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 →A productive day focused on DuckDB development and maintenance across multiple VGI RPC language bindings.
DuckDB upstream contributions dominated the day, with six merged PRs addressing a range of bugs and features. Rusty fixed geometry coordinate corruption in scientific notation (PR #21893), corrected a sequence error message typo (PR #21892), and resolved a case-insensitive default database check vulnerability (PR #21863). Additional merged work included shell C++ bugs (PR #21857), column tag exposure via duckdb_columns() (PR #21794), secret drop-if-exists storage handling (PR #21877), filter propagation correctness (PR #21859), and qualified alias method call binding (PR #21865). He also opened PR #21898 on duckdb/duckdb to implement Arrow dense union support, along with supporting work on rustyconover/duckdb branches feature/arrow-dense-union-support and fix/arrow-union-type-ids-offset to address union type_ids buffer handling that ignores chunk offsets. Community engagement included comments on multiple issues providing technical feedback and supporting ongoing discussions.
A remarkably productive day focused on bug fixes and open-source stewardship across the DuckDB ecosystem.
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 and ecosystem work these past few months, balancing core database improvements with cross-language open-source contributions. February was all about DuckDB compatibility sprawl—future-proofing two dozen extensions while shipping a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem across Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript. I've also been leveling up Apache Arrow with custom metadata support and hunting down silent data drops, plus teaching weather apps to care about paw safety.
- Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility efforts across the Query-farm extension portfolio, opening 40+ PRs to standardize documentation and future-proof extensions like
airport,shellfs, andinflector. - Contributed upstream Arrow enhancements across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go implementations, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages that fixed production data loss scenarios.
- Shipped a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production-ready implementations, unified branding, Cloudflare-hosted documentation, and Apache 2.0 licensing across all language variants.