My journey from discovering Algolia to using it in my project
In this post I’ll tell you how I came to discover Algolia and use it in more and more projects.
Living in Paris and being active in the startup scene, I discovered Algolia for the first time in April 2013. They invited me to the housewarming party of their new office. The small studio could barely hold 4 to 5 people working.
A lot has changed since then — including the size of the office — however, one thing that has remained true was their dedication towards building a good product and solving search.
I’ve been involved in the Meteor ecosystem and evangelizing it in France since the beginning. Back in 2014, I was getting frustrated by the website of the official Meteor package manager, Atmosphere. The site was slow and the search left much to be desired. I thought it would be a perfect occasion to try to use Algolia on a side project.
At the end of 2014, I started working on an unofficial Meteor package for Algolia. Internally, it used the official JavaScript client and server and allowed people to make Meteor apps with an Algolia search that was the same both on the client and the server (what we now call universal JavaScript).
With the package ready, I still had the hardest part of the job to do. I had to get all the Meteor package data in a usable form. The website at that time was not exposing any data in an API-friendly way. I had to write an HTML scraper and run it periodically in a CRON to fill the Algolia index. The website is still up today. It now powers around 200 searches per day, but went as high as 5000 when it launched.
At the end of 2015, I decided to quit my position at eFounders and start my own company, Talkus, with my brother. Our goal is to provide a complete technical support solution for SMBs, 100% integrated into Slack. Talkus includes live-chat, but also email, SMS and phone support.
In July 2015, we included one of the essential missing components to the system: an FAQ. Once again Algolia has become our solution of choice to provide a simple, fast and flexible way to navigate in the FAQ (available in multiple languages, including Klingon). Their secure API key settings lets us use one Algolia account while still segmenting FAQs for each of our own customers. And, thanks to Meteor, synchronizing the Algolia index with every change in the FAQ is a breeze.
Today, our company is doing well and we know we’ll use Algolia again in the future. It goes beyond classical input-based search and can let you provide new ways to discover data.
Don’t hesitate to drop me a note if you’d like to know more about Talkus.io.
