archipylago #14 - November 2025 at Knowit

Welcome to our November meetup at Knowit!

Registration opens 30.10. at 12.00

18.00 Doors open
18.15 Niklas Nevalainen: Is keyword search dead?
18.50 Break
19.15 Stephen Sullivan: States, Events, Action!
19.45 Socialising
20.30 Post-meetup discussions at Cosmic Comic Cafe

Talks

Niklas Nevalainen: Is keyword search dead?

Search powers many of the AI systems built today yet it's often treated as an afterthought. In this talk I'll break down how keyword and vector searches differ, and show how these perform in an Elasticsearch demo. We'll also take a look at what happens when you mix the two. This talk is about inverted indices, relevance, signals, hobbits, and perhaps some learnings as well.

Stephen Sullivan: States, Events, Action!

An example of building a "event driven finite state machine" in Python. We'll cover:

1. Why implementing a soluton from an existing pattern can be a good idea

2. The finite state machine as a pattern for bringing order to chaos

3. A walkthrough of coding one in Python.

A practical talk aimed at both early career developers and those who like arguing about abstractions.