Migrating off Heroku and Challenges with Search Functionality

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In this chapter, they discuss the technical challenges they faced during their migration off Heroku and their issues with search functionality. They experienced a major problem during the migration, where many users had their accounts deleted or couldn't remember their login details. They also encountered performance issues with their search feature, leading them to switch from ElasticSearch to Bonsai. They highlight the importance of search functionality for their app and share their experiences with managing server failures and indexing millions of records.

This week on The Changelog we’re talking with Nadia Odunayo, founder of StoryGraph. Nadia started out as a one woman dev and product team — she’s had to adjust and maneuver along way to becoming the Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads.

We talk about the importance of customer research, the iterative nature of customer research and what it takes to synthesize and analyze the findings to guide product development, the technical challenges and learnings she faced while building StoryGraph, for example at several points they’ve faced challenges in handling an influx of users and had to re-architect the system. We also talk about the business model of StoryGraph and how they generate revenue through Plus subscriptions, and partnerships with publishers for book giveaways.

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