Searching Changelog.com Transcripts

I’ve found myself becoming an avid listener of the Changelog podcast of late. I enjoy Jerod and Adam’s interview style and the topics. Recently I went poking around in the Changelog’s GitHub repos and found a repo containing transcripts from all episodes.

Something else I discovered recently is Typesense, an “open source alternative to Algolia”. Unlike a tool like lunr, which uses JavaScript for client-side searching, Typesense requires running a dedicated server for search, or using their hosted cloud SaaS (Search-as-a-Service).

So, I built a simple web using Typesense and the Changelog transcripts. You can see it here: https://joeriddles.github.io/changelog-transcript-search/.

You can run this all locally using the steps in the README. The UI is built with bog-standard React and Algolia’s open source UI library, React Instance with Typesense’s adapter. The UI library has drop-in components for searching, filtering, and paging.

The most interesting part of this simple project is a Python script to transform and upload the Markdown transcript files to the Typesense server. Even that code is straightforward, if ugly.