There was a time at the beginning of the pandemic where my team was asked to build a full text search engine on top of a bunch of SharePoint sites in under 2 weeks and with frustratingly severe infrastructure constraints, (No cloud services, single box on prem for processing, among other things), and we did and it served its purpose for a few years. Absolutely no one should emulate what we built, but it was an interesting puzzle to work on and we were able to cut through a lot of bureaucracy quickly that had held us back for a few years wrt accessing the sensitive data they needed to search.
But I was always looking for other options for rebuilding the service within those constraints and found Quickwit when it was under active development. I really admire their work ethic and their engineering. Beautifully simple software that tends to Just Work™. It's also one of the first projects that made me really understand people's appreciation for Rust as well outside of just loving Cargo.
I don't know what brings me more happiness in this career. Building systems with no political constraints, or building something that's functional with severe restraints.
> we were able to cut through a lot of bureaucracy quickly that had held us back for a few years wrt accessing the sensitive data they needed to search
Yeah, this seems like a weird way to interpret what I said. I just meant we got in front of the right people to get permission, which we were already waiting to do for quite a while before the pandemic.
But I was always looking for other options for rebuilding the service within those constraints and found Quickwit when it was under active development. I really admire their work ethic and their engineering. Beautifully simple software that tends to Just Work™. It's also one of the first projects that made me really understand people's appreciation for Rust as well outside of just loving Cargo.