Techtalks 16 — Product matching & learning from your mistakes

TechTalks 16 was held at the beginning of this month and I’d like to give you guys a short insight on what went down at the presentation, and what our guest speakers had to say. This time our speakers were Dan Gurgui who taught us a little bit about product matching, and Laurentiu Matei who shared some of his experiences as a programmer and what he managed to learn when things didn’t exactly go as he planned them to.

So jumping right in as you get comfy and crack open a beer, Product Matching. What is it? Well if you look at the eMAG website there are millions of products displayed on the site, with multiple sources, with multiple documentations attached to them and you might find yourself at time finding the same product multiplied on the same page. You might think that’s something easy to get around but it’s not and the solution of product matching involves very complex algorithms that makes it possible to find the desired search results.

The product matching or Universal Catalog is based on SOLR, simply because it can find up to 30 million products in one search, it has excellent search algorithms and it has an indexing speed of 2000 documents per second. Soon Dan will publish an article related to the topic right here on TechLabs and all your questions will be answered.

The sec

ond part of the TechTalks welcomed Laurentiu Matei with a very open approach on his career in programming, the mistakes he made and what he managed to learn from them. The message Laurentiu wanted to share with everyone, you included, is that it’s ok to try things out and make mistakes, because that’s how you learn, that’s how you grow, that’s how you become better at whatever you do.

It’s perfectly fine not to know the best solution, not to apply the latest technology, it’s ok to ask someone “How do I do this?”. Don’t be surprised to find out that not everyone was born all knowing. And when you do happen to make a mistake acknowledge it, learn from it and let others learn from what you did wrong. You will laugh together I promise you.

In the end all that matters is the drive to do better and go on to the next level with ups and downs, because most of the time there is no other way to do it.

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