Celebrating 20 years of Apache Lucene: Origins

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 going to take a look at origins. In addition to hearing Lucene's origin story from its founder, Doug Cutting, we'll also feature different Project Management Committee (PMC) members, committers, and contributors — highlighting how each got their start with this amazing open source search project. Let's start with Nhat:

I started contributing to Apache Lucene when I was working with Simon Willnauer to support soft deletes in Apache Lucene, which can be used to maintain the history of documents. Elasticsearch's cross-cluster replication feature was built upon this foundation. I was very impressed by the quality of Apache Lucene of not only the code but also the community. In June 2018, I was very happy and excited to be an Apache Lucene committer. Since then, I kept contributing to Apache Lucene mainly focusing on the IndexWriter component. In March 2020, I felt honored to join the Apache Lucene PMC.

- Nhat Nguyen, Apache Lucene PMC

Everyone has their own unique story for how they got started with Lucene. Watch some of these stories unfold...

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