Hi everyone, Many of you may have come across me spamming the mailing list a little with my discussions and feedback threads over the past few months :) For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on my GSoC 2026 project with Iceberg and as I wrap things up, I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone in the Iceberg community for all the help along the way. Throughout the project, discussions with the community, benchmarking and reviews helped shape the direction of the work, eventually leading to EagerInputFile / EagerInputStream and their integration into the Parquet read path. I’ve also documented the project, benchmarks, and contributions here in my final work product [1].
A BIG BIG thank you to my mentor Russell Spitzer for his guidance throughout the project. I especially appreciated our discussions around design, benchmarking, and approaching changes from a reviewer’s perspective. I’ve learned a great deal from those conversations.I’d like to thank the community members who helped along the way — just to name a few: Anoop Johnson, Anurag Mantripragada, Daniel Weeks, Danny Jones, Holden Karau, Huaxin Gao, Kevin Liu, Mukund Thakur, Neelesh Salian, Péter Váry, Prashant Singh, Steve Loughran, Vaquar Khan, and Yufei Gu — for their feedback, reviews, and discussions. And thank you to everyone else in the community who took the time to review, discuss, or help along the way. Although the GSoC period is coming to an end, this definitely isn't a goodbye. I’ve been involved with Iceberg even before GSoC, and now that I have a much better understanding of the project and its internals, I’m excited to continue contributing, particularly around V4. Thanks everyone! [1] https://github.com/varun-lakhyani/gsoc-apache-iceberg/blob/main/README.md -- Lakhyani Varun
