We have some news! From February 1st 2019 Flax's Managing Director Charlie Hull will be joining OpenSource Connections (OSC), Flax's long-standing US partner, as a senior Managing Consultant. Charlie will manage a new UK division of OSC who will also acquire some of Flax's assets and brands. OSC are a highly regarded organisation in the world of search and relevance, wrote the seminal book Continue reading
Relevance Engineering is a relatively new concept but companies such as Flax and our partners Open Source Connections have been carrying out relevance engineering for many years. So what is a relevance engineer and what do they do? In this series of blog posts I'll try to explain what I see as aContinue reading
I've already written about Day 1 of Lucidworks' Activate conference; the second day started with a keynote on 'moral code', ethics & AI which unfortunately I missed, but a colleague reported that it was very encouraging to see topics such as diversity and inclusion raised in a keynote talk. Note that videos of some of the talks is starting to appear on Continue reading
Activate is the successor to the Lucene/Solr Revolution conference that our partner Lucidworks runs every Autumn and was held this year in Montreal, Canada. After running a successful Lucene Hackday on the Monday before the conference, we joined hundreds of others to hear Will Hayes, the CEO of Lucidworks, Continue reading
We ran a couple of Lucene Hackdays over the last couple of weeks: a chance to get together with other people working on open source search, learn from each other and to try and improve both Lucene and associated software. Our first Hackday was in London, hosted by Mimecast at their offices near Moorgate...Continue reading
Flax has always been very active at conferences and events - we enjoy meeting people to talk about search! With much of our consultancy work being carried out remotely these days, attending events is a great way to catch up in person with our clients, colleagues and peers and to learn from others about what works (and what doesn't) when building cutting-edge search solutions. I'm thus very glad to announce that we're running three search events this coming October. Earlier in the year I atten...Continue reading
Mimecast were our kind hosts for the latest London Lucene/Solr Meetup (and even provided goodie bags). It's worth repeating that we couldn't run these events without the help of sponsors and hosts and we're always very grateful (and keep those offers coming!). First up was Andrea Gazzarini presenting a brand new framework for search quality testing. Designed for offline m...Continue reading
Relevance Engineering is a relatively new concept but companies such as Flax and our partners Open Source Connections have been carrying out relevance engineering for many years. So what is a relevance engineer and what do they do? In this series of blog posts I'll try to explain what I see as a new, emerging and important profession. ...Continue reading
The second event I attended in Berlin last week was the Mix Camp on e-commerce search (MICES), a small and focused event now in its second year and kindly hosted by Mytoys at their offices. Slides for the talks are available here and I hope videos will appear soon. The first talk was given ...Continue reading
I spent last week in a sunny Berlin for the Berlin Buzzwords event (and subsequently MICES 2018, of which more later). This was my first visit to Buzzwords which was held in an arts & culture complex in an old brewery north of the city centre. The event was larger than I was expecting at around 550 people with three main tracks of talks. Although due to so...Continue reading
