Celebrating 20 years of Apache Lucene: Community

Apache Lucene turned 20 this year, and to celebrate, we've reached out to folks involved in the project to talk about its past, present, and future. In this week's blog, we're taking a look at the Lucene community. In addition to hearing about Lucene's strong and diverse community from its founder, Doug Cutting, we'll also feature different Project Management Committee (PMC) members, committers, and contributors — highlighting how the community got started, why its made Lucene what it is today, and what they love about it. Let's start with Uwe:

I started to get in contact with Lucene around 2005 while investigating ways how to effectively query numerics, and in my many years of working with the community, I’ve earned some funny nicknames. One is “Generics Policeman” — which was my reward for introducing generics in the Java 5 migration! I’m also known for “heaving committing” and changing half of the codebase in a single commit. Although I can behave a bit harsh, some fans in the community created a Twitter account (@UweSays) posting my best statements on Lucene mailing lists. Working together with the community is a great pleasure, and not only when drinking beers at one of the many conferences!

- Uwe Schindler, Apache Lucene PMC

Lucene wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't for the community that's grown around it. So let's hear from them...

Visit our Apache Lucene timeline to see how it became the search engine that powers digital experiences worldwide.