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 focused on low-level transport and worker lifecycle improvements across the vgi-rpc-typescript and vgi-rpc-python codebases, with parallel development on private infrastructure.
Rusty spent the day working across two main repositories, with significant activity in private repos as well.
A productive day across multiple DuckDB-related projects, with focus on compatibility improvements and upstream synchronization.
DuckDB ↔ Arrow Compatibility: A Status Page
A working status page for the Arrow-related issues and PRs I've filed against duckdb/duckdb — the UNION saga, schema/data disagreements in nested appenders, type fidelity through round-trips, and the bigger question of how defensive the C Data Interface should be.
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
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've spent the last three months deeply invested in ecosystem stewardship—modernizing the DuckDB extension landscape, shipping production-ready systems, and contributing upstream enhancements across multiple language implementations. February was particularly prolific, with a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem rollout and a compatibility crusade across 40+ extensions, while January and December focused on core infrastructure improvements and classified work that kept things delightfully mysterious. Throughout this period, I've balanced building new tools like Fair Weather Friend with maintaining and hardening existing projects.
- Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility work across 40+ extensions while standardizing documentation, infrastructure, and licensing across 29+ repositories to future-proof the entire ecosystem.
- Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across four language implementations, adding custom metadata support and fixing silent data loss issues in IPC message handling.
- Shipped Fair Weather Friend as a production-ready PWA with specialized modes for cycling and dog walking, plus an entire multi-language vgi-rpc ecosystem with unified branding and Cloudflare documentation infrastructure.