Fun story time: I was at twitter for a few years and tended to write quick hacks that people wanted to replace with better engineering.

We never had scala thrift bindings, and the Java ones were awkward from Scala, so I wrote a thrift plugin in JRuby that used the Ruby thrift parser and ERb web templates to output some Scala code. Integrated with our build pipeline, worked great for the company.

I also wrote one era of twitter's service deploy system on a hacked up Capistrano.

These projects took a few days because they were dirty hacks, but I still got a below perf review for getting easily distracted, because I didn't yet know how to sell those company-wide projects.

Anyhow, about a month before that team kicked off Parquet, I showed them a columnar format I made for a hackweek based on Lucene's codec packages, and was using to power a mixpanel-alike analytics system.

I'm not sure whether they were inspired or terrified that my hack would reach production, but I like to think I had a small hand in getting Parquet kickstarted.