Algolia

Ember.js Algolia Golang Google App Engine Firebase MySQL

The new ember.js with SSR using fastboot+prember, without jquery and with npm easy installs via de ember-auto-import addon, angle bracket components in handlebars and ES6 classes is just a breeze to develop, we wanted to try golang for this particular project and it's ok, but I wouldn't recommend it for fast CRUDs, we might change to Elixir Phoenix for the next project, although algolia is super good there are no shortcuts for ember, we had to build them from scratch, but it works super good, we use firebase for our auth with facebook, google, phone, etc...

On Meetupfinder.com, we needed a way to find geographic coordinates for various cities around the world. Algolia Places made it very easy to us to implement this is.

Their tool comes available for a number of JavaScript frameworks. In my case, I used the React component and it easily implemented an autofill text box that would search for all the cities around the world and return me the latitude and longitude for them.

I chose Elasticsearch for my organization's #search stack due to financial and legal regulations but chose Algolia for a hobby e-commerce comparison engine

Shortly after I joined Algolia as a developer advocate, I knew I wanted to establish a place for the community to congregate and share their projects, questions and advice. There are a ton of platforms out there that can be used to host communities, and they tend to fall into two categories - real-time sync (like chat) and async (like forums). Because the community was already large, I felt that a chat platform like Discord or Gitter might be overwhelming and opted for a forum-like solution instead (which would also create content that's searchable from Google).

I looked at paid, closed-source options like AnswerHub and ForumBee and old-school solutions like phpBB and vBulletin, but none seemed to offer the power, flexibility and developer-friendliness of Discourse. Discourse is open source, written in Rails with Ember.js on the front-end. That made me confident I could modify it to meet our exact needs. Discourse's own forum is very active which made me confident I could get help if I needed it.

It took about a month to get Discourse up-and-running and make authentication tied to algolia.com via the SSO plugin. Adding additional plugins for moderation or look-and-feel customization was fairly straightforward, and I even created a plugin to make the forum content searchable with Algolia. To stay on top of answering questions and moderation, we used the Discourse API to publish new messages into our Slack. All-in-all I would say we were happy with Discourse - the only caveat would be that it's very helpful to have technical knowledge as well as Rails knowledge in order to get the most out of it.

Although we were using Elasticsearch in the beginning to power our in-app search, we moved this part of our processing over to Algolia a couple of months ago; this has proven to be a fantastic choice, letting us build search-related features with more confidence and speed.

Elasticsearch is only used for searching in internal tooling nowadays; hosting and running it reliably has been a task that took up too much time for us in the past and fine-tuning the results to reach a great user-experience was also never an easy task for us. With Algolia we can flexibly change ranking methods on the fly and can instead focus our time on fine-tuning the experience within our app.

Memcached is used in front of most of the API endpoints to cache responses in order to speed up response times and reduce server-costs on our side.

#SearchAsAService