Launching Kifi

Over the last year we’ve been working hard to launch the first version of Kifi (Keep It Find It) so you can search like normal, and find like never before.

Both the product and the technology behind it are incredibly powerful. We’ll soon start describing some of the technical decisions we took and the way we use specific technologies.

Kifi is about helping you keep and find things. On top of that there’s a layer of social collaboration and communication between users on keeps. To achieve all that we developed a strong search engine supporting online index updates and a variety of machine learning mechanisms such as the Flower Filter. We had to use a fast programming language in the backend that would work nicely in a multi-threaded world, be fast with crunching numbers and quick to iterate with. We picked Scala. Along with Scala we’re using Play Framework (2.2 at the moment) and Slick (just upgraded to 2.0).

There are many other interesting technologies we’re using or developing, namely in the search, frontend, and mobile fronts. More on them in future blog posts.

Hope you’ll enjoy using Kifi as much as we enjoyed building it!

Originally published at eng.kifi.com on February 7, 2014.