Kodsnack 536 - I choose computer science, with Michele Riva

Recorded at the Øredev 2022 developer conference, Fredrik chats with Michele Riva 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.

Michele highly recommends writing a full-text search engine. He created Lyra- later renamed Orama, and encourages writing your own in order to demystify subjects. Since the podcast was recorded, Michele has left his then employer Nearform and founded Oramasearch to focus on the search engine full time.

We also discuss working for product companies versus consulting, versus open source. It’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.

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.

Writing books is never convenient, but it can open many doors.

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 his presentations.

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Links

• Michele
• Michele’s Øredev 2023 presentations
• Nearform
• TC39 - the committee which evolves Javascript as a language
• Matteo Collina - worked at Nearform, works with the Node technical steering committee
• Lyra - the full-text search engine - has been renamed Orama
• Lucene
• Solr
• Elasticsearch
• Radix tree
• Prefix tree
• Inverted index
• Thoughtworks
• McKinsey
• Daniel Stenberg
• Curl
• Deno
• Express
• Fastify
• Turbopack
• Turborepo from Vercel
• Vercel
• Fast queue
• Refactoring
• Michele’s refactoring talk
• Real-world Next.js - Michele’s book
• Next.js
• Multitenancy
• Create React app
• Nuxt
• Vue
• Sveltekit
• TF-IDF - “term frequency–inverse document frequency”
• Cosine similarity
• Michele’s talk on building Lyra
• Explaining distributed systems like I’m five
• Are all programming languages in English?
• 4th dimension
• Prolog
• Velato - programming language using MIDI files as source code

Titles

• For foreign people, it’s Mitch
• That kind of maintenance
• A very particular company
• A culture around open source software
• Now part of the 8%
• Nothing more than a radix tree
• One simple and common API
• Multiple ways of doing consultancy
• What you’re doing is hidden
• You can’t expect to change people
• A problem we definitely created ourselves
• Math or magic
• Writing books is never convenient
• Good for 90% of the use cases
• (When I can choose,) I choose computer science