Built a Team

6 months later, we onboarded 2 senior engineers, 1 junior engineer, and 1 intern.  

Everyone followed our team's internal onboarding document and contributed to it on areas of improvement.  

The senior engineers are leading large projects.  The intern finished their project on time.  Our junior engineer is hitting their stride and making meaningful contributions to the codebase.

I created training around leading the scrum ceremonies and we just finished a full rotation with everyone leading once.  

I'm really happy with how our team culture sponsors autonomy and ownership.

Due to a departmental restructure, I was entrusted with building a new junior team for the ad operations team. The task involved:

• Working with the Human Resource team to get the job ads out
• Filter incoming candidates * arrange interviews
• Conducting interviews & deciding on who gets the job
• Create a welcome kit & training agenda for the new starter
• Training the new starter with help from my team
• Mentoring & enabling them to grow into senior positions over 1.5 years

Two things I learned:

1. Make your interviews fun & educational.
2. Mentoring means being patient & listening to the other person's opinions. No ego!

The team is growing? Again?!
Yep, yes we are. A new front-end developer has arrived in our team. Welcome Cosmin!

We released Recommend UI — the frontend libraries for the new Algolia Recommend product. Recommend is a milestone that made Algolia a multi-product company.

Recommend is a new service that builds machine learning powered recommendations. Two AI models are available: Related Products and Frequently Bought Together.

I led the frontend part of that product; built a team of 4 people, designed the elements, developed the libraries (API client and UI components), and wrote documentation.

I also spent some time researching and developing framework-agnostic UI components while working on it. The idea is to use JSX to describe your UI, and plug your framework's specifics to render this UI description. This final step plugs your framework to our components. They work with any framework that use some kind of Virtual DOM or equivalent: React, Preact, Vue, etc. A bridge to Angular is possible. We implemented this concept in the Recommend UI components, which reduced drastically the code we maintain. This pattern originally emerged when I was designing Autocomplete, where you're able to provide your own renderer. We may write more about it in the future!

Check it out on GitHub and Product Hunt.

I launched Autocomplete 🔮 – an open source, production-ready JavaScript library for building autocomplete experiences.

This is the work and research of more than a year spent on user experience, behaviors, design, architecture, platforms, renderers, framework or the lack of it, agnostic templating, and so on. It provides the tools to build great autocomplete experiences, or even creates the whole experience for you. You chose the granularity #DX.

You can use Autocomplete to reproduce interfaces like Google, Amazon, YouTube, but also command runners like Alfred.

It already powers DocSearch v3, the Algolia Docs search, and e-commerce websites you may have used this month.

I should write an entire blog post about Autocomplete, what a journey!

Check it out on GitHub, and read the documentation.

I launched DocSearch v3 — the new frontend to search documentations (5M users per month).

This was a great collaboration with the Algolia Developer Journey team, where I started doing some R&D on a new Autocomplete library. We shaped the library with DocSearch at first, which spread the modal search pattern quickly on documentation websites.

Then we partnered with the Docusaurus team (from Facebook) to integrate DocSearch v3 directly in the websites they generate. That's gotten a lot of traction. DocSearch v3 now powers documentation search on React Native, Redux, Vue 3, etc.