Ahmad Maher Abdelwhab is currently working at Knowledgeware Technologies as an open source developer. He has over 10 years of experience, with special development skills in PHP, Drupal , Perl, Ruby On Rails , Java, XML, XSL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, SQL, and Linux. He graduated in computer science from Mansoura University in 2005.

Markus Klose is a search and big data consultant at SHI GmbH & Co.KG in Germany. He is in charge of project management and supervision, project analysis, and delivering consulting and training services.

Most of Markus' daily business is related to Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, and Fast ESP. He travels across Germany, Switzerland, and Austria to provide his services and knowledge.

On a regular basis, you can find him at meets, user groups, or conferences such as Berlin Buzzword oder Solr Revolution, where he speaks about Apache Solr.

Besides search-related training and consulting, he is currently establishing additional areas of work. He uses tools such as Logstash and Kibana to fulfill customer requirements in monitoring and analytics.

Thanks to the experience gained from his daily work, Markus wrote the first German book on Apache Solr (Einführung in Apache Solr) with his colleague, Daniel Wrigley. It was published by O'Reilly in February 2014.

Besides writing, Markus spends a lot of his free time using his knowledge and programming skills to work on and contribute to open source projects such as Latin stemmer and number converter for Solr (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-4229) and SolrAppender for log4j 2 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LOG4J2-618) .

Julian Lam is a cofounder and core maintainer of NodeBB, a type of free and open source forum software built upon modern web tools, such as Node.js and Redis. He has spoken several times on topics related to Javascript in the workplace and best practices for hiring. Julian is an advocate of client-side rendering, which can be used to build highly performant web applications.