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 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.
Rusty spent the day working across multiple codebases, with primary focus on the Apache Arrow project. He made 6 commits to apache/arrow, contributing to ongoing development efforts on that codebase.
Rusty focused on feature parity across the vgi-rpc language implementations, adding cancel() support for streaming RPC calls to all three client libraries.
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 spent the last few months balancing ecosystem stewardship with deep dives into DuckDB internals and cross-language contributions. February's work focused on future-proofing the Query-farm extension portfolio and shipping a complete production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem across multiple languages. January and December rounded out the period with upstream improvements to Apache Arrow, core DuckDB enhancements, and a healthy dose of classified project work that kept things mysteriously productive.
- Led a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility push across 40+ extensions, standardizing documentation and modernizing the entire Query-farm portfolio to handle future database versions gracefully.
- Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow's IPC layer across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go, adding custom metadata support and fixing silent data corruption issues in production systems.
- Shipped vgi-rpc as a production-ready ecosystem with implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript, complete with unified branding, documentation sites, and proper licensing across the entire package.