What happened? Did another year really just whizz past me? I am still typing 2024 dates, but it is true. 2025 is here, and soon we will also switch to the new lunar year, so it is time to look back and recapture my year with Trino and Commander Bun Bun.
In a nutshell, my 2024 was a very good year for Trino, Commander Bun Bun, and the Trino contributor and user community. Check out my recap blog post for the Trino project itself for some overall stats and information, and then let’s see what I got done.
Events and public advocacy
One of the aspects of my involvements with Trino is organizing events, creating advocacy resources, and acting as host, moderator, and presenter. And it has been a busy year:
Occasionally joined by Cole Bowden, I organized and ran Trino Community Broadcast episodes 54 to 67 covering a large variety of topics. We talked about AI a bit , JavaScript, different connectors and data sources, Open Policy Agent, OpenTelemetry and OpenMetrics, Kubernetes, and of course about the changes in all the Trino releases of the year.
In April I visited Seattle to attend the Open Source Summit, connect with many speakers and attendees, and then present about Trino at the inaugural meeting of the Data Engineer Things group in Seattle.
During that time Anna Schibli, Monica Miller, and myself were already busy working towards Trino Fest in Boston, sponsored by Starburst. Call for speakers, announcements, venue allocation, speaker selection and lots of other tasks kept us busy. The event was a huge success with many great sessions forthe international audience on site and joining us remotely. We even had Commander Bun Bun join us!
Over the summer I got invited to present at the Open Source Data Summit and together with Will Morrison I presented “Trino Gateway – because one Trino cluster is not enough“. More about Trino Gateway shortly…
For the Starburst conference datanova I organized and moderated a very interesting panel discussion about data lakehouses, where we covered many aspects from the history, the current status with Iceberg, Delta Lake, Snowflake, Databricks, and the various other players and projects, and the future with Trino.
In preparation for Trino Summit I created more SQL and Trino-related training material and ran two sessions. “Moving supplies” with Dain Sundstrom and “Getting ready to summit” with Martin Traverso.
Finally we rounded the year out with a two-day Trino Summit packed with great talks that revealed some very impressive Trino usage scenarios and deployments. It was great preparing the event, selecting the speakers and working with them all, running the AI panel, presenting about the Trino Gateway project and hosting the event with Monica.
Trino website improvements and messaging
A lot of the work on events for Trino surfaces on the Trino website, but there is always much more to do. Despite my limited graphics design experience and my rusty web development, I shipped numerous improvements to the website, with a heavy focus on actual content. Have a look at the ecosystem section, the expanded users page, the improved navigation, and the expanded development section and resources.
Overall I authored and merged over 100 pull requests, helped with review and merge for many others, and wrote 14 blog posts.
Trino maintainer work
When it comes to the actual Trino codebase and working as a maintainer I was certainly busy. I triaged a lot of Trino PRs and shepherded them along with other maintainers and contributors.
At the end of the year I was the top reviewer with 1623 reviews, 1489 comments, and 54 approvals. I ended up as top ten commit author with 177 merged commits, and top ten merger with 88 merged PRs. Not too shabby given given the small scope I work on with my focus on docs, build process, and a number of smaller aspects, since I don’t get a chance to focus on code only.
Props for the numbers go to Jan Was to his Trino-powered PR metrics dashboard for all the numbers.
Trino Gateway maintainer and coordinator
Trino Gateway has been another focus of my work, although given the diversity of all the things I do “focus” might be overstating it. I certainly would like to get even more done on Trino Gateway. Leading the project, running regular dev sync meetings, and PR reviews alone kept me pretty busy. I was also able to be a top contributor with changes across docs, build, releases, setup, and even some code. And I presented about Trino Gateway twice:
Work on other Trino projects
When it comes to further projects and efforts, the following stand out in my mind:
Helm chart
Worked on the Trino Helm charts and ended up kicking off a large amount of improvements managed by Jan Was with numerous contributors. Now the Trino Helm chart is full of features and a great way to manage Trino deployments on Kubernetes. Check out the presentation from Trino Summit for more info.
JavaScript client
Initiated the contribution of the Trino JavaScript client from Filipe Regadas to the Trino project and managed the onboarding of the project in the Trino community up to first releases. On the way I also contributed a bit here and there. I am really looking forward to more community work in this project. I also hosted Emily Sunaryo with her demo project in Trino Community Broadcast 63.
C# and ADO.Net client
I established a great collaboration with George Fischer and Microsoft. The current highlight of this work is the contribution of the Trino C# and ADO.NET client and the onboarding of this project towards a first release. George also presented at Trino Summit 2024 about the project. I am really excited about the future of this effort and the impact it will have on Trino and many Trino users. It promises to unlock a slew of new client integrations and applications.
Learning material
I also provided a little bit assistance for the new Japanese edition of my book Trino: The Definitive Guide and on work for a new Chinese book about Trino.
Trino community leadership
When it comes to “leading” a large open source community, a lot of the work is around connecting people, providing avenues for collaboration, and generally helping users out. Besides helping our users and contributors out on our Slack a lot, I am proud about the following achievements:
- Advocated, established, and managed monthly Trino contributor calls with public meeting notes, recordings, and a lot of great collaboration
- Set out to run monthly Trino maintainer calls to establish closer collaboration and a forum to exchange ideas and meet other maintainers and sub project maintainers.
- Found contacts at numerous companies sponsoring and supporting Trino directly or indirectly, and made it possible to expand sponsorship going forward.
- Connected maintainers, users, and contributors across companies to create collaborative efforts around Trino, different specific aspects, and sub projects. Good examples are Trino Gateway and the new effort to work towards a Kubernetes operator for Trino, a project I will continue in 2025.
- Lastly, I am proud of the improved guidance and documentation for contributors and user on the website, the docs, and the various code repos
What’s next?
Looking forward to continuing the trend, diving deep into the code everywhere, and maximizing the positive impact of all other contributors and users. We are making Trino a great success and platform for everyone together.
Special thanks
As a facilitator to a community, my thanks go out to all my friends and collaborators. There are too many of you to all mention. You all know who you are and how we worked together. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Let’s do more of that again in 2025!
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