Hi Parse.ly fans.  Andrew here.  I just wanted to let you know that I presented Parse.ly at the NYC Search & Discovery Meetup on Thurs, Oct. 29.  The meetup is organized by Otis Gospodnetic (blog), who is one of the authors of Lucene in Action and the author of the forthcoming Solr in Action book.  It was graciously hosted at kgbweb (thanks for making that happen, Joe West!).

We make heavy use of Lucene and Solr on Parse.ly, so it was exciting to get an opportunity to present to a community of fellow technologists building systems with these excellent technologies.

Here is the abstract from the talk:

Parse.ly: Inside a modern RIA built with Solr
Andrew Montalenti
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Parse.ly is a rich, adaptive web application that discovers your unique interests to filter and prioritize content from countless news and blog sources on the web. This talk will introduce Parse.ly with a quick demo and then delve right into how the Parse.ly engineering team makes use of the Solr open source search engine. This will include discussion of initial design mistakes that were later revised and “real world issues” that were overcome in scaling a system that currently processes millions of articles per week. Finally, we will discuss the existing Solr and Python landscape, and how we at Parse.ly aim to help the Solr community with the open source release of high-quality, Pythonic components for doing common Solr tasks.

Otis has written about the talk, and the slides are online, as well.  Special thanks to my kickass Parse.ly colleague Didier for setting up our BitBucket repository and starting to tease the code out that is ready for the community.

Thanks also to everyone who attended, and if you have any questions about it, feel free to contact us.