Come on out – there’s not much better than Solr AND Ruby!  For more details on time and location, visit this CVREG page.

I’ll be speaking at the upcoming Rich Web Experience conference in Ft. Lauderdale, presenting an “Introduction to Solr”, “Solr Recipes”, and “Lucene for Solr Developers”.  I’ll be tying all of these presentations together into a cohesive search/Solr track going from the introduction, to recipes for common tasks, through advanced customization of Solr.

For more details and to RSVP, please see http://sf-mahout-11-11.eventbrite.com/

Looking forward to seeing you there. Everyone in attendance will not only get to hear about the latest greatest enhancements to these technologies, but may also walk away with a cool Lucid t-shirt!

Here are the slides for “Rapid Prototyping with Solr”:

My next talk, titled “Solr Recipes”, was a 3 hour workshop covering the common ways to get data into Solr, configure it, and leverage it within applications.

Here are the “Solr Recipes” slides:

And finally, to a few hardcore folks, I discussed “Lucene for Solr Developers”, which more broadly covered the various ways to extend Solr. One cool example (or so I think, at least) I built for this talk that I’ve put out there as food for thought is “auto-faceting”, having a way for Solr to determine the best facets to select for a given query. See SOLR-2641 for my initial proof-of-concept implementation.

Here are the “Lucene for Solr Developers” slides:

There was so much going on that I barely got to tap into the conference experience myself, with the best part being the conversations had during meals, and between and during the scheduled talks. I was able to reconnect with many long-time friends that I’ve made through No Fluff, Just Stuff, and made many new acquaintances – I won’t name names, as this list covers most of them.

Thank you, Überconf, Jay, and fellow speakers and attendees for a stellar technical event. If you missed it, don’t despair, No Fluff, Just Stuff brings many of the same speakers and topics to an area near you. I’ll be speaking at a few NFJS events during the second half of this year, including Raleigh, NC, Boston, MA, and, surely to rival the quality and size of Überconf, The Rich Web Experience in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

Let’s talk.

• Developing Search Applications with LucidWorks Enterprise: a 2-day instructor-led, hands-on classroom training course designed and developed by the engineers that developed LucidWorks Enterprise (LWE). The objective of this course is to introduce LucidWorks Enterprise to users with no previous experience working with search applications. Through a combination of lectures and hands-on lab exercises you will learn how to get up and running with LucidWorks Enterprise, what the components of a search application are, and how to make your content searchable and findable in a search application built on LucidWorks Enterprise. There will be time for questions and discussion to enhance your learning experience.
• Solr Application Development Workshop is a two-day hands-on training classroom course designed and developed by the engineers that helped write the Apache Lucene/Solr code. The workshop is targeted at developers who want to build applications with Apache Solr, the Lucene Search Server. You will learn how to set up and use Solr to index and search, how to analyze and solve common problems, and how to use optional Solr modules such as facets, spell check, and highlighting. Lab exercises and real-world examples will be used to reinforce content.
• Lucene Application Development Workshop is a two day instructor-led hands-on training workshop, written and led by the engineers who helped write the Apache Lucene/Solr code. The objective of this course is to provide you with real life use cases and teach you how to apply Lucene to real business requirements. During the course you will learn to apply best practices in developing scalable, highly available and high performance search applications.

More information is available on the Lucene Revolution conference site training page. Note that with early bird specials for conference registration, there are some pretty good deals bundling a training workshop with conference attendance, something you might want to take advantage of.

Conference organizers include:  our friends Isabel Drost (Member of the Apache Software Foundation, PMC member Apache community development and co-founder of Apache Mahout), Jan Lehnardt (PMC member Apache CouchDB) and Simon Willnauer (Apache Lucene PMC member), in colloboration with conference producers Newthinking GmbH.

The format features a mixture of short lightning talks as well as long, in-depth tutorials, plus lots of networking time during and after the conference attendees to network with core project developers as well as commercial users. Food and drinks are included in the conference ticket. Details at http://berlinbuzzwords.de.