Well, let's see. I used to work for a company that had acquired
several other products. The small group I worked in supported
...5 different search engines. One of which had to be rebooted
periodically (every hour?) to keep from bringing down the
server.
In the time it took me to get a response to an email asking for
support from one of those vendors I'd found Lucene, downloaded
it, indexed some of our content and was searching it.
Then the vendor responded with "that's an invalid serial number,
we can't talk to you until you give us the right one". I was hooked
from there on.
So we replaced another one of the search engines, also replaced
a SQL solution, and put a new product on Lucene. By the end of
the third one, I thought to myself "Gee, there's a certain
commonality among these, I wonder if I could write something that
was configuration-driven to make this even easier". Fortunately I
found Solr before trying to write one myself....
The folks on the Lucene user's list gently helped me along
with my understanding of Lucene, and I started answering
the questions I could. I found three things out.
1> trying to regularly answer a question or two helped
me understand nooks and crannies better.
2> it freed up people who really knew things to help me even more.
3> they invited me to be a committer. This part was totally
unexpected I must say. I contributed a few patches along
the way, mostly around the edges in the jUnit area.
Personal stuff:
My wife and I have a daughter who's the apple of our eye, and
her husband adores her. What more could we ask of him?
Along the way we built our house 20+ years ago. OK
I don't do drywall (too slow) or electrical (don't like fires) or
masonry (don't have the skill). But most of the rest of it worked out.
And my wife and I even stayed married.
Graduated U of Mich three times, once in elementary ed, then a bs
and ms in computer science. Worked in the industry since then,
mostly in the publishing area (typesetting systems Z80-based),
a newspaper editorial system, a corporate search provider
and most recently for a large information provider to business,
research and educational customers. I guess I've been in the
tech fields for...er...30 years. Siiggghhhh. Do I get "grandfather"
status?
Anyway, I'm flattered by the invitation to become a committer and
it looks like I need to actually start digging into the code...
Thanks PMC
Erick
On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 4:07 PM, Robert Muir <rcm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm pleased to announce that the Lucene PMC has voted for Erick
> Erickson as a committer.
>
> Erick, its tradition that you introduce yourself with a brief bio.
>
> Congratulations!
>
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