Cedric Hurst

Cedric Hurst is the current principal at Spantree Technology Group. Cedric previously worked as a Solr Consultant for Threadless from March 2011 to March 2012.

Threadless is a Chicago-based company focused on crowdsourcing product design and democratizing commerce. Over 10 years ago, the founders started Threadless as a simple online t-shirt design company. However, rather than develop and curate the designs themselves, Threadless turned the reigns over to their community. Users submit their designs and have other users vote on which ones they want made. With this model, Threadless grew to over one million users and 20 million items sold per year. In 2008, they were named “the most innovative small company in America” by Inc Magazine.

As a technical organization, though, they freely acknowledged that one of their biggest problems was product search. Threadless engaged Cedric and the rest of the Spantree team to help with their search, which was exclusively SQL-based. At the same time, Threadless was in the midst of migrating from PHP to Python and Django.

Cedric created a proof of concept over the course of a long weekend and worked with the Threadless team to map Django models into Solr documents, optimized ORM fetching strategies for batch retrieval. Cedric also created a RESTful search API using Django JSON views and added support for Solr field collapsing in the Sunburnt library, contributing back as a pull request.

Cedric Hurst has a Bachelor of Science in Information and Decision Sciences from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Peter Murphy - Senior Software Engineer, Sebastian Otaegui - Senior Systems Engineer, and Roberto Guerra - Senior Software Engineer report to Cedric Hurst.