I enjoyed reading this but I also fundamentally don't get it at a basic level like... why re-implement stuff that has already been done by entire teams? There are so many bigger and productionised search and retrieval systems. Why invest the human capital in doing it all again yourself? I just don't get it.
How does one learn new things if not first by understanding them, and then looking to evolve them?
Sure, we can shell out to libraries and to other people's work, but at some point, you will have to understand the thing that you've abstracted away if you want to evolve it.
Not really. The original usage of it was completely positive and it has evolved into something more ironic but not necessarily negative. I think the person you were replying to used it absolutely the way most people use the phrase.
It can be more or less translated to "I want to see the outcome of what they're doing" usually used after the person who is "cooking" is criticized for their methods.
Most of what exists doesn't work for my application. It either assumes an unbounded resource budget, or makes different priorities that don't scale by e.g. permitting arbitrary realtime updates.
I'm building stuff myself because it's the only way I'm aware of to run a search engine capable of indexing quarter of a billion documents on a PC.
I want to do my own version of something like this to have a personally curated search function. The "it's mine" factor is enticing, if it does something unexpected, then I know all the dependent, interacting parts so I can trace the problem and fix it.
But I'm a privacy and self-hosting nut, which is probably just another way of saying the same thing.
(I will probably never actually do it, but that doesn't stop it being on the list).
It's kind of funny really, many good projects are actually maintained by a small group of people. You genuinely cannot throw more people at a project and make it faster and better. A lot of cool infra and protocol concepts stuff that we use day to day is made by a handful of people at best
Independant efforts are as important, if not more important, than larger corporate efforts. Because independants have different priorities, and are often not as tied to satisfying curiosity instead of some bottom-line.
Read any articles about how amazing Google's search is lately? Me neither.
Funnily enough this repetitions encapsulates what is wrong with this reasoning. If you don't put time into learning the fundamentals, telling yourself there's not need to re-invent the wheel, you end up repeating old mistakes. Turns out computer systems are not as transparently obvious as a wheel...
