Kodsnack 536 - I choose computer science, with Michele Riva

<p>Recorded at the <a href="https://oredev.org/">Øredev</a> 2022 developer conference, Fredrik chats with <a href="https://www.micheleriva.it/">Michele Riva</a> about writing a full-text search engine, maintaining 8% of all Node modules, going to one conference per week, refactoring, the value of a good algorithm, and a lot more.</p> <p>Michele highly recommends writing a full-text search engine. He created <a href="https://github.com/oramasearch/orama">Lyra</a> - later renamed Orama, and encourages writing your own in order to demystify subjects. Since the podcast was recorded, Michele has left his then employer <a href="https://www.nearform.com/">Nearform</a> and founded <a href="https://oramasearch.com/">Oramasearch</a> to focus on the search engine full time.</p> <p>We also discuss working for product companies versus consulting, versus open source. It&rsquo;s more about differences between companies than anything else. Open source teaches you deal with more and more different people. Writing code is never just writing code.</p> <p>Should we worry about taking on too many dependencies? Michele is in favour of not fearing dependencies, but ensuring you understand how things important parts for your application work.</p> <p>Writing books is never convenient, but it can open many doors.</p> <p>When it comes to learning, there are areas where a whole level of tutorials are missing - where there is only really surface-level tutorial and perhaps deep papers, but nothing in between. Michele works quite a bit on bridging such gaps through <a href="https://www.micheleriva.it/talks">his presentations</a>.</p> <p>Thank you <a href="http://www.cloudnet.se">Cloudnet</a> for sponsoring our <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server">VPS</a>!</p> <p>Comments, questions or tips? We are <a href="https://www.twitter.com/kodsnack">@kodsnack</a>, <a href="https://www.twitter.com/tobiashieta">@tobiashieta</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/oferlund">@oferlund</a> and <a href="https://www.twitter.com/bjoreman">@bjoreman</a> on Twitter, have a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/kodsnack">page on Facebook</a> and can be emailed at <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.</p> <p>If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/se/podcast/kodsnack/id561631498?l=en">review in iTunes</a>! You can also support the podcast by <a href="https://ko-fi.com/kodsnack" rel="payment">buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi</a>.</p> <h2 id="links">Links</h2> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.micheleriva.it/">Michele</a></li> <li>Michele&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMs4Ypo-CIQ">Øredev</a> 2023 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAk4WsGDH00">presentations</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.nearform.com/">Nearform</a></li> <li><a href="https://tc39.es/">TC39</a> - the committee which evolves Javascript as a language</li> <li><a href="https://nodeland.dev/">Matteo Collina</a> - worked at Nearform, works with the Node technical steering committee</li> <li><a href="https://github.com/oramasearch/orama">Lyra</a> - the full-text search engine - has been renamed Orama</li> <li><a href="https://lucene.apache.org/">Lucene</a></li> <li><a href="https://solr.apache.org/">Solr</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch">Elasticsearch</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_tree">Radix tree</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie">Prefix tree</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index">Inverted index</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtworks">Thoughtworks</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company">McKinsey</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Stenberg">Daniel Stenberg</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURL">Curl</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deno_%28software%29">Deno</a></li> <li><a href="https://expressjs.com/">Express</a></li> <li><a href="https://fastify.dev/">Fastify</a></li> <li><a href="https://vercel.com/blog/turbopack">Turbopack</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sB2E1XnzOY">Turborepo</a> from Vercel</li> <li><a href="https://vercel.com/">Vercel</a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/creationix/fastqueue">Fast queue</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_refactoring">Refactoring</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMs4Ypo-CIQ">Michele&rsquo;s refactoring talk</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.packtpub.com/product/real-world-nextjs/9781801073493">Real-world Next.js</a> - Michele&rsquo;s book</li> <li><a href="https://nextjs.org/">Next.js</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy">Multitenancy</a></li> <li><a href="https://create-react-app.dev/">Create React app</a></li> <li><a href="https://v2.nuxt.com/">Nuxt</a></li> <li><a href="https://vuejs.org/">Vue</a></li> <li><a href="https://kit.svelte.dev/">Sveltekit</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf">TF-IDF</a> - &ldquo;term frequency–inverse document frequency&rdquo;</li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity">Cosine similarity</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42sMkbGLlh4">Michele&rsquo;s talk on building Lyra</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CESKgdNiKJw">Explaining distributed systems like I&rsquo;m five</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAk4WsGDH00">Are all programming languages in English?</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_Dimension_%28software%29">4th dimension</a></li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog">Prolog</a></li> <li><a href="http://velato.net/">Velato</a> - programming language using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI">MIDI</a> files as source code</li> </ul> <h2 id="titles">Titles</h2> <ul> <li>For foreign people, it&rsquo;s Mitch</li> <li>That kind of maintenance</li> <li>A very particular company</li> <li>A culture around open source software</li> <li>Now part of the 8%</li> <li>Nothing more than a radix tree</li> <li>One simple and common API</li> <li>Multiple ways of doing consultancy</li> <li>What you&rsquo;re doing is hidden</li> <li>You can&rsquo;t expect to change people</li> <li>A problem we definitely created ourselves</li> <li>Math or magic</li> <li>Writing books is never convenient</li> <li>Good for 90% of the use cases</li> <li>(When I can choose,) I choose computer science</li> </ul>