First off, special thanks to all the speakers (Jason Rutherglen, Michael Busch, Erik Hatcher and all the lightning talks.)  We had a lot of excellent talks ranging from low level Lucene details on payloads and real time search to high level discussions on new feature in Solr and best practices for working on stopwords and relevance.  Also had intros to Mahout, Tika and the new Open Relevance project at Lucene.  I’ll post the slides on the Meetup site when they are available (I am still waiting to get them from the speakers.)

Second, I really enjoyed engaging with so many people about what they are working on in Lucene/Solr.  It is always fun to hear all the different ways people are (ab)using Lucene/Solr to do cool things, etc.   It was especially good to meet some fellow Mahout committers (Ted Dunning and Jeff Eastman) for the first time, as well as one of Mahout’s Google Summer of Code student David Hall, who is working on adding Latent Dirichlet Allocation.

Finally, I look forward to doing more of these.  Right now, I’m looking for interest in Raleigh, NC, but I know we’ll likely have another one in the Bay Area again soon.

• Lucene Boot Camp – A two day training session, March 23 & 24th
• Solr Boot Camp – A one day training session, March 24th
• Introducing Apache Mahout – Grant Ingersoll. March 25th @ 10:30
• Lucene/Solr Case Studies – Erik Hatcher. March 25th @ 11:30
• Advanced Indexing Techniques with Apache Lucene – Michael Busch. March 25th @ 14:00
• Apache Solr – A Case Study – Uri Boness. March 26th @ 17:30
• Best of breed – httpd, forrest, solr and droids – Thorsten Scherler. March 27th @ 17:30
• Apache Droids – an intelligent standalone robot framework – Thorsten Scherler. March 26th @ 15:00

Also, I’m doing a non-Lucene related talk this year with my wife, Robin, (she clearly is the star of the talk) called “The Programmer’s Guide to Health, Fitness and Nutrition“.  Here’s the gist:  I’m a programmer and fitness buff, my wife’s a Nutritionist and Health Coach.  For a long time, I didn’t have a clue on how to eat or be healthy, subsisting on the typical programmer’s (and everyone elses) diet of soda, carbs (can you say Pasta leftovers?) and junk food.  Even after I met and married Robin, I still persisted in my ways, figuring I could just exercise off the weight and exercise my way to better health.  You know what?  That doesn’t really work for people who sit at a desk all day (and often late into the night), especially as we age.

Want to know what changed my ways and has helped me be healthier, happier and more productive?  Register for the conference, and attend the talk to find out.  (You didn’t think I would give it away here, did you?)  OK, I know, let’s be realistic: you should go to the conference for all the other great talks about Apache technologies at the conference, but do make some time to think about the other parts of your life beyond code, too!