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ApacheCon Europe 2007 is over, and it was kind of busy for me. Joost has opened the invitation gates last Thursday (no more limits) and people have rushed, overloading our backend. A stressful day (and night) was needed to fix it with Pier, Torsten and the team in Toulouse, and it now runs faster than ever.

As always, ApacheCon is a great occasion to meet people. Among the notable encounters for me:

• Stefano, which I had not met for years, and gave a very inspirational talk on growing communities by comparing them to plants (hey, put your slides online!)
• J. Aaron Farr, explaining Stefano and I the incredible complexity of the chinese language.
• some of the core Wicket developers, Eelco Hillenius, Martijn Dashorst, Johan Compagner and Matej Knopp: great guys that care a lot about their project and are eager to learn about how healthy communities work.
• David Nuescheler, who came with promo material for Day containing subliminal messages in an esoteric language that only true geeks can understand!
• Peter and his wife Tricia, who was so amazed when I explained her how the Airbus company works. Big multi-national european consortiums are strange beasts for US people!
• Bertrand and his hilarious void talk() ligthning talk,
• The Hippo/Sourcesense crew led by Arjé and Gianugo.

On the few talks I was able to attend, the two sessions on Lucene by Yonik Seeley and Grant Ingersoll were full of useful tips, and made me realize that Solr is much more than just an HTTP/XML front-end: it's the Lucene user's power toolbox!

Hopefully next ApacheCon will be less busy!