CameraPanda.com has been like fifteen years in the making. Way back when, faceted search hit me, though I didn’t know that’s what it was called. All the time I shopped and the facets that I wanted just weren’t there. I attended Oscon around that time and learned about Amazon’s rather awesome affiliate program, which provides metadata for Amazon products, and referral fees for purchases made through affiliate links.
For years, I thought I could be all things to all products, figuring out all the facets in general, building a great site for selling computers, tablets, TVs and maybe even cameras. A couple years ago I decided to concentrate on TVs. I made some progress, but really, I never shop for TVs and have no passion there. I’ve had the same projector for years and hope to for years to come. A year or two ago I decided to switch to cameras, which I often shop for and have total passion for.
On the backend, I started with Perl and MySQL. Perl eventually led to a total rewrite into Java (wanted good old interfaces) and MySQL led to Elasticsearch. The MySQL queries got pretty crazy and tough to read, let alone optimize.CameraPanda.com is really all about the aggregations. Elasticsearch is a dream for aggregations.
I wasn’t really sure what I’d use on the front end, but figured that I’d figure that out later. Kinda had some bad luck, but I think I’m not alone as Flex didn’t really turn out. I think the Flex UI had a chance, but when mobile browser support went away so did I. Next up was Silverlight’s Pivot UI, which is actually made for facets. After I loaded the multi-meg XML file it was SO fast! And then, away.
Somewhere along the way I pretty well knew I had to switch to HTML5, just didn’t know how or when. Turns out that was Christmas, 2015. I got a tip to use React/Redux and one day I decided I’d try it out, which I did for several hours one day with no luck. Then things clicked in my head and about a day later I had a working prototype. I got some great help on the look and feel and here we are.
And the name? Well, among others, I own mycomparer.com, computercomparer.com, cameracomparer.com and lenscomparer.com. I got tired of folks typing in cameracompare.com or really, just being so darn descriptive with the name. A couple months ago I wrote some good old Perl that paired animals (and other nouns), adjective and other select words and tried to find my favorite. It really came down to CameraGopher and CameraPanda and rather non-scientifically I chose the latter.
So, howdy, welcome to CameraPanda.com! Come, shop, find great cameras, great lenses and great prices.
Earl