While working on a new feature for Dev.to involving the existing "Reading List" component, my team ran into a roadblock. Namely, having no idea whatsoever where the data was originating. The Rails controller action corresponding with the related view did not make an ActiveRecord query; so where are the articles on the user's reading lists being pulled from? What we did find in the controller was a reference to Algolia, but the Algolia class does not reside in the project itself but in an external library.
The Dev.to docs mention Algolia but are less than helpful on the topic:
Algolia is a third party service that powers the search. When working with the API, you will likely need to utilize Algolia. You will need to sign up for a free-tier account, retrieve the keys, and provide those keys to the Rails application.
What "the search" is and what "the API" might be is left for us to discover. A page farther down the docs
The front-end focused members of our team identified that the readingList component was making a fetch request.