Kodsnack 536 - I choose computer science, with Michele Riva

01-08-2023 • 49 mins

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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