Craft

What I am good at

Enterprise search, relevance, and the leadership of engineers. Each part links to the work and the subjects behind it.

Enterprise search

Ten years centered on Apache Lucene and Apache Solr, with production work on Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Milvus, and Lucidworks Fusion.

Schema design, analyzers, and BM25
Sharding, replication, and SolrCloud
Autosuggest and faceting
Java, with Python, SQL, and standard cloud tooling beside it

Enterprise search Apache Lucene Apache Solr Elasticsearch OpenSearch

Public search at country scale One catalog, many storefronts Concept search before vectors were the default Return one record, not a list

Relevance and migrations

A migration is complete when the new system returns a result a person can trust, not merely when the cluster is healthy.

Similarity chosen for the field
Overlap on the top results when a platform changes
Like-for-like checks when the product returns one record

Relevance Apache Solr OpenSearch

A move that kept the answers

Leading engineers

I manage a search engineering team and still work hands-on. The useful part of that mix is translation: a need, a relevance behavior, and a system other engineers can operate.

A need, stated so an engineer can act on it
A relevance behavior the team can explain
A system that runs without one person

Engineering management

The team's output Your First 90 Days as a New Engineering Manager

Current study

Retrieval in the current wave of systems, and how an answer engine reads a page, structures context, and attributes a citation.

Quantization, HNSW, and when exact similarity beats approximate search
Hybrid BM25 plus dense retrieval, and how to check the blend
Luxir, a new open-source hybrid engine, read by running it

Hybrid search Answer engines Luxir

A new engine, tried on a laptop Run Luxir on a Mac or Windows laptop