There is one tool that has found its way into the toolbox (or let’s say “stack”) of, dare I said, a large part of the world's computer systems in one way or another. It’s a tool that has intrigued, educated, and (give thanks) employed me for, now, nearly 25 years. You know what I’m talking about…
Lucene and I
I’ve been a Lucene-ite since Doug Cutting’s creation migrated from Sourceforge to Jakarta.”I Love[d] Lucene” so much.that I volunteered, a large part of time over 14 months of my life (and shout out to Otis and Mike for sharing the arduous grinds) to co-author the first edition of Lucene in Action. The process of discovering a really cool, super powerful, and easy to use full text search library, realizing the word about it needed to get out widely, had me dig deep into the community and codebase with my Apache hat on, tinkering, contributing, committing, and generally loitering on the shoulders of folks way smarter than me.
I thank the bulk of my professional life to Lucene. I’d be kinda lost without it. A lot of us would.
It just be this easy with a little Java elbow grease. And because it’s fairly straightforward to send data into Lucene and then query it powerfully, and because Mr. Cutting nurtured such a benevolent, inviting yet demanding, open source environment, an entire ecosystem of add-ons, forks, ports, wrappers, and companies, and ... And ... AND!
When my homie Marcus “so-real-he-is” Eagan implored me to join him at MongoDB to work on Lucene integrated capabilities, called Atlas Search, I was intrigued and jumped at the opportunity to start a fresh challenge advocating for developers baking search into “document data”-based applications.
All of this said is to set the stage here - Lucene is the answer to All of The Problems! I’m an obeyer of the Law of the instrument, and when life gives me data, I make Lucene-ade.
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