Infomart
Architect & Lead Developer (Media Archive Re-Architecture)
2012–2014 · Toronto, ON, Canada
Infomart was a division of Postmedia, the industry standard for Canadian newspaper archiving.
Fun Fact: Elasticsearch was still in early beta when I started working with it on this project. At the time, the latest version was version ~ 0.19–0.2.x
Highlights
- Re-architected Canada's largest newspaper archive (200 billion+ articles) for modern search performance and scalability — replacing Microsoft SQL Server with Elasticsearch (then in beta, v0.19).
- Designed all document schemas, indexing strategies, and search algorithms to optimize retrieval speed and relevance.
- Built and led a new engineering team, managing the full hiring, onboarding, and mentoring process.
- Authored the internal development style guide and best practices for long-term maintainability.
- Created custom SVG-based visualizations to meet unique editorial and analytics needs.
- Established the foundation for search-driven content systems that later influenced work across finance, healthcare, and accessibility domains.
About the Project
For the last 30 years, Infomart had collected over 200 million newspaper articles from every major Canadian publisher.
The goal of this project was to enhance the search capabilities of the tool, while expanding its archives to include content from leading social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Data was originally stored in Microsoft SQL Server, but given the full text requirements of the tool, Elasticsearch proved to be an ideal use-case for this modernization effort. Elasticsearch was still in its early beta then (~ version 0.19–0.2.x), so the documentation was a challenge, but the promise was very high.