---
title: Andreas Session
image: https://content.vespa.ai/hubfs/6-4.png
---

[![VespaAI-logo-dark-RGB](https://content.vespa.ai/hs-fs/hubfs/VespaAI-logo-dark-RGB.png?width=7465&height=1467&name=VespaAI-logo-dark-RGB.png "VespaAI-logo-dark-RGB")](https://vespa.ai)

# Vespa.ai Live: Speaker and Session Details

[Return to Program Overview](https://content.vespa.ai/vespa-live?hsLang=en)

[Get Tickets](https://www.tickettailor.com/events/vespaaias/2158210)

Speaker Details

## Andreas Eriksen

### Principal Software Engineer, Vespa.ai

Andreas has worked at Vespa for 15 years, doing product development, SRE/oncall, sales engineering, advent calendars, and whatever else needs doing. Along the way he's picked up a little bit of Information Retrieval trivia, and further developed his very strange sense of humor.

![linkedin](https://content.vespa.ai/hs-fs/hubfs/linkedin.png?width=25&height=25&name=linkedin.png)**[Connect](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreer/)**

![6-3](https://content.vespa.ai/hs-fs/hubfs/6-3.png?width=480&height=480&name=6-3.png "6-3")

Talk Details

## PROBLEM-1 was titled "help": Stories from the Trenches

Marlon and Andreas — two Vespa engineers who have variously broken, debugged, and apologised for Vespa in production — will walk you through what happens when:

- A search company's public search demo gets garbage-collected by S3 because the demo was so stable nothing had changed in 180 days,
- A customer asks Vespa for ten specific document IDs and reliably gets four back (eight engineers, nine hours, the fix is one query parameter),
- A single grouping query with an empty array crashes every search node simultaneously, and
- A customer feeds 25 KB of text containing 11,167 Unicode replacement characters — text so broken our indexer correctly decided it must be binary.

Each story is short, technical, and at our own expense. The through-line: distributed systems where some invariants are local-only, "defensive" code that turned out not to be, optimisations that quietly hide your blast radius — and a healthy reminder that even the people who write search can't always find their own documentation.

**Andreas Eriksen, Vespa.ai & Marlon Saglia, Vespa.ai**

## Join us at Vespa.ai Live

[Get Tickets](https://www.tickettailor.com/events/vespaaias/2158210)[Return to Program Overview](https://content.vespa.ai/vespa-live?hsLang=en)

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