About the Author

Rafał Kuć is a born team leader and software developer. Right now, he holds the position of Software Architect, and Solr and Lucene specialist. He has eight years of experience in various software branches, from banking software to the e-commerce products. He is mainly focused on Java, but is open to every tool and programming language that will make the achievement of his goal easier and faster. Rafał is also one of the founders of the solr.pl site where he tries to share his knowledge and help people with their problems with Solr and Lucene.

Rafał began his journey with Lucene in 2002 and it wasn't love at first sight. When he came back to Lucene in late 2003, he revised his thoughts about the framework and saw the potential in search technologies. Then Solr came and that was it. From then, Rafał has concentrated on search technologies and data analysis. Right now, Lucene and Solr are his main points of interest. Many Polish e-commerce sites use Solr deployments that were made with the guidance of Rafał and with the use of tools developed by him.

The writing of this book was a big thing for me. It took almost all of my free time for the last six months. Of course, this was my sacrifice and if I were to make that decision today, it would be the same. However, the ones that suffered from this the most was my family—my wife Agnes and our son Philip. Without their patience for the always busy husband and father, the writing of this book wouldn't have been possible. Furthermore, the last drafts and corrections were made, when we were waiting for our daughter to be born, so it was even harder for them. I would like to thank all the people involved in creating, developing, and maintaining Lucene and Solr projects for their work and passion. Without them, this book wouldn't be written. Last, but not least, I would like to thank all the people who made the writing of this book possible, and who listened to my endless doubts and thoughts, especially Marek Rogoziński. Your point-of-view helped me a lot. I'm not able to mention you all, but you all know who you are. Once again, thank you.