Last Thursday we officially kicked off the Washington DC OpenSearch User Group at Carahsoft. We had 21 people join us for the first event, which exceeded our expectations for the kickoff. 
It was great to see the room full of people ready to talk search, compliance/security, and OSD development.
The Technical Deep Dive Carlo Viqueira and Khai Nguyen from Qmulos gave a talk titled “Hacking the Stack: Using OpenSearch Dashboards as an Application Framework.” They did a great job showing how they are pushing Dashboards beyond just simple visualizations to build actual software on top of OpenSearch Dashboards. It was a technical session that clearly hit home, judging by all the engagement from the crowd!
Special Guests It was also great to have Eric Pugh, the OpenSearch Ambassador, make the trip into town for the kickoff. Having him there to share his perspective on the OpenSearch roadmap, chime in on questions from the audience, and chat with people during the networking portion was a big win for the group.
Community and Swag We had plenty of pizza and got to hand out awesome OpenSearch shirts. A huge thank you to @kris for getting us the swag and for fueling the group!
Looking ahead The momentum is already building for the next event. We have our next speaker lined up and we will be sharing those details soon. If you want to make sure you get the invite, join our group over on Meetup.
You can find us here: https://www.meetup.com/opensearch-project-washington-dc/
Huge thanks to the OpenSearch Project, the Linux Foundation, and Carahsoft for the support in getting this group off the ground.
See you at the next one!