically change cluster settings. Rolling upgrades? Reduce merge pressure and increase shard move speed. Low QPS times? Lets bump up merge concurrency.

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Reposted by David Tippett

Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 18/02/2026

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅 (BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

Book cover of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition". It has a similar wild boar on the cover as the first edition, but it uses O'Reilly's new cover design, and the boar is now slightly colourised.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Dang. My Compute blade project is literally pandoras box. I initially got a bunch of the Uptime Compute blades to run an OpenSearch cluster. After months of waiting I get the blades in, go to start up OpenSearch and BOOM. Craps out because the Amazon Linux containers can't run on ARMv7. 🧵

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

New favorite move. Introduce drama for no reason. Example: I got my wife ice cream. Before handing it to her I assured her no blood was spilled getting her ice cream. The concern that followed was priceless.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Me ships a really cool update that makes issues and prs pages faster. GitHub:

A picture of the github.com status page showing issues with Pull Requests, Notifications, Copilot, and so forth.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

I just realized my understanding of the Elasticsearch/OpenSearch refresh + translog operations was INCORRECT. I'd always had the mental model that refresh or translog flush would write segments. That's partially true...

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Now with copilot instead of writing just a few hundred lines of bad code a week I can scale to TENS OF THOUSANDS of lines of bad code a week.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

The amount of logistical things needed to build a startup is so frustrating. I don’t want to build a company I want to ship code that helps people. Today I: - created a bank account - migrated emails - mailed so compliance documents

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Okay, so not only did I do a thing with Tanki I am actually starting a serious company: relevan.dev We're building the future of relevancy based search. We're pre-launch (despite me launching this technically here). But we want to talk to small e-commerce businesses about their search problems.

relevan.dev

Relevan · Yet Another Search Site

Relevan — Relevancy as a Service

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Got bored… made an app this weekend to help me track my aquarium tanki.dev In case anyone else with a #reeftank wants a free place to track parameters over time 👀

tanki.dev

Tanki

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Not going to lie so much engineering work is getting replaced by AI. It’s shocking but l’m starting to see a world where engineers write less code and do a lot more product + architecture work. You very much still need someone with expertise at the wheel.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

three things people mean when they say they’re working on a startup: - side project that you’re “working on” and “has potential” - you’ve spent all your time building the perfect c-corp, landing page, and name… - and then there’s actually building a startup

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

I just had ChatGPT respond to my question with an OpenSearch diagram that I was the author of.. Is this what it means to be full circle?

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Finally, wrapping up a big PR. Everything's working time to refactor a few bits and bobs anddddd... broken... why broken 😞

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Nothing like provisioning a whole ~100 node cluster just to realized the attached disks aren't large enough 😮‍💨 This is what I get for not checking my SKU's more closely 😭

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

I visited X-Mans site and immediately had to leave. 😭 Someone was trying to work out why lower income people would spend more money on lower quality food than he has 😐 It’s not like the want to but they don’t have the time to: - plan meals - shop for healthy food - cook - clean afterwards

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Has anyone in my feed done tuning with vLLM caches? I’ve just used the same prompt with two very different intents and there was a lot of carry over between the two. Just wondering if there are some knobs for tuning here

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

My six year old to my wife: Mommy… I can’t sleep and I don’t think square breathing is going to help….. 🤣 I mean I can’t say that I haven’t taught her well

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

Jokes on Corey, I fetch a tarball of my passwords using a public endpoint I have running outta my house.

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Reposted by David Tippett

Nick Zadrozny @nz.omc.io · 07/11/2025

Hello world! I'm putting together a series of talks and team trainings on Nix and NixOS. (Two is a series, right?) There's a lot to narrow down. So I would love to know: if you're Nix-curious, what questions do you have, or frustrations have you experienced?

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

I'm hoping to reach the million miler club this year... that is with Lines of Code removed from GitHub. So many places where we've got just orphaned code.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

Things you may not realize. It can take a literal month or more to ship a blog in a company like AWS or GitHub. It's easily weeks of editorial reviews. If you're announcing something or talking about best practices it can easily go into the several months range.

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David Tippett @taidesu.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Going to make a “we’re migrating to azure” variant. Too soon?

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