The Apache way of developing open source software relies on an active community of users, contributors and developers. All of us can contribute in some way or another. Being a committer means that you participate actively in the software development work and have write access to the source code repository. Each project is lead by a the PMC (Project Management Committee) which consists of some of the committers taking an extra responsibility of staking out the future of the project.

I’ve been actively participating in the Lucene/Solr community for a few years: Answering questions on the solr-user and dev mailing lists, reporting bugs, uploading patches etc. This week I was invited by the PMC as a committer on the Lucene/Solr project, joining the twenty-something other existing committers. I’m honored of this invite, which also shows that the ASF works as a true meritocracy, those who show persistent contribution over time will be given more responsibility.

Looking forward to my first commit and many more to come, improving an already great code base. If you have a JIRA issue you’d like me to work on, please suggest one in the comment field!