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 tackled a variety of integration and compatibility challenges across the DuckDB ecosystem today.
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.
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 been focused on ecosystem stewardship and cross-language interoperability over the past three months, with particular emphasis on future-proofing the DuckDB extension landscape and shipping production-ready infrastructure. February saw me orchestrate a major compatibility push across dozens of extensions while contributing upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow, then January and December balanced high-volume community contributions with some classified work that's best left mysterious. Throughout this period, I've prioritized both the unglamorous work of dependency management and strategic infrastructure improvements that prevent silent data loss and security issues downstream.
• Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across 40+ extensions and standardized documentation across 29 repositories, while contributing upstream Arrow enhancements that fixed silent data drops in RecordBatch serialization across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go implementations
• Shipped a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production-ready implementations in four languages, unified branding, documentation infrastructure, and proper open-source licensing
• Maintained high-impact core improvements to DuckDB including profiler hooks, enhanced query explanations, and security fixes, while keeping the community extensions universe updated through systematic dependency upgrades and quality hardening