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 private repository work today, making 2 commits to an internal project. While the specifics of the private codebase remain undisclosed, the day's activity suggests focused iteration on an ongoing initiative.
Rusty cut multiple releases on vgi-rpc-python today, shipping three versions in quick succession: v0.6.6, v0.6.7, and v0.6.8. The rapid release cadence suggests either bug fixes or refinements rolling out to address issues discovered in testing or production use.
DuckDB work dominated the day. A fix for DELETE ... RETURNING with local storage merged into the main duckdb repository (PR #21541). More significantly, Rusty opened PR #21794 on duckdb/duckdb to expose column tags via duckdb_columns(), addressing a feature request for better column metadata discovery. The work involved multiple commits on the feature/column-tags-in-duckdb-columns branch in his fork (rustyconover/duckdb), and he also commented on the PR to discuss implementation details with the community.
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 been orchestrating infrastructure upgrades and ecosystem stewardship across DuckDB and Apache Arrow, from future-proofing 40+ extensions for DuckDB 1.5 compatibility to shipping a production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem in four languages. I've also contributed upstream enhancements to Arrow across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go, fixing silent data drops in IPC message handling. The work balances systematic dependency management with delightful shipping—whether that's standardizing documentation across 29 repositories or transforming a weather app into something genuinely useful with PWA support and domain-specific scoring modes.
- Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility work across the Query-farm extension portfolio, opening 40+ PRs to future-proof extensions like
airport,shellfs,webmacro, andinflectorwhile standardizing documentation structures. - Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across four language implementations, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages and fixing silent data drops in dictionary serialization.
- Shipped a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production-ready implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript, including unified branding and Cloudflare-hosted documentation sites.