Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server -- Third edition

This year gave me a chance to be a technical reviewer of the book with search engine topic. The title is Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server and it saw the light in its third edition. The first edition back in 2010 helped me to start thinking in NoSQL way, despite that SQL has been literally everywhere (well, and still is). It does take a bit of mind warping to think beyond relational database lingo and data modelling and in my opinion is rather useful for your career as a software engineer.

Here goes my review on Amazon:

This book in its first edition was the first one around back in 2010, that covered Apache Solr in as much detail as I needed to get into the topic quickly. This third edition includes revisions for Apache Solr 5, notoriously covering things like Solr admin page, SolrCloud, scaling the search engine for large amount of documents, text analysis, indexing, search and even map-reducing your Solr index! In particular, throwing a MapReduce task at large-scale indexing task has been hard / unclear in the past and now it is available to any user of Apache Solr out of the box. This makes books like this immensely important to not waste one's time in looking around for useful bits of information scattered here and there. More importantly, authors of the book are directly involved into the project, either as Apache Solr / Lucene committers or active practitioners and developers of the technology. So I recommend this book for an entry-level and mid-level search engineers that look into getting their hands dirty with search problems and / or improving on the previously untapped areas of the search engine world.

Berlin buzz words 2012: impressions

This year I have had a unique chance to participate in the Berlin buzz words conference for the first time. In brief, it is the event where search, store and scale people come together to exchange on the recent ideas / developments in the area. I must say that the conference level simply amazed me: the quality of the presentations and the audience maturity have clearly aligned together.

Urania building, the venue

To me, as a Solr / Lucene user and developer it was especially fun to meet in person people I have previously only seen on the mail-lists or in video talks on the Internet. These, in particular, include (in my case): Otis Gostpodnetić, Uwe Schindler, Simon Willnauer, Robert Muir, Grant Ingersoll, Ted Dunning, Rafał Kuć. There've been new folks I haven't heard of previously and got inspired by their presentations, like Alex Lloyd from Google and Markus Weimer from Microsoft (opps, GOOG and MSFT in the same sentence). Got to see sematext guys in action at their SPM booth.

Opening session kicks in

The wi-fi worked everywhere, which is unnatural usually to other conferences. Yet, I kept my laptop at a hotel in order to force myself do three things: 1) actually listen to the presenter and ask questions via mike or in person; 2) occasionally take pictures; 3) network during the coffee-breaks.

First day's keynote session by Leslie Hawthorn

As a result: I took some amount of pictures; felt less distracted and tired at the end of each day; asked questions from the audience and got (probably) recorded on the video and many more questions in person; networked with leaders in their areas to actually perceive how things are going in their communities. SO this is to say, that in the end, what mattered to me was people and not only the technologies they have talked about.

Eric Evan's presentation

Some observations (probably interesting more to the conference orgs), pros and cons mixed:
1) The personal badge could have name on each side because of two reasons: it tends to always flip so that the name isn't visible and second - the map on the other side of it was useless, because it was easy to learn where each auditorium was.
2) Food was great and free beer / ice-cream / snacks by sponsors -- awesome addition.
3) Small auditoriums tended to have been super-packed and the only big one have been super sparse (excluding opening and closing sessions). Could be addressed somehow next year?
4) 20 minutes talks have been a surprise for the presenters that expected to have 40 min. The result is usually running out of time to ask any questions from the audience and presenters getting slowly to the core of their presentation.
5) Party on Monday evening and cute small surprises on the bus seats from wooga were cool!

There was also sometime left to explore the beautiful city of Berlin and of course eat Schnitzel!

Thanks to all the #bbuzz team for excellent experience and hoping to come next year! yours truly,