Tech Blog Menu

React and Flux are evolving technologies and using them with Coveo was a no brainer for me to get started on them. Here is my take on creating a searchable dashboard with those technologies. The code of the demo is available on Github

Fifth edition After months of preparation, the fifth edition of Coveo Blitz was held on January 10th 2015. This year, we held the contest in our offices for the third time. A total of 54 students from 7 universities and colleges participated in the fifth edition of our annual contest. Let me tell you a bit on how it went.

##The Why We lately had Maps360 come to our office in Quebec to take pictures for Google Business View. Why you might ask. We are a software company. We sell a series of bits ordered in a very specific manner. Our clients buy those well aligned bits and, to some extent, couldn’t care less about our offices. But we also sell to another audience. Our bits aligner. We are constantly hiring in a competitive industry where there are far more jobs than people to fill them. We are a good place to work, with good conditions, and with a nice office. That last part is something that we thought we could leverage in our recruiting, and Google Business View comes in as the best option to show this off.

When configuring your servers, there are some aspects to consider. Depending on your needs, you will need to implement the most beneficial scalability model. We will be highlighting some options that can guide you along. The first aspect to consider is the amount of documents. You see, as the number of documents in your index increases, hosting the index on a single hard disk can often lead to size and performance limitations. In this scenario, consider adding a slice. The slice is in effect, a separate physical storage location for a section of the master index and distributes the index content, hence increasing available space. It’s possible that it can potentially speed indexing once you have passed a certain threshold, so add a slice when it’s needed. A slice can potentially contain up to 40million documents, and since one Coveo server can typically host up to two slices, it would then contain up to 80 million documents evenly distributed between the two. Potential problem averted!

Following some strong reactions about my last post (that were caused, I believe, by a poor use of the word lock on my part), I decided to write a little follow up post to remedy the situation.

Small update: Having noticed comments about this post on Twitter, I think it’s important to specify that the word “lock” might have been badly chosen here. It’s more of a best-effort thing to reduce the frequency of situations where certain operations would need to be retried. It’s perfectly fine if for any reason those still occur concurrently (indeed before there was no locking whatsoever). The only adverse effect would be slightly decreased performance for the querying user. So, kids, do not use this approach if you need real resource exclusion. As Coveo’s cloud usage analytics product matures, more and more events are logged every seconds and a lot more people are using the analytics dashboards from the cloud admin. That increased load is great and the usage analytics handles it easily, but there was one thing we did not see coming: transaction cycles in the database. They did not happen often, but this was still problematic as continuous increase in the load on the service only meant more transaction cycles. These cycles were the result of scheduled jobs running when insertion of new events and reporting queries occurred at the same time.

It all began… It is in September of 2010 that the idea of doing a programming contest came to life. Coveo was a startup with highly passionate employees, ready to grow and bring more passionate people on board. Did I say passionate? Our primary source for hiring talented and passionate - I know, but it’s really important to us - software developers was (and still is) universities. We bring students on board during an internship and show them what it’s like to work with us - the challenges, the environment, the people, … - it usually works really well and we end up hiring almost 33% of the interns.

This blog is powered by Jekyll, a static site generator. There is no database, nothing to search against, the site is simply composed of a few HTML pages referencing each other. Being search experts, we can leverage Coveo to add powerful search to Jekyll.

Coveo for Sitecore offers various extension points to easily customize almost every part of it : indexing, queries, interfaces etc. In the developers documentation, we’re often giving examples of custom pipelines or JavaScript snippets, but what happen if you guys want to do more than that?

As the UX design department grows at Coveo we start to get enough manpower to actually create stuff before it’s implemented (yep…). One of these concepts is for an online community. The idea for this project came from an internal initiative to unify the search on our various websites. You’re probably familiar with how great Coveo is at this kind of problem. Basically, it’s what we do. I was tasked to create mockups for this initiative. As I was working on this, another idea came up. We have Coveo staff who are communicating directly with developers. We have online resources (a lot) that are frequently updated. Maybe we could bring all of this together. We talked about it in our meetings with the design team and soon it started consuming me.