Fascinated by the 'craft' of software development, Eric Pugh has been heavily involved in the open source world as a developer, committer, and user for the past five years. He is an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation and lately has been mulling over how we solve the problem of finding answers in datasets when we don't know the questions ahead of time to ask. In biotech, financial services, and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source search software. As a speaker, he has advocated the advantages of Agile practices with a focus on testing in search engine implementation. Eric became involved with Solr when he submitted the patch SOLR-284 for Parsing Rich Document types such as PDF and MS Office formats that became the single most popular patch as measured by votes! The patch was subsequently cleaned up and enhanced by three other individuals, demonstrating the power of the open source model to build great code collaboratively. SOLR-284 was eventually refactored into Solr Cell as part of Solr version 1.4. He blogs at http://www.opensourceconnections.com/.
