Steven Rowe
Member at The Apache Software Foundation
New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteven Rowe is an experienced search engineer with 18 years building and modernizing Lucene and Solr core components, and has been a long-standing committer and PMC leader within The Apache Software Foundation. He combines deep backend expertise—demonstrated by contributions like a UAX#29-based StandardTokenizer and enhancements to shingle/Unicode handling in Apache Lucene—with practical integration work such as extending Lucidworks' spark-solr connector to support custom Lucene analyzers and multi-valued inputs. Steven has applied his research background in NLP from Syracuse University to production systems, shaping text analysis pipelines used at Lucidworks and Amazon. He is comfortable at the intersection of open source governance and hands-on engineering, having chaired the Lucene PMC and shipped commercial search features. Based in New York, he brings a pragmatic focus on robust, test-covered implementations and edge-case handling that make search reliable at scale.
18 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Engineering Science, Engineering Science at Penn State UniversityBS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at Syracuse University
Stackoverflow
136reputation
6kreached
3answers
1question
Github Skills (20)
lucene10
tokenize10
apache-spark10
solr10
java10
text-analysis10
scala10
javas10
tokenizer10
unicode10
data-structure9
nlp9
data-structures9
algorithms8
documents6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
lucidworks/spark-solr
Nov 2015 - May 2016
Tools for reading data from Solr as a Spark RDD and indexing objects from Spark into Solr using SolrJ.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 commits, 4 PRs, 15 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Steven contributed significantly to the `spark-solr` project by implementing and enhancing the `LuceneAnalyzer` component. Their work included adding features to build custom Lucene analyzers using parameters and schemas, supporting multiple input columns and multi-valued inputs. Furthermore, the user developed Java and Scala tests to validate the functionality of the new `LuceneAnalyzer` features and address edge cases like missing values. These changes expanded the flexibility and capabilities of the project for text analysis and integration with Solr.
solrindexingsparksolrjrdd
apache/lucene
Nov 2021 - Nov 2021
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review in 1 day
Contributions summary:Steven was primarily involved in implementing and maintaining core functionalities of the Apache Lucene search software, evidenced by the implementation of a StandardTokenizer using the UAX#29 Standard, the addition of options for the ShingleFilter and the code base, and various changes related to updating the code to Unicode standards. The commits focused on enhancing and expanding the existing codebase by adding options and modifying core internal data structures. The user's work was essential for improving search capabilities and modernizing Lucene's codebase.
nosqlfulltext-searchsolrapachesearch-engine
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