[angilly]

Slightly off topic, but this jumped out at me: "In hindsight, I could've used something like Apache Solr or Lucene, but I just enjoyed finding the solution to a complex problem and building it myself..."

If I were your client I could see getting fairly annoyed at this. Is/was your client pissed that you spent (wasted) time building something from scratch when you could have just used something open source? Or were there legitimate reasons in this case to build something from scratch?

[rbrcurtis]

If clients knew there was a boxed solution available they either 1) wouldn't need you or 2) would tell you up front to use the boxed solution.