Starting a new position at Quickwit!

Hi everyone! a few weeks ago I announced that I’m leaving my position at eHealth Africa where I have spent the last 4 years. It’s been amazing and a wonderful experience for me working for NGOs having a direct impact on people’s life especially in remote areas. But if you look at my career history and especially my old Github repos, you will notice that I have a passion for developer tools; especially compilers, databases, and search engines.

I have been so lucky to be offered a position at Quickwit Inc where I am working as a software engineer. It has been a wonderful experience and the transition for the past few weeks has been amazing. Given how cool and helpful my colleagues have been, I can only be grateful and say a big thank you to them for giving me the chance to be part of this journey.

On relocating

I had to relocate back to my home country (Guinea) for the time being. I have to admit that it’s not been that smooth because I have been in Nigeria for the past few years (e.i missing quite a few people). Internet is better now in Guinea than it used to be, but it’s still as expensive as any precious stone. Traffic is hectic so I do my best to stay at home as much as possible. Probably a positive given the pandemic situation. On a positive note, I am currently spending more time with my little one 🥰.

About Quickwit

Quickwit is a company currently building a search engine product and the plan is to offer a more performant and cost-effective alternative to current key players in the field. The company open source search library Tantivy is already production-grade and available on Github. If you are a developer, try it, give feedback, and possibly contribute.

Plans for the rest of the year

My goal at the beginning of 2021 was to be able to get a system programming job mostly using Rust. Given the fact that has been checked very quickly, I think the plan is to know the ins & outs and contribute more to our product. I want to use this wonderful opportunity to become a search engine go-to person 😊. I also plan to release later during the year some open source projects I have been working on. I also hope to keep learning more about distributed databases & storage systems. Of course, you should expect to see more posts relating to search engines and particularly tantivy internals from now on.

I hope this post gave you updates on what I have been am up to and until next time, stay safe. Covid-19 is still around. May God bless & protect us all 🙏.