Eric Pugh is the co-founder of OpenSource Connections. Today he helps OSC’s clients, especially those in the ecommerce space, build their own search teams and improve their search maturity, both by leading projects and by acting as a trusted advisor.

He is an active maintainer on the OpenSearch Documentation project, and is focused on expanding the suite of Search Relevance features in the OpenSearch Project.

Fascinated by the craft of software development, Eric Pugh has been involved in the open source world as a tester, developer, committer and user for the past twenty years. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and co-authored the book Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server, now on its third edition.

OpenSource Connections mission to empower the world’s search teams comes directly from Eric’s belief in the open source software movement, and the importance of educating people to succeed with it, so that people own their technology.

When not thinking about search, Eric likes to get his hands dirty by building furniture. His next project is a reproduction Danish modern couch, using just hand tools!

Doug Turnbull helps clients build better agentic search systems. He led machine-learning-driven search initiatives at Reddit, significantly improving search relevance through Learning to Rank methods. Doug also advanced e-commerce search at Shopify and served as CTO at OpenSource Connections. He co-authored the influential book Relevant Search (Manning, 2016) and created popular open-source tools, including Quepid and the Elasticsearch Learning to Rank plugin. He regularly speaks at industry conferences, making search relevance accessible to engineers.