In early 2015, I was hiring another full-stack dev in Boulder, intermediate level or better. The job was filled but I still get a lot of traffic to my blog because of the post.
I tinkered with PostgreSQL’s full-text-search (FTS) capabilities and I’m pretty impressed. On a table with 1.2 million rows of user profile information, I can do a token-based FTS search for usernames in under 90 milliseconds on a small-ish AWS instance. Unfortunately, the FTS token system doesn’t recognize MixedCaseUsernames, or numbers between words, as word separators. I did, however, fall quickly in love with the marker tag system which tells Postgres to prepend and append HTML 4 bold tags around matching portions of text.
Disclosure: I was an employee at The Rubicon Project for almost two years as a senior engineer working on core statistics and analytics data, including when I originally wrote this blog piece. <u>I was not asked or compensated to write this review.</u> I bought my stock options upon resigning and so was a shareholder for a time but sold my stake in the company after their IPO. Despite being an employee, I used the *exact* same interface that any other person uses when they sign up, and I pay Rubicon the same 10% of the managed advertising they bring to my site.
Hey all. Got a new job in Culver City that I’ll be starting at the end of March. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to blog about it, of course, but my current employer was really nice about letting me leave. More details a little later. UPDATE, 2016: My time at Pricegrabber was pretty great. I stuck around until they were purchased by Experian for about $770M. I left shortly afterward, purely by coincidence, because I was tired of a 90+ minute commute in each direction.
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