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 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:
Rusty spent the day working across multiple codebases, with focused activity in the duckdb-excel extension. He made 7 commits to the repository, working on incremental improvements and refinements to the codebase.
Rusty focused on feature parity across the vgi-rpc language implementations today, rolling out HTTP cookie support for unary RPC methods. This involved coordinated work across three repositories.
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 deep in ecosystem stewardship across the DuckDB universe and Apache Arrow, balancing high-level infrastructure work with low-level performance optimization. February brought a major compatibility push for DuckDB 1.5 and the complete launch of the vgi-rpc ecosystem, while January and December focused on dependency gardening, core database improvements, and mysterious classified operations. Throughout these months, I've contributed upstream enhancements to critical projects while maintaining the health of dozens of community extensions.
- Led a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility crusade, opening 40+ PRs to future-proof extensions and standardizing documentation across 29 repositories
- Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across four language implementations, adding custom metadata support and fixing silent data drops
- Shipped a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production-ready implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript, including unified branding and documentation infrastructure