We’re always keen to get more people involved in the Lucene search community – there’s always lots to do, from deep hacking of the core code, to testing with different frameworks and clients, to creating documentation and examples. It’s also just over fifteen years since Tom Mortimer and I founded Flax and we thought we should mark this birthday with some kind of event! So I’m thus very happy to announce we’ll be involved in three Lucene hackday events over the next two months:
Firstly, Dr. Leif Azzopardi has kindly invited us to speak and participate in the Lucene4IR Workshop to be held at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow on 8th & 9th September 2016. The event is aimed at those in academia wanting to get more involved in practical applications of Lucene and we are also hoping they will also contribute ideas from cutting-edge information retrieval research. We’ll be giving the keynote talk on how we use Lucene-based search engines in industry and also getting involved in the coding sessions later. There are some free places (although registration is only £69) and there are even some travel grants available.
A month later on 7th October we’re running a Lucene Hackday in London as part of our London Lucene/Solr Usergroup (note that Elasticsearch users are also very welcome to this and the other events mentioned). Bloomberg are kindly providing a venue, we’ll have Lucene committers on hand to guide us.
The next week is the largest Lucene event of the year, Lucene Revolution – but we’ll be in Boston a couple of days early on Tuesday 10th October to run a Boston Lucene Hackday. BA Insight are our hosts this time and we’re hoping some of those coming to Revolution later in the week will be able to participate.
So all we need is you – bring a laptop, your ideas for new things to add to or do with Lucene. We’ll even provide cake for Flax’s birthday at the latter two events! Feel free to suggest what we should hack on in the comments below.
