Lucene Hackdays in London & Montreal

We ran a couple of Lucene Hackdays over the last couple of weeks: a chance to get together with other people working on open source search, learn from each other and to try and improve both Lucene and associated software. Our first Hackday was in London, hosted by Mimecast at their offices near Moorgate...Continue reading

A fabulous FactHack for Full Fact

Last week we ran a hackday for Full Fact, hosted by Facebook in their London office. We had planned to gather a room full of search experts from our London Lucene/Solr Meetup and around twenty people attended from a range of companies including Bloomberg, Alfresc...Continue reading

Just the facts with Solr & Luwak

It won't have escaped your notice that factchecking is very much in the news recently due to last year's political upheavals in both the US and UK and the suspected influence of fake news on voters. Both traditional and social media organisations are making efforts in this area; examples include Channel 4 and Faceboo...Continue reading

Not one, but three Lucene hackdays coming soon!

We're always keen to get more people involved in the Lucene search community - there's always lots to do, from deep hacking of the core code, to testing with different frameworks and clients, to creating documentation and examples. It's also just over fifteen years since Tom Mortimer and I founded Flax and we thought we should mark this birthday with some kind of event! So I'm thus very happy to announce we'll be involved in three Lucene hackday events over the next two months: Firstly, Continue reading

London Lucene Solr Meetup – Enterprising attitudes to open source search & query completion strategies

Last night the London Lucene Solr Meetup was hosted by Elsevier in their Finsbury Square offices. Our first speaker was Martin White, expert consultant, author of many books about enterprise search and intranets and visiting professor at the University of Sheffield (oh, and Fl...Continue reading

Cambridge Search Meetup – Elasticsearch Hackday

Last Friday we hosted a hackday featuring Elasticsearch in Cambridge, following a similar event last year focused on Apache Lucene/Solr. Around 20 people attended from organisations working in sectors including analytics, digital music, bioinformatics and e-commerce, and all the Flax team were there as well. We started wi...Continue reading