Hope to see you in Boston!

CFP is now live for talks in Prague this May.

I’m looking forward to my first visit to Prague and also looking forward to talking with all the great Lucene users over in Europe.

Hope to see you there,

Grant

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.

Looks like an interesting crowd is forming for the Lucene meetup at ApacheCon EU this year.  Even if you aren’t attending the conference, you can still go to the Meetup.  We’ve got a lot of the Lucene ecosystem projects covered by the looks of it: Lucene, Solr, Mahout, Tika, Droids.  Hope to see you there.

Mark Miller shows how to add Lucid’s Lucene ecosystem search as a Firefox plugin.  Now you can search all the Lucene project (and subproject) archives, website, wiki from the comfort of your browser plugin.

It’s that time of year again.  Time for students to sign up for Google Summer of Code.  Gist of it:  Get paid to work in Open Source for the summer.

I’ve signed up to mentor for Apache Mahout.  We are looking for students interested in implementing cutting-edge machine learning algorithms, optionally using Hadoop or other techniques for scaling.  For my Mahout announcement, see here.

Assuming there are mentors, I would love to see students for Lucene, Solr, Tika and any of the other Lucene ecosystem projects.  Just know up front, the competition is pretty tough.  Last year, for Mahout alone, we had many good applications, so bring your ‘A’ game.

My tips for getting accepted and having a successful Summer (especially if you are implementing new ideas and not just fixing bugs):

1. Write a good proposal.  Well-thought out, well-referenced.  Realistic.
2. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.  I’m sure you are the greatest programmer since Knuth, but it is a community effort.  It isn’t just about producing code, it’s about participating in the community and learning about how open source works.  You will be failed if you think that you can just throw up the code at the end of the process and collect your money.  Instead, post patches early and often and solicit feedback.
3. Engage the community on your ideas before, during and after the proposal process.  Don’t just throw your application up there and disappear.
4. Be honest about your time and your efforts.  We really don’t like having to fail students, but if you routinely aren’t showing up and doing your job, you will be let go.  Sorry to be so harsh, but that’s the real world.
5. Show you have the chops by putting up some bug fixes or other improvements during the proposal process.
6. Stick around.  Open source is like one giant job application.  See my career advice post for more thoughts.

Good luck!  I am looking forward to reading many good proposals.

Another thing I’m particularly excited about is our search functionality (running on Solr of course).  It’s in beta (send feedback to find@lucidimagination.com) right now, but it aims to provide search for all things in the Lucene ecosystem: Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Mahout, Tika, Droids and all the Lucene ports (PyLucene coming soon) hosted at the ASF.  We’ve indexed the websites, mailing lists, wikis, JIRA, javadocs, etc.  Additionally, we provide multi-select faceting to allow people to easily search and navigate across projects.  Simply do your search, and then select the projects or sources that you want included in the results.  Stay tuned for more details on how we implemented all this stuff.

Lastly, we’ve done a bunch of articles and a few interviews with people in the Lucene community, including Doug Cutting, Chris Hostetter and Ryan McKinley.  Have a read or a listen and let me know what you think.