At Pivotal we generally have a talk each Wednesday that regards some topic of professional interest. These “brown bag” talks generally involve something to do with interesting projects or new technologies that we might want to use; sometimes we invite speakers from outside Pivotal, sometimes Pivots do all the talking. We nearly always invite folks from outside Pivotal, and we always feed everyone lunch.

Unfortunately, keeping up a schedule of interesting talks takes a not insignificant effort, and most of us here have one or two other things taking up our time. So, sometimes a week rolls around without a scheduled speaker. Or, on rare occasions, a speaker bails or has to reschedule. When this happens we have to cancel our talk for the week, everyone misses a learning opportunity, and no one gets a free lunch.

So, we decided to fill in the gaps with less formal, but still informative, discussions of various topics. We plan to focus on technologies that we use on some of our projects, that some Pivots may know a lot about while others may know less. In short, a chance to spread around some knowledge.

This past week we had our first of these discussions on Solr. I took some notes and will publish some of what we discussed in subsequent posts. Lunch was buffet-style Burmese. Delicious.