Hope to see you in Boston!

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.

Jason Rutherglen has been up to some interesting things with Lucene lately concerning real time search.  This has always been one of those parts of Lucene that has been needed over time by some people, but has never reached the critical mass whereby someone tackles it.  Looks like Jason finally has, and I am glad to see it.  I have, on occassion, met with clients, or users who truly have needed it, but most have usually been able to live with a little bit of a delay and the associated workarounds.  Now, it seems, they won’t have to.