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 12 years of experience in various branches of software, 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 the problems they face with Solr and Lucene. Also, he has been a speaker at various conferences around the world, such as Lucene Eurocon, Berlin Buzzwords, ApacheCon, and Lucene Revolution.

Rafał began his journey with Lucene in 2002, and it wasn't 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 this 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. Also, he is the author of the previous edition of this book and Mastering ElasticSearch. All these books have been published by Packt Publishing.