eMAG at DevTalks
Dev Talks is the biggest IT conference that gathers under the same roof Software Developers & IT professionals from Bucharest and surrounding area in order to explore the trends that will shape the future of technology. The 2015 edition gathered more than 800 attendees at the event and over 900 viewers online, as the sessions were also broadcasted live. This year’s conference in Bucharest took place on June 11th at Romexpo and targeted an audience formed of experienced technical professionals, employees of large IT development centres across Romania.
We also participated at this event and three of our colleagues were even speakers in keynotes and panels on the Web scene. Moreover, we had the opportunity to customize the Fun area at the event, which was one of the main attractions. We had all sorts of cool gadgets for the participants: roller coaster simulator, Oculus Rift, a circuit for guided cars and robots of all sorts.
Back to the sessions, our colleague, Arthur Kerpician, together with Gay Duncan at PayU approached the subject of Scrum working method and how programmers should plan their work so that they might increase efficiency. They offered an insight on how to work best using this methodology and gave the audience some very useful tips and tricks on the subject.
On the ELISSE (eMAG Listing and Semantic Search Engine) dedicated keynote by eMAG, Mihai Stanculescu and Ovidiu Mihalcea talked about why they created this new search engine and how it worked. They motivated that, confronted with increasingly large amounts of data, we needed to go the extra mile and really underlined the importance of the search box as the first place users go to explore and find the things they need, on their own terms.
Building a search engine that people can truly interact with can be a mysterious process. Thanks to it, they can discover valuable, relevant content, fall in love with your product and evangelize it within their group of friends. But without it, the process of bringing the information they need into focus becomes hazardous, and the users — hopelessly lost. Even though we tend to ignore it, relevance ranking cannot be avoided. Only few organizations have the expertise to build a search experience that responds in a relevant, immediate manner. This is called relevance engineering, and our colleagues, Mihai and Ovidiu, helped the audience shed some light on the subject with a case study on ELISSE, built on top of Apache Solr. They took the participants on a ride through the entire journey of building this search engine, the challenges and breakthroughs. Ovidiu underlined the importance of tracking every aspect of the search process, to better understand your users and actually use those metrics to help future customers. He also advised the participants not to fall into the trap of building their search functionality and forgetting about it. You should regularly check your users’ typos, try to understand them and see how you can serve relevant results even if they don’t really know what they want or can’t spell complicated brand or keywords.
Ovidiu ended his presentation with a key ingredient for offering our customers the best shopping experience: give them relevant content and they will fall in love with your search engine!
Our experience at the 2015 edition of DevTalks was so enriching: we got to share our knowledge and experience, learnt about the trends in technology and had a lot of fun. We are looking forward to the next edition!
