DEV Community: Julie Reboul

Algolia Coding Challenge: Help Santa get inspired 🎅

Julie Reboul — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 13:07:31 +0000

It's that time of the year! We're excited to kick off a new Coding Challenge for the Holiday season. ❄️

🎅 Santa has been working from home for months trying to get ready for Christmas and he feels like he needs a break. We need to help Santa get inspired before his big journey!

Answer the following set of questions using Algolia Search and corresponding frontend libraries to help Santa get back on track.

For each participant, Algolia will donate money to the HackYourFuture charity, a free web development program for talented refugees and other disadvantaged groups with limited access to education and the labor market.

📱 The prize for the winner, chosen at random from completed submissions, is an iPhone 13 or a Samsung S21, to be put under the tree!

Fill out this form to register for the challenge, submit your answers, and receive access to the official Algolia Discord server for this contest. The Challenge is open from December 6th to December 19th, 11:59pm PST.

Challenge #1 🎤

Santa is a huge Star Trek fan. He remembers his favorite Star Trek actor once gave a Ted talk with an inspiring rating between 800 and 900 that was tagged storytelling.

A pep talk from his favorite Star Trek actor is just what he needs! Santa is nothing if not a builder -- perhaps by building a search interface similar to this demo he could find the talk!

After watching the video, Santa is feeling so inspired he decides to go visit the actor!

Data Source

Ted Talks

Question

What is the name of the speaker, (who is also a famous Star Trek actor), that Santa is going to visit? (Submit via Form)

Bonus Question

What is the most viewed TED Talk tagged for both collaboration and society?

Challenge #2 📽

As he prepares for his trip Santa remembers that little Bryan, one of the children on his “nice” list, has asked for a movie that stars both the actor he plans to visit and the actress Amy Poehler. Santa needs another search interface to find the title of this movie (and when it was released).

Maybe he can get the actor to autograph a copy when he goes to meet them!

Data Source

Movies:

This data set is too large for the Algolia free tier, so you may want to use the hosted version directly without having to push anything to your application.

You can use the following credentials:

App ID: latency

API Key: 56f24e4276091e774e8157fe4b8b11f6

Index name: movies

Question

What is the title and release year of the movie that Bryan wants for Christmas? (Submit via Form)

Bonus Question

What is the title and score of the highest rated movie with the genre Crime released in 2008?

Challenge #3 🍷

Santa, of all people, can’t show up at the door of his favorite Star Trek actor without a gift! He decides to be clever and get them a bottle of Bordeaux wine from the Fronsac domain (the actor’s favorite) that was bottled the same year as the movie above was released. He remembered a handy demo he’d seen of something similar.

Data Source

Wine

Question

What is the name of the Bordeaux wine from the Fronsac domain released in the same year as the movie in Challenge #2? (Submit via Form)

Bonus Question

What was the highest rated wine under $30 from 2010?

Challenge #4 🛩

Wine in hand, Santa is ready to start his journey. But where? He knows his favorite Star Trek actor recently made the following flights:

ATL → SEA
AHN → LGA
JFK → MCN

He can use this information along with map data, (similar to this demo), to figure out the major US city where the star is staying. Santa would make a great detective!

Data Source

Airports

Question

What is the major US city closest to all three flights listed above? (Submit via Form)

Bonus Question

What is the closest airport to Carson National Forest in the United States?

Challenge #5 🎸

Once he knows where he’s headed, Santa uses his UberReindeers app to catch a sleigh and is on his way!

When he arrives in the city, Santa remembers another gift he still needs to pick up for a girl on his “nice” list. All little Julie wanted for Christmas were tickets to see the musician that played in that same city sometime between August 14 and August 18, 2019.

Data Source

Concert:

This data set is too large for the Algolia free tier, so you may want to use the hosted version directly without having to push anything to your application.

You can use the following credentials:

App ID: latency

API Key: 059c79ddd276568e990286944276464a

Index name: concert_events_instantsearchjs

Question

What was the name of the artist Julie wants to see for Christmas? (Submit via Form)

Bonus Question

What was the last city where the band Coldplay performed in 2018?

Conclusion 🎄

It worked! After an inspiring visit with his favorite actor (and a little bit of Bordeaux wine), Santa is feeling refreshed and ready for his big day! He was also able to get some last minute Christmas shopping done along the way, always a bonus!

Thanks for helping Santa, and thanks for helping others by submitting your answers to this coding challenge. Have a wonderful holiday season and we’ll see you in the New Year! 🥳

Coding Challenge Official Rules

The Official Rules of the Coding Challenge are available here. By participating to the Coding Challenge, you agree with the Algolia Coding Challenge Official Rules.

Announcing the Firebase + Algolia search extension

Julie Reboul — Thu, 20 May 2021 13:46:32 +0000

We know why you are here. You want to learn how to integrate Google Firebase Firestore database with Algolia search.

Firebase Firestore is a NoSQL cloud database that provides structure to manage your data into multiple collections. It is scalable, serverless and it provides synchronization between client and server and offline mode. Most importantly, it is highly secure and it comes at a reasonable cost.

However, Firebase does not support search functionality out of the box. To solve this, you needed to turn to a third party application — and the one recommended by Firebase is in fact Algolia.

We have a search product that enables full-text search that is fast, relevant, API-first, and has a solid free plan that makes it easy to start and grow your product. We also provide a wide choice of client libraries and SDKs for all major languages/platforms and are very proud of our documentation.

Up until today, however, integrating Algolia and Firebase involved a non-trivial number of steps. Today, we are excited to announce the Firestore<>Algolia extension.

The technical stack

Let me provide a high level integration diagram on what we are trying to achieve with these two products in your stack.

So how do we implement the above architecture with the new Firebase Extension Framework?

The old-school way

There are many articles and blog posts that describe the implementation. The gist of it was to use Cloud Function to implement the logic to monitor the Firestore database and push changes to Algolia indexes. This required writing code in Google Cloud Functions to wire and monitor changes to the Firestore database, as well as maintaining and supporting the integration.

The new kid on the block

At Fireconf 2019, Firebase announced the Firebase Extensions Framework. The idea is to provide users with configuration-only extensions maintained and supported by extension providers. We are proud to have become a part of this framework in 2021, as announced at Google I/O. The Algolia extension can be installed with a click of a button or using a CLI, which will kick off a process to provision the Cloud Function to monitor the Firestore database for changes based on the configuration information provided by the developer. Let’s see this in action.

Prerequisites

Google Cloud Platform account
Firebase project
Algolia account

Navigate to the Firebase Extension listing page.

For details on the extension, click on “See Details”.

Click “Install in console” to start the installation process. The first step in the process is to create or select an existing Firebase project.

You will be prompted to enter the following configurations:

Collection Path, the path to the collection in your Firestore database
Fields, the document fields to be send to Algolia for indexing
Algolia Applications ID
Algolia Index Name
Algolia Api Key
Location, GCP region to deploy the Cloud Function

NOTE: This extension can be installed multiple times monitoring different collections and pushing the changes to a central Algolia Search Index or a separate Index for each collection.

That’s it! Now go ahead and click install and configure to your heart’s desire, and don’t forget to send us feedback: twitter.com/algolia. Happy configuring!

P.S. Future improvements
There are known limitations on the extension, which will be addressed in future releases.

Algolia relevance works well with records smaller than 10kb or the limit set based on your plan. Any record larger than this limit will be rejected by Algolia Indexing Process. In future versions of the extension, we are hoping to implement a record splitting logic to break large records into smaller records for indexing. Refer to .
to improve relevance.

Algolia Coding Contest 🧑‍💻

Julie Reboul — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 11:41:10 +0000

Hi everyone! We're happy to announce Algolia is kicking off a Coding Contest.

To participate, it's simple:

Build a project using Algolia, choosing one of the 3 categories listed below
Place your submission in a GitHub repository
Send your project to codingcontest[at]algolia.com

The deadline for all submissions is Wednesday, May 5th, 11:59pm PST.

The prizes

Exciting news! For each category, the winner will receive one of the following:

A smartphone of your choice between an iPhone 12 64 Gb / a Samsung S21 128 Gb / an OPPO Find X3 Neo 256 Gb
Or an $800 Amazon giftcard.

On top of that, each participant is entitled to a 1-month coupon to use Algolia for free. Please send us an email to codingcontest[at]algolia.com with “Coupon request” in the subject line.

Project requirements

Build a search interface using Algolia. It can be for mobile or the web. You can integrate it into an existing website or app that has no search yet, or create a simple, standalone interface for the contest.

In you are not familiar with Algolia, we suggest you follow our Quick Start guide, which will help you (a) send data to Algolia and (b) build a UI. You can also use our Interactive Tutorial for the same purposes.

Additionally, feel free to use any of Algolia’s features: facets, solutions, paging, menus, and so on. Check out our solutions page in the docs for tutorials, and check our inspiration library to see what you can build.

We will not accept projects that display violence, pornography, abuse, or any kind of hate speech, as stated in the Coding Contest Official Rules.

Criteria

To evaluate your submitted project, we will take into account:

Functionality: Is your code clean, does it work well?
User experience: Once you've got the features, now it’s time to design the interface. Are features well placed on the screen? Are they nicely styled? Extra points for creativity or novelty!

Your project - Pick one:

Important note: you can only submit one project.

Choose from one of the following three categories:

First category

Build a project using both the Strapi and Algolia APIs.
You can also include any other APIs or tool you'd like for this project.

Second category

If you're not familiar with Strapi, we offer you a broader option: build a project using the Algolia API.
You can also include any other APIs or tools you'd like for this project. Please refer to our documentation if you have any questions.

Third category

Build an Algolia implementation using a pre-made Codesandbox.

See the rules here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Algolia offer me a free plan for this project?

Yes. Algolia offers a 14-day full-featured free trial for all new users. We are also offering a 1-month coupon for each participant to thank you for joining the contest. If you’re interested in receiving the coupon, please send us an additional email to codingcontest[at]algolia.com with “Coupon request” in the subject line.

Can I use Strapi for free for this project?

Yes. Strapi offers a Community plan that is free and available to everyone.

Can I participate in several categories?

No. You can only participate in one of the 3 categories, as stated in the Coding Contest Official Rules.

When will the results will be announced?

The Algolia jury will deliberate during 2 weeks after the last day of submissions.

How will I know I am the winner of my category?

You will receive an email from the Algolia team. They will contact you about the prize and how to organize the shipping.

If I have some questions for the organizers, where should I send them?

Please send them to codingcontest[at]algolia.com

Can a website/app already using Algolia be submitted?

No. The goal of this contest is for you to build something new. We want to make the contest fair to every participant who has until May 5th to build their project. However, you can definitely get inspired by one of your previous projects using Algolia!

Does the code have to be public or can I submit a private repository?

You can submit a private repository, but we will ask you to give access to the jury members when you submit on the codingcontest[at]algolia.com email adress.

Coding Contest Official Rules

The Official Rules of the Coding Contest are available here. By participating to the Coding Contest, you agree with the Algolia Coding Contest Official Rules.

Add search to your Jamstack app in a few clicks

Julie Reboul — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 07:39:15 +0000

Hello there,

Searching on Netlify has just become much easier with the Algolia for Netlify plugin. It automatically indexes your website to Algolia when deploying your project to Netlify with the Algolia Crawler.

We’re super happy to launch this plugin in a joint effort with Netlify. Find the project here: www.algolia.com/netlify

This enable users to index their Netlify website, using our custom crawler, as soon as the user deploy. Algolia search excellency in combinaison with the amazing hosting by Netlify in just a few clicks.

How Algolia for Netlify Works:

Once a user installs the plugin on their Netlify site, the Algolia Crawler extracts structured data from every page any time a change occurs and indexes the content into Algolia to power the website’s search bar.
Algolia hosts and maintains the index in the cloud, allowing developers to build highly-tailored front-end experiences using one of several pre-built UI libraries.
The Algolia Crawler plugin can be used for a wide variety of industries —from media to technology— for various use cases, including site search with federated search, filtering, and faceting; documentation search; and customer self-service and support.

We’d love to hear your thoughts, comments and feedback. This plugin is currently in Public Beta and we’re eager to improve, thanks :)