Rafał Kuć is a born team leader and software developer. He currently works as a consultant and a software engineer at Sematext Group, Inc., where he concentrates on open source technologies such as Apache Lucene and Solr, ElasticSearch, and Hadoop stack. He has more than 11 years of experience in various software branches, from banking software to e-commerce products. He focuses mainly on Java but is open to every tool and programming language that will make the achievement of his goal easier and faster. Rafał is also one of the founders of the solr.pl site where he tries to share his knowledge and help people with their problems with Solr and Lucene. He is also a speaker for various conferences around the world, such as Lucene Eurocon, Berlin Buzzwords, and ApacheCon.

Rafał began his journey with Lucene in 2002, and it wasn't exactly love at first sight. When he came back to Lucene in late 2003, he revised his thoughts about the framework and saw the potential in search technologies. Then Solr came along and that was it. He started working with ElasticSearch in the middle of 2010. Currently, Lucene, Solr, ElasticSearch, and information retrieval are his main points of interest.

Rafał is also the author of Apache Solr 3.1 Cookbook and the update to it—Apache Solr 4 Cookbook—published by Packt Publishing.