Blog post about 1000 distinct committers / history of the project

[alamb]

@nuno-faria just noticed apache/datafusion-site#162 (review)

Also, Datafusion hit recently 1000 unique contributors, in case it's relevant to mention here.

It would be great to write a blog post , similar in spirit to Arrow's 10th anniversaty blog

https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2026/02/12/arrow-anniversary/

Some neat content woudl be:

1. Project history (there is some additional content here): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M9nsHLdOseDvRxaL28KnB7DPkrPEZOk19dpFHo3S6mw/edit
2. summarize curernt users / usecases -- there is some content here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1h5HZwG2CQoXIU_Rdzs_cDIOs3lBRHKJi_ISkn4IHVHk/edit?slide=id.g361b54a0025_1_807#slide=id.g361b54a0025_1_807
3. Look to the future

One interesting usecase that @gene-bordegaray and I were taliing about recently was that DataFusion's structure allows replacing legacy processing systems incrementally (e.g. from the bottom of their plans up) -- with a full on systems like Trino they would likely need to do it all at once, which would be much riskier. I think DataDog falls into this category given their public presentations. I know of other systems that do but I am not sure how much is public

[gene-bordegaray]

This is awesome 🚀
@alamb brought up the incremental adoption feature / use case and think that it would be great to highlight in the post. I presume this will be even more valuable in the future as systems are seeing rapid changes to their requirements. I think more discussion in the community about how this is being used / where they see it going would be great 👍

[theirix]

I am wondering how this GitHub contributor list is composed for an Apache-structured project. I don't see my commits there. Does it only include committers/maintainers who are committing and merging PRs?

[nuno-faria]

I am wondering how this GitHub contributor list is composed for an Apache-structured project. I don't see my commits there. Does it only include committers/maintainers who are committing and merging PRs?

@theirix I think that list only shows the top 100 per number of contributions. Using the GitHub API shows all, including you:

  {
    "login": "theirix",
    ...
    "contributions": 15
  },

[theirix]

I am wondering how this GitHub contributor list is composed for an Apache-structured project. I don't see my commits there. Does it only include committers/maintainers who are committing and merging PRs?

@theirix I think that list only shows the top 100 per number of contributions. Using the GitHub API shows all, including you:

{
"login": "theirix",
...
"contributions": 15
},

It works quite strangely, since the "Last 24 months" view shows only 72 contributors, with 1 to 1315 commits. So I believe the project has even more contributors, given that GitHub statistics are flaky.

[alamb]

I suggest using git directly to count contributors if we want to pubish numbers

[Adez017]

Hi @alamb , would love to draft a blog for this one . perhaps need some clarifications .

[alamb]

Sounds great @Adez017 !

[Adez017]

take

[Adez017]

@alamb , what should we primarily focus on ?
is it history or impact or how datafusion is been outperforming . let me know your vision /thoughts.