Apache Lucene/Solr Committer !

I’ve always loved R&D and I’ve always been fascinated by seeing in action the implementation of my ideas.
It was in July 2010 when I started my professional journey in the Open Source search landscape, I was a Junior software engineer at the time, and after few months of post graduate research at Roma3 University I was very curious of exploring how the theory of Information Retrieval was actually implemented in the industry.

Lead by my former colleague Tommaso Teofili I approached the Apache Lucene/Solr project and I got struck by the technology and the ethics of Open Source software. Soon it became my main passion and favourite Information Retrieval implementation.

In the last 10 years I have worked in a number of Search software engineering positions across various companies in Europe and I kept my focus on Open Source search solutions.
Studying and working with Apache Lucene/Solr was enriching me personally and it was paying my bills.
So I decided it was honest to contribute back, I started with mini code contributions, evangelising Open Source software and supporting the Solr-user mailing list.
As time passed by, I was able to help with the Learning To Rank contribution by Bloomberg and many more.
Furthermore I enjoyed even more supporting people all around the globe in the mailing list, it was very interesting to see all the problems people experienced in Information Retrieval tasks and to think and design possible solutions using Open Source software.
Blogging arrived roughly in 2015, I though that evangelising what I learned in technical blogs was a good way to spread information and help people tackling various search related problems even more.
Contributions continued and I started to also engage more with the vibrant global community, I was in London after all, a melting pot of tech and ideas, search was no exception and I found in the Apache Lucene/Solr London meetup a valid ally.
A lot of conferences, meetups and talks followed, all around the world from far east in Tokyo and the far west of California, I personally enjoy to share, present and discuss ideas and it is a great way to improve ourself and help others!

In 2016 I founded Sease with the very scope of building a bridge between Academia and the industry through Open Source software and my community contributions continued steady, we built a cohesive group with my team and we kept helping, in 2019 we started the London Information Retrieval meetup and also university seminars(in Italy at the moment) to attract students and give them a better idea of the Open Source Information Retrieval landscape.

Apache Lucene/Solr have been central in all of this, for the last 10 years:

I am honoured to announce I am now an APACHE LUCENE/SOLR COMMITTER !
And I am happy, plain and simple 🙂

Thanks to all the people that supported my contributions over the past years, I’ll do my best to continue helping the community and improving the project.