I'm a year into my tech career, balancing between backend, frontend, and now full stack development with a bit of DevOps thrown in. I've just started at a local company as the only new developer, and we use Shopify for our online store. They rely on several pricey third-party plugins, including one for recommending products to users, similar to how YouTube suggests videos. This recommendation plugin costs us about $2,000 a month.
I've never built a plugin before, but I'm curious to learn how the recommendation technology works. From my research, it looks like they use a vector database, which I understand to mean that data is represented as numbers in an array. I believe they might combine that with something like ChatGPT or other LLMs for product suggestions. I used to think it was all super complex math and machine learning, but now I feel more confident that I can tackle it.
Given that my boss is open to new ideas from employees, should I propose to him: 'Let me take 3-6 weeks to learn how to build these plugins, and we can save some money in the long run? I'm confident I can create whatever we need in the future!'?
3 Answers
You're definitely optimistic about taking on a project like this without prior experience! Building a recommendation plugin is no small task, even if a junior could do it in weeks. If it really costs $2,000 a month, there's likely a lot of complexity involved. I'd suggest spending some time learning and perhaps experiment on your own before pitching this idea. You wouldn’t want to risk messing up something crucial, right?
Have you checked out the O'Reilly book *Collective Intelligence*? It has some worthwhile algorithms for recommendations, even though it's a bit dated. It could provide you with some fundamental insights and save you from continuous charges to a third-party service.
I admire your ambition! If you're only using a fraction of what these plugins offer, it might indeed be cheaper and simpler to build just that piece in-house. Though, I’d caution that you might actually be underestimating the work involved in this kind of project.
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