Q1 Review & Q2 Goals

At the start of the year, I set myself some goals for Q1.

Q1 Achievements

I met the majority of my Q1 goals. My main professional achievements (outside of work) were:

• Contributed a Rust implementation of Apache Arrow to the Apache Software Foundation
• Resurrected an open source project I have been working on for some time and reached a milestone where I could publish the project and start talking about it. Currently 271 people have starred the project on GitHub and 7 people have contributed code.
• I learned just enough HTML5/CSS3 to be able to make a website for my open source project that doesn’t totally suck https://www.datafusion.rs/.
• I published some blog posts about my project, with one of those posts attracting 1.4k visitors in a single day.

The goal I did not do anything about was to re-launch the “Keep Calm and Learn Rust” website. I realize now that this site is just not important to me so I will close it down or transfer it to someone who has the motivation to do something with it.

Q2 Goals

Now that I’ve found some direction, my Q2 goals were easy to decide on.

• Continue to develop the Rust implementation of Apache Arrow and help others contribute to the project.
• Continue to enhance DataFusion. Specifically:
  • Add support for reading and writing parquet files (using the parquet crate that was recently released).
  • Add support for simple distributed partitioned queries
• Improve the design of my blog to make it look a little more professional

Working on DataFusion and Apache Arrow has been a great way for me to improve my skills in the Rust programming language and understanding fundamentals of distributed data processing.

Want to learn more about query engines? Check out my book "How Query Engines Work".