Born to code, David Smiley is a senior software engineer, book author, conference speaker, and instructor. He has 12 years of experience in the defense industry at MITRE, specializing in Java and Web technologies. David is the principal author of "Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server", the first book on Solr, published by PACKT in 2009. He also developed and taught a two-day course on Solr for MITRE. David plays a lead technical role in a large-scale Solr project in which he has implemented geospatial search based on geohash prefixes, wildcard ngram query parsing, searching multiple multi-valued fields at coordinated positions, part-of-speech search using Lucene payloads, and other things. David consults as a Solr expert on numerous projects for MITRE and its government sponsors. He has contributed code to Lucene and Solr and is active in the open-source community. Prior to his Solr work, David first used Lucene back in 2000, as well as Hibernate-Search and Compass since then. He also used the competing Endeca commercial product, too, but hopes to never use it again.