Solr Consulting

I’ve been working as a software developer for over 15 years, and have a strong interest in database technology.

In my role at Wingspan I researched Solr to make architectural recommendations, including implementing security in search, monitoring production servers, and indexing Office documents.

Contact: gary.sieling@gmail.com

Work History

Wingspan, an IQVIA Company: Life Sciences Platform
Work on Solr indexing
– Enforcing ACLs (security) in search
– Introduced docker – used to allow developers to test production-like scenarios (e.g. running HA zookeeper locally)

Thomson Reuters
Worked on a data warehousing app that generated statistics across all U.S. litigation for use in law firm marketing. My role was a cross between front-end UI developer and building an ORM layer over the data warehouse.

Side Projects

FindLectures.com
FindLectures.com is a curated search engine for quality online lectures, interviews, documentaries, and historically significant speeches. The video list can be navigated with a deep topic taxonomy, which allows the discovery of interesting niche topics.

Videos are ranked using over a dozen quality measures, so users can spend time learning, not looking. Ranking and inclusion are affected by topic variety and novelty, length, audio quality, and speaker presentation style. Other factors include the speaker having a unique background and material being the appropriate difficulty level for being a standalone content aimed at an educated audience.

X.509 Search
This search engine indexed domains to let users track SSL feature adoption.

“Expert” Search
Went to Solr/Lucene Revolution to learn about Solr. In the down time, I built a search engine that indexed our source code repositories. This allowed users to search for topics and find who on the team was an expert on a particular programming language or product feature. I turned this into a talk for the Philly Java Users group.

Another engineer on the team said this: “I thought he showed a lot of creativity in building the Solr/Git code search app. He was able to get it up and running quickly, and he seemed very comfortable learning the two APIs.”

StickStock.com
Simple image search engine for stock images. I took this site over from another owner, and used it to learn about SEO, and incorporated Shutterstock.com APIs.

Public Speaking

I’ve spoken at several meetups and conferences:

Solr/Lucene Revolution: Indexing Videos in Solr

AI With The Best: “Building a Discovery Engine with Machine Learning”

Philly Area Scala Enthusiasts: “Exploring Word2vec in Scala”

Philly Java Users Group: GPU Programming for Java Developers

Postgres Open, 2011: Immutable Data in Postgres

Contact: gary.sieling@gmail.com