Elasticsearch

About two years ago, I read the book The Year without Pants, which describes the author’s experience leading a team at Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com, among other products). Automattic is a fully-distributed company, which means that all of its employees work remotely (hence pants are optional). While the book discusses some of the challenges of working remotely, the author’s general experience was very positive. A few months after reading the book, I decided to look for a full-time position after a period of independent work....

Bandcamp Recommender (BCRecommender) is a web application that serves music recommendations from Bandcamp. I recently switched BCRecommender’s data store from MongoDB to Elasticsearch. This has made it possible to offer a richer search experience to users at a similar cost. This post describes the migration process and discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of using Elasticsearch instead of MongoDB. Motivation: Why swap MongoDB for Elasticsearch? I’ve written a few posts in the past on BCRecommender’s design and implementation....