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 kept things mysterious today, splitting focus between two classified operations: classified project received the lion's share of attention with three commits worth of tinkering, while classified project got a quick check-in behind closed doors. No public repos were touched, but there's clearly some interesting work happening in the shadows—the kind that keeps a developer's schedule delightfully unpredictable.
Rusty kept the gears turning across multiple fronts today: tinkering with flyctl infrastructure, diving into the depths of classified project and classified project behind closed doors, and lending a helpful hand to the DuckDB community by weighing in on issue #21342 regarding COMPRESS option support for in-memory databases. Meanwhile, steady progress marched on with commits to vgi-rpc-python, and classified operations hummed along across classified project and classified project. A day of measured momentum across the visible and invisible layers of the stack.
Rusty made a couple of surgical commits to community-extensions, keeping the DuckDB ecosystem humming along. Meanwhile, behind closed doors on classified project, mysterious operations were afoot—three classified events suggest something intriguing is brewing in the shadows. A day of quiet but purposeful progress.
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 deeply invested in ecosystem stewardship across the DuckDB and Apache Arrow landscapes, balancing major infrastructure upgrades with meaningful upstream contributions. February marked a turning point with a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem launch and DuckDB 1.5 compatibility crusade across 40+ extensions, while earlier months focused on core database internals, performance optimization, and selective classified work. Throughout this period, I've maintained a philosophy of equal parts innovation and meticulous maintenance—proving that infrastructure work can be both systematic and elegantly impactful.
• Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across the extension portfolio while standardizing documentation structures across 29 repositories, plus contributed upstream Arrow enhancements across four languages that fixed silent data loss in production systems.
• Shipped production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript with unified branding, Cloudflare documentation, and complete Apache 2.0 licensing infrastructure.
• Transformed Fair Weather into a delightfully practical PWA with astronomical stargazing mode, cycling-specific weather scoring, and dog walking mode with paw safety alerts—proving weather apps can be both functional and whimsical.