David Smiley
Independent Consultant at Freelance
Southwest Harbor, Maine, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Smiley is an independent consultant and Apache Lucene/Solr search expert with over 15 years of continuous search-focused experience, recently concentrating on middle-tier Java, Solr, and architecture. He has led large-scale SolrCloud migrations in production (most recently at Salesforce) and regularly contributes to the core Apache Lucene and Solr projects, including significant spatial and thread-safety improvements. Comfortable across the full stack, he pairs hands-on Java/Kotlin backend work with front-end and database familiarity, but prefers solving performance-sensitive and concurrency-heavy problems. His open-source contributions include refactoring Lucene spatial APIs to support complex geometries and hardening Solr’s codebase and test suite for platform robustness. He’s especially interested in geospatial algorithms and multi-threaded programming, bringing both deep technical rigor and clear communication to client engagements. Based in Southwest Harbor, Maine, he combines consulting agility with a long track record of mentoring and delivering inventive search solutions.
15 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at Northeastern University
Stackoverflow
4,112reputation
223kreached
53answers
1question
lucene
top-5%
solr
top-1%
git
top-5%
Github Skills (29)
lucene10
search-engine10
licensing10
multithreading10
apache-http-client10
proxy10
solr10
apache10
java10
http-proxy10
servlet10
javas10
http-client10
thread10
backend10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
locationtech/spatial4j
May 2011 - Dec 2021
LocationTech Spatial4j: A Geospatial Library for Java
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 8 reviews, 674 commits in 10 years 9 months
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on refactoring and updating source headers. This involved adding, updating, and correcting copyright headers for files from various sources, including those originating from Chris Male's fork of ElasticSearch and the ASF. The user's commits also addressed header consistency and ensured the correct licensing information was applied across multiple files. Additionally, the user updated headers for MITRE and VoyagerSearch contributions.
geospatialogcgeofencegeodesyjava
apache/solr
Feb 2023 - Mar 2023
Apache Solr open-source search software
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2204 reviews, 12 commits, 445 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:David primarily contributed to improving the code quality and maintainability of Apache Solr. Their work involved replacing deprecated annotations with more modern alternatives from JCIP, ensuring thread safety, and annotating various classes and methods to prevent potential issues. The user also fixed build and test configurations, addressing issues related to Windows path separators and test system properties, improving the robustness of the test suite.
nosqlsolrapachesearch-enginebackend
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