SBTB 2023: Julien Le Dem, Ten years of building open source standards.

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Ten years of building open source standards: From Parquet to Arrow to OpenLineage. Over the last decade I have been lucky enough to contribute a few successful open source projects to the data ecosystem. In this talk I’ll share the story of how these projects came to be and what made their success possible. I’ll describe the ideation process and early growth of the Apache Parquet columnar format and show how this led to the creation of its in-memory alter-ego Apache Arrow. I’ll end with showing how this experience enabled the success of OpenLineage, an LFAI&Data project that brings observability to the data ecosystem. Along the way, I’ll talk about the key elements that catalyzed their growth, from project focus to governance to community. More details available here: https://www.scale.bythebay.io/post/julien-le-dem-ten-years-of-building-open-source-standards-from-parquet-to-arrow-to-openlineage