Search at Quid is recognized as one of the most valuable yet challenging areas within our product. It serves as the vehicle through which our users first engage with the product, and also serves as an integral part in helping our users derive insight. The results from a user search are fed to both our network generation and clustering algorithms, as well as the beautiful visualizations described in previous blog posts. Suggested terms are just one of the ways we enhance the search experience for our users, enabling the creation of more complex queries faster. This post will be the first in a series of blogs highlighting some of the unique challenges faced by Quid’s Platform Search team. In this post we will give a brief peek into how we approach suggested terms at Quid. The Use Case Every search engine these days, from Facebook to Google, provides some form of suggestions. Users have come to both expect and rely on this functionality as an extension of search. For Quid, this meant let’s not reinvent the wheel, but let’s also make sure our suggestions serve the correct function within our application. Our use case involved solving for the following: * Low […]
Read MoreOptimizing The Rendering Engine
Quid strives to power human intuition by delivering vast quantities of data and their connections through network visualizations. Those networks are usually made of nodes and edges. Lots of them. To enable our customers to visualize, navigate and manipulate these big networks in their browser, a question naturally arises: how can we render those nodes and edges as fast as possible? WebGL To The Rescue WebGL lends the power of the computer’s GPU to the web browser which affords processing large amounts of geometric data quickly in parallel. However, WebGL’s rather rudimentary set of APIs focused largely on drawing points, lines, and triangles, which makes our life difficult when drawing curved edges. Rendering edges with lines is quickly rejected due to the WebGL’s poor support of line endings and joints1. What if we draw triangles? First thought in mind would be to divide the curve into multiple segments and fit each of them with a quadrilateral (quad), which is rendered as two triangles. We increase the number of segments until the curve is smooth enough. Bartosz Ciechanowski describes this approach in his article “Drawing Bézier Curves”2. Although this would work if we had only tens or hundreds of edges to […]
Read MoreQuid Hackathon
Quid hosted its first internal hackathon, a Quidathon, back in late November. Teams of engineers, product managers, and designers had 48 hours to see their ideas become a reality. We required only two things of participants. First, have fun! And second, attempt to learn something new. Before our two day event was over, the entire company gathered round to watch each team present their project. Below are a few of the awesome projects that emerged. Quid Touch: A touch compatible version of Quid’s web application (using a 55″ touch display found in Quid’s office). User Activity Heat Map: An interactive user activity heat map within Quid’s data visualization application. Mobile Quid: A mobile version of Quid’s web application. Embedded Quid: A lightweight version of Quid’s web application that can be embedded in any webpage. Smart Search: A “smart” version of Quid Search which took advantage of a generated taxonomy and a query to generate a context based suggestion. Everyone at Quid was excited to see the projects Quidizens created in such a short time. We look forward to seeing what the future has in store for a few of these. And even more, we look forward to […]
Read MoreMajor League Data Visualization Event @ Quid!
Quid is hosting the next d3.bayarea() Meet Up event! Please join us for an engaging visualization discussion. Food, beer, and wine will be provided. RSVP: https://lnkd.in/b3vKky4 Major League Data Visualization Wednesday January 20th @ 6:30pm 62 1st Street FL 5 San Francisco CA Those working in data visualization know how challenging projects can be. There is no silo for data visualization. To do it well often requires domain experts, designers, analysts and engineers contributing in their own special way. How you bring these diverse skills together again and again through iterations is still more an art than a science. This month at the D3 MeetUp we have a team from Stanford’s Sports Analytics Club talking to us about how they came together to take second place in Graphicacy’s Major league data challenge. Graphicacy is a creative analytics design firm who challenged a host of contestants to visualize the statistics of the 20 top baseball players of all time. The team consists of Eli Shayer, Scott Powers, Ryan Chen, Daniel Alvarado, and Stephen Spears. During the MeetUp we’ll hear about the conception of their project, their process for effectively working in groups, how they made decisions as well as how d3.js […]
Read MoreThe Ups and Downs of a Chef Shop
Back in 2012, Quid made the decision to invest resources into automating our infrastructure with Chef. A few years later, we have around 40 machine types spread over 400 machines powering our development and production environments. Thanks to our now well developed cookbooks, we can rest easy should any machine need to be recreated. With over 3 years of experience under our belt, we’d like to share some of the ups and downs of cooking with Chef. The ups The community artifacts When Chef first started gaining real popularity, the technology was really rough around the edges. A community latched on anyways and has produced methodologies and artifacts which not only shifted Chef development but likely most future configuration management tools going forward. The Chef community produces and maintains an impressive number of cookbooks covering anything remotely popular. Resources like Bryan Berry’s Food Fight Show, Jaime Winsor’s environment pattern, and Chef’s conference talks heavily shaped Quid’s Chef practices. We are forever grateful. Flexible and powerful fundamentals Even if you do not appreciate all the cooking analogies, Chef has done a very good job at providing flexible yet powerful capabilities with their server, environment, node, and cookbook setup. We can easily […]
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