Writing backend code has always been my preference because it allows more structured code, since backend often means Java in my industry, the web. On the other hand frontend coding has always been a pain because of the mess. Javascript may be the culprit, but probably more because it allows to be messy more than being messy itself. Then one day I tested Angular (the v1) and I had the wow effect: first time I felt like an engineer writing Javascript code. Then appeared React: awesome, about same idea but just a library not a full framework. Our team at Scoop.it adopted it and embraced it.

We embraced it so much that we felt the pain in writing big React pages. Raw React doesn’t scale well. People already faced this scalability issue. They came with the idea of Flux (thank you people at Facebook to have shared it with us).

While reading about Flux I started designing a way of managing the state. Later some smart guys of our team dived and fell in love of Redux, an open source implementation of Flux. I learned from them and I made improvement to my design. Here is the story.

Lately I saw a lot of excitement around writing asynchronous code, non blocking, lock free, etc… This is good as we are moving towards more parallelized/concurrent softwares and libraries. There are nice performance improvements ahead. But I fear that we are going into having code hard to understand and therefore to debug.

Setting up a search engine in one thing, but to make it actually work, in the human sense, is another story. Having a search which basically does a grep on all your content is the bare minimum you can do, but what makes Google awesome is that when you search something, you find quickly good content. When you search something, you should find good results, and the good results first. Here some of the things we did to make the Scoop.it search looks good.

As soon as you start having a good amount of data, browsing them is not anymore a solution and you need a search engine. It happened to us some time ago at Scoop.it. We are pretty happy with what we put in place almost 2 years ago. Let’s revisit the story.

Now that have learned and practiced software engineering a good amount of time, I think I can share back some of my experiences and discuss with you about some hopfully interesting ideas.