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 pushed commits across two repositories today, continuing work on upcoming releases.
Rusty opened two complementary PRs addressing a fundamental limitation in DuckDB: the inability to interleave streaming SELECT queries with DML operations (UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE) within the same transaction.
Rusty spent the day coordinating a synchronized v0.6.0 release across the vgi-rpc ecosystem while addressing critical bugs upstream in DuckDB.
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 spent the last few months deep in ecosystem stewardship, upgrading DuckDB extensions for compatibility while shipping production-ready infrastructure across multiple languages and platforms. February was particularly focused—I led a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility push across 40+ extensions, contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across four language implementations, and launched a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with unified branding and documentation. The work balances systematic infrastructure improvements with delightful product polish, from fixing silent data drops in production systems to shipping weather apps with dog-walking safety alerts.
- Completed a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility crusade across the Query-farm extension portfolio, future-proofing 40+ extensions like airport, shellfs, webmacro, and inflector while standardizing documentation structures.
- Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go, 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 unified branding, Cloudflare-hosted documentation, and Apache 2.0 licensing.