Unlocking success: Insider tips from an Elastic Gold Contributor with Jeevanandham Selvaraj

Jeevanandham Selvaraj (Jeeva) is one of the Gold Contributors for the 2025 cycle. He has about 10 years of experience in IT, out of which 7+ years in Elastic and the ELK Stack. He possesses extensive expertise in establishing observability systems and enterprise search systems using the ELK Stack. He began his career as a help desk analyst and transitioned to technical support, infrastructure (server) support, and ultimately, to an Elastic developer. Additionally, he was recognized as a Bronze Contributor prior to achieving the Gold recognition this year. Get to know more about his journey, and learn how you could also become an Elastic Gold Contributor.

I came to know about the Elastic Contributor Program by the end of 2022 through my dear friend Raja Guntupalli. Being a person who loves Elastic as a product and as a company, I was immediately tempted to start contributing. Initially, I went through the rating systems, categories, awards and rewards, and the FAQs in detail. Then, I started by writing technical articles explaining the issues that I had faced in the past and how I resolved each one of them. When people kept reading my articles and commenting on how it helped them fix their issues, I got interested in contributing more and more articles. That’s how I ended up as a regular contributor for Elastic

I have always told myself that if I am providing any contributions and if the common public is going to read it, I should always make sure that it is 100% error-free. This made me go through each of the topics a lot of times before writing and proofread each of the submissions several times as well. By writing the “Decoding Elasticsearch Query DSL” series, I was able to learn a lot about the language myself since I was going through each of the query types several times before writing. This helped me in my professional career a lot of times. Plus, boasting a Gold Contributor badge in your profile or the resume always has its own perks and provides a lasting first impression.

Out of several articles that I have submitted, I am very proud of the “Decoding Elasticsearch Query DSL” series, which I started by giving an introduction to the language then progressively kept increasing the complexity of the queries I was explaining. Till date, I can see that a lot of people are reading all of these articles, and it makes me happy to learn that it helped them in some capacity at least.

I won’t exactly say that I had strategies. But not plagiarizing things let all my technical contributions get approved without any issues. I also concentrated on submitting technical articles on all the areas available, which kept giving me some more bonus points. Plus, constantly reviewing the submissions from other people played a big role. Even if you are getting just 0.2 points per review, it will keep coming every time you approve/decline an article and by the end of the year, it will have compounded to a very big number. More than points, you will be able to understand what/how other people are contributing and how you can better your own contributions based on that, and there is always the nice feeling of helping someone’s work get published.

If you are going to write technical articles, always write the issues that you have faced in the past for which you had to spend a lot of time to fix. Your article may be able to help to fix someone’s same issue without having to spend the same time as you. This also applies to the features and pipelines you have developed. It's not just about putting in some effort for the ECP. It’s also about how you can help a lot of newcomers coming into the ELK Stack as a technology by using ECP as a platform and about the personal satisfaction you can get from that. Apart from that, being a contributor has its own perks and advantages. For example, I have been delaying to complete my Elastic certifications, but for the Gold Contributor level, I was given free Elastic courses, free mock practice attempts, and free certification exam vouchers. So, ECP helps you by helping others.

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