Rusty Conover
Data infrastructure engineer and founder of Query.Farm. Building DuckDB extensions, scaling data platforms, and writing about what I learn along the way.
Recent Activity
View all →Rusty kept things lean and focused today, making a single commit to vgi-rpc-website while channeling his open-source stewardship energy toward the DuckDB community. He weighed in twice on issue #6590 in duckdb-web, offering guidance on Python replacement scans with plain objects—a nice reminder that sometimes the most valuable work happens in the comments section, not the commit log.
Rusty kept things mysterious today, splitting focus between two classified operations: classified project received the lion's share of attention with three commits worth of tinkering, while classified project got a quick check-in behind closed doors. No public repos were touched, but there's clearly some interesting work happening in the shadows—the kind that keeps a developer's schedule delightfully unpredictable.
Rusty kept the gears turning across multiple fronts today: tinkering with flyctl infrastructure, diving into the depths of classified project and classified project behind closed doors, and lending a helpful hand to the DuckDB community by weighing in on issue #21342 regarding COMPRESS option support for in-memory databases. Meanwhile, steady progress marched on with commits to vgi-rpc-python, and classified operations hummed along across classified project and classified project. A day of measured momentum across the visible and invisible layers of the stack.
VGI Injector: A Tiny HTTPS Download-and-Execute Binary in Zig
I needed a self-contained binary that downloads a program over HTTPS and exec's it — small enough to run in a FROM scratch container with nothing else. Go and Rust couldn't get small enough. Zig could.
TIME Data Type Compatibility Across Databases
A survey of the TIME data type across 14 databases, comparing supported ranges, maximum values, and whether the special value 24:00:00 is accepted.
Telemetry for DuckDB Extensions Without the Pain
I open-sourced the telemetry client I use across Query.Farm's DuckDB extensions. It's two files, one function call, and it only collects platform and version info.
Releasing vgi-rpc: An RPC Framework Built on Apache Arrow
I built an RPC framework for Python that uses Apache Arrow IPC as the wire format and Python Protocol classes as the interface definition. No .proto files, no codegen — just type annotations.
Acronym-Aware Case Conversions in the DuckDB Inflector Extension
The Inflector extension for DuckDB now supports configurable acronyms, so case conversions preserve terms like HTML, API, and URL as fully uppercase — configured through a native DuckDB setting.
DuckDB Extension Development Workshop
DuckDB Developer Meeting #1 — Amsterdam, Netherlands
Building on Flight: Real-World Lessons from the DuckDB Airport Extension
Apache Arrow Summit 2025 — Paris, France
Query.Farm: Growing DuckDB Community Extensions
DuckDB Amsterdam Meetup #3 — Amsterdam, Netherlands
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've been deep in infrastructure stewardship and ecosystem expansion these past months, leading compatibility crusades across the DuckDB extension portfolio while shipping production-ready systems like the vgi-rpc ecosystem. My work spans from low-level performance archaeology and upstream Apache Arrow enhancements to high-level community stewardship—maintaining dozens of repositories while balancing transparent open-source contributions with classified operations. February culminated in a complete visual identity rollout and multi-language RPC implementation, but the real theme across January through February has been systematic ecosystem gardening at scale.
- Spearheaded DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across 40+ extensions with standardized documentation, future-proofing the entire Query-farm portfolio while opening upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go.
- Shipped production-ready vgi-rpc implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript with unified branding, comprehensive documentation infrastructure, and Apache 2.0 licensing across the ecosystem.
- Enhanced Fair Weather Friend with PWA support, stargazing mode, cycling weather scoring, and dog walking mode with paw safety alerts—transforming a utility into a delightfully practical application.