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 spent the day advancing the vgi-rpc ecosystem across three language implementations, with a focus on production readiness, security hardening, and CI/infrastructure improvements.
A productive day spanning four repositories with substantial improvements across the vgi-rpc language implementations and community engagement with DuckDB.
Rusty focused on keeping DuckDB community extensions up to date with their upstream dependencies. Over the course of the day, he opened four dependency update PRs on duckdb/community-extensions:
GeoSilo vs GeoArrow + Byte Stream Split: Two Approaches to Geometry Compression
A detailed comparison of GeoSilo's delta-integer encoding against GeoArrow's columnar float64 layout with Parquet BYTE_STREAM_SPLIT, covering compression ratios, precision tradeoffs, and when each approach wins.
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
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've been balancing ecosystem stewardship with core database improvements over the past few months, tackling everything from DuckDB compatibility crusades to shipping production-ready multi-language systems. February was particularly intense—I orchestrated major infrastructure upgrades across 27 repositories while contributing upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow and shipping a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with unified branding. Underneath it all, I've maintained a steady drumbeat of community contributions, from debugging core internals to extending the DuckDB extension universe with new capabilities.
- Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility work across the Query-farm extension portfolio, opening 40+ PRs to future-proof extensions like airport, shellfs, and webmacro while standardizing documentation structures
- Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go implementations, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages and fixing silent data drops
- Shipped production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript with complete documentation infrastructure and unified branding