Tim Saucer, PMC member and primary maintainer of Apache DataFusion’s Python bindings, joins PlusOne to talk about how he went from frustrated Spark user to open source maintainer — and how the project is using LLM-powered “skills” to keep its Python API in full parity with the upstream Rust library. He walks through the three developer-facing skills they’ve built (expose new APIs, make them Pythonic, audit the user-facing docs) and shares practical advice for other projects looking to adopt a similar approach: treat your skills like test-driven software, constrain the agent to one shot, and use your existing examples as the ground truth.
The conversation also covers what’s next for DataFusion Python, including lambda functions on array columns, distributed compute via DataFusion Comet and Ballista, and how a single-line code change can move a local workflow to a distributed cluster.
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More about DataFusion at https://datafusion.apache.org/
Andrew Lamb, PMC Chair of Apache DataFusion, explains how this open source query engine lets teams build specialized analytic databases without reinventing SQL from scratch. We cover how DataFusion grew out of Apache Arrow, why it split into its own top-level project, how it attracted nearly 1,000 contributors, and what the rise of AI coding agents means for an embeddable database engine. If you’ve ever wondered what sits under the hood of the modern data stack — and how open source communities form around infrastructure no end user ever sees — this is the conversation.
In the March board meeting, the Apache Software Foundation seated a new board of directors, which included three new members. Emmanuel Lecharny has been around the ASF for a long time, but this is his first term on the board. He discusses some of his backstory, and his priorities for this board term.
In the March board meeting, the Apache Software Foundation seated a new board of directors, which included three new members. One of them, Chris Dutz, had served a few terms before. In this interview, he talks about his priorities for the coming year on the board.
Apache Grails recently graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top-level Apache project. But it’s far from a new project, having been started 20 years ago! James Fredley, and James Daugherty from the Grails PMC talk about why they came to Apache, along with many other topics.
In this interview, Dave Fisher talks about the Tooling effort, which he heads, and the specific projects they’ll be working on.
Danny Angus is the new VP of Infrastructure. In this interview he discusses some of the priorities for the coming year.
I talked with Matt Pavlovich about the recent release of 6.1.7, and we also talked bout 6 in general, and what’s on the roadmap for the future.
