Nick Veenhof
I'm Nick Veenhof and employed by Acquia as a senior search engineer. You can easily find more about me by googling Nick Veenhof or my nickname Nick_vh. Before my job at Acquia I have obtained a Master in Information and Technology in Barcelona, Spain - which I must say is a wonderful city!
I'm also advocating Open Source and especially the Open Source project Drupal. This software came close to me during my Bachelor and got even closer when I started to work with several companies, building Drupal sites.
Currently I am working as a Senior Search engineer at Acquia where I started as an intern. I helped in the renewal of the Apache Solr project and supporting the feature requests of people. Such as multiple search environments, new UI, code cleanup, load testing. At Acquia we have a lot of clients that actively use Apache Solr as their search backed and I help support and update Currently we are re-engineering our search network to be bigger, better and easier to use and modify for our clients.
Also I'm active in the Drupal community as you can see in my drupal.org profile and I try to help people online with their first steps in the Solr system by the means of giving online support on IRC (#solr).
Presenter for the following session(s):
Exploring the world of Search
Site Building | IntermediateThis session is a new approach to explaining the world of Search in the Drupal ecosystem. I will go from a scratch Drupal site in a semi-continuous demo to a fully functional website that is using Faceted Search as its primary navigation.
I will assume there is a Apache Solr server available but will provide guidance on how to set it up locally.
The major part of the presentation will be without coding any custom modules so no solid experience with coding is really needed.
Use cases will go from e-commerce sites to personal blogs to a decent intranet search.
Also, if there is time, I'd like to debunk some of the myths of the "battle" between the Search modules (Apache Solr and Search API) and show you what we are doing to work together and get to a better solution for the both modules. Knowledge is king so it might be good to know where the challenges are when choosing one of the two.