Rafał Kuć is a born team leader and software developer. Currently, he is working as a consultant and a software engineer at Sematext Group, Inc., where he concentrates on open source technologies, such as Apache Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch, and the Hadoop stack. He has more than 13 years of experience in various software branches—from banking software to e-commerce products. He is mainly focused 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 website, where he tries to share his knowledge and help people with their problems related to Solr and Lucene. He is also a speaker at various conferences around the world, such as Lucene Eurocon, Berlin Buzzwords, ApacheCon, Lucene Revolution, and DevOps Days.

He began his journey with Lucene in 2002, but 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 came Solr, 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 the author of Solr 3.1 Cookbook, its update—Solr 4.0 Cookbook—and its third release—Solr Cookbook, Third Edition. He is also the author of Elasticsearch Server and its second edition, along with the first edition of Mastering Elasticsearch, all published by Packt Publishing.