Nope. He uses Some software available only on windows or MacOs for his podcasts.
I am also strongly considering to jump ship from Mac to windows now. However, I have some software licenses that won’t transfer so I’m waiting for the renewal periods to expire.
1tb is nothing these days. If you insist on cloud the hetzner could be best bang for buck. Otherwise a similar desktop system can be acquired for less than 1000 usd.
I’d start with solr or elasticsearch and a simple indexing script (home rolled python script).
Then you can use solr admin or something like Jupyter for iterative querying.
I’m not an expert on index tuning, but you might even be able to dump it all into postgres with json types.
We do technical interviews but it is more of a conversation about an existing issue or problem in the company. We talk about it like the candidate is a consultant.
Our expectation is that they will ask questions for clarity, probe, and challenge any decisions or architectures chosen to date.
Then they offer an insight, opinion, or story as to how they have solved similar problems in the past.