Community over Code EU 2024 (ApacheCon EU)

For too long, we haven’t had an ApacheCon EU. But after 5 years of waiting, there was a Community over Code EU event again, this time in Bratislava. It was great to meet so many friends again, and I also had the chance to get up-to-date on the latest developments in Apache Solr.

Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)

The conference started with a panel discussion about the effects of the upcoming Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) of the EU. Everyone who distributes software is affected and should keep an open eye on it. It doesn’t matter if you provide commercial software or if you are contributing to an open-source project.

My key takeaway is that the relationship between software makers and open-source projects will probably change because if you bring software into the market, you have to provide security patches for 5 years. So if you rely on open-source software, you will have to make sure that you can get security-related patches applied and that you can integrate them into your software.

Vector Search with Apache Solr

Since Indoqa works on a Search Intelligence Platform and will make it publicly available by the end of the year, it is important for me to understand all the new features Solr provides. Although our search intelligence platform is search engine agnostic, I learned a lot about the challenges that vector-based search will bring. My takeaway is that search analytics will become even more important if you introduce vector-based search because otherwise, you will have a hard time understanding the impact on the quality and user behavior.

Apart from that, I learned that Solr is ready for vector search and shines in hybrid-search scenarios. It also comes—actually for quite some time—with an integrated Learn-to-Rank (LTR) solution which you will even be able to combine with Vector Search and Hybrid Search in the near future.