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 managing dependency updates and providing community support across the DuckDB ecosystem.
A high-velocity day focused on filter accessor improvements for DuckDB and coordinated updates across the Query-farm extension ecosystem.
Rusty spent the day focused on modernizing the WebAssembly build infrastructure and supporting community work across multiple DuckDB-related projects.
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 DuckDB ecosystem stewardship these past few months, orchestrating dependency upgrades across dozens of community extensions while shipping production-ready infrastructure like the vgi-rpc multi-language ecosystem and Fair Weather Friend PWA. The work spans both high-level architectural improvements—from Apache Arrow custom metadata support to DuckDB core enhancements—and meticulous ecosystem gardening that keeps extensions compatible and well-documented. Alongside the open-source momentum, classified projects have added their own share of interesting challenges to the mix.
- Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across 40+ extensions and standardized documentation across 29 repositories while contributing upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across four language implementations
- Shipped a complete multi-language vgi-rpc ecosystem with production implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript, complete with unified branding and documentation infrastructure
- Debugged core DuckDB internals including aggregate function callbacks, optimizer bugs with order-sensitive aggregates, and contributed security improvements like flagging encryption key leaks in database output