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 spent the day deep in the shadows, channeling all five commits into classified operations. Four commits went into classified project while one landed in classified project—both shrouded in the usual secrecy and intrigue. No public repos saw action today, making this a full-fledged behind-closed-doors affair where the only witnesses are his IDE and whatever NDAs he's sworn to uphold.
Rusty went on an extension upgrade spree, opening eight PRs to enable DuckDB 1.5 builds for his community extensions (textplot, marisa, jsonata, json_schema, inflector, httpserver, httpclient, and adbc_scanner). He also gave fair-weather a friendlier rebrand to Fair Weather Friend, laid the foundation for snacks-report with production deployment fixes, and squeezed in a dozen classified commits split between classified project and classified project—because even open-source stewards need their secrets.
Rusty spent Valentine's Day showering DuckDB extensions with love, opening a flurry of PRs (#1292-#1297) to enable 1.5 builds across adbc_scanner, crypto, datasketches, httpclient, shellfs, and webmacro. Meanwhile, fair-weather got romantic upgrades of its own: scoring unit tests, shareable forecast links, and a dog walking mode that warns when pavement temps could singe puppy paws. He also ventured into Apache Arrow territory, opening issue #49285 and PR #49286 to add buffer support to RecordBatch.serialize(), while finding time to support the DuckDB community on CRT mismatch issues and agent data extensions.
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
DuckDB, Apache Arrow, & the Future of Data Engineering
The Hedgineer Podcast (S2E3)
Streaming Data into DuckDB with Arrow and Python Generators
How to use Python generators and Apache Arrow's RecordBatchReader to stream large datasets into DuckDB without loading everything into memory at once.
Airport for DuckDB: Letting DuckDB take Apache Arrow Flights
DuckCon #6 — Amsterdam, Netherlands
Cron Expressions For DuckDB
Introducing a DuckDB extension that interprets cron expressions to generate scheduled timestamps directly in SQL, built with the Rust croner crate.
Enhancing DuckDB with Unix Pipe Integration: Introducing the shellfs Extension
Introducing shellfs, a DuckDB extension that enables seamless integration with Unix pipes for both input and output, allowing command-line programs to be used directly within DuckDB queries.
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've spent the last four months diving deep into the DuckDB ecosystem, modernizing telemetry infrastructure, and shepherding extensions through major version upgrades while contributing meaningful improvements to Apache Arrow and core DuckDB performance. From building new extensions like JSONata and blake3 to orchestrating dependency updates across dozens of community projects, I've balanced ecosystem stewardship with technical depth—debugging SEGV crashes, optimizing serialization paths, and transforming a weather app into a progressive web experience. Alongside the public contributions, I've maintained steady progress on several classified projects that keep my commit graph pleasantly opaque.
- Modernized telemetry across 33 Query-farm extensions in a single day, updated Apache Arrow's IPC serialization APIs to surface dictionary handling, and enabled DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across the extension ecosystem with targeted community PRs.
- Extended the DuckDB community with five new extensions (JSONata, Inflector, blake3, a5, and others) while orchestrating mass version bumps and WASM compatibility fixes across the entire Query-farm collection.
- Transformed fair-weather into a progressive web app with cycling modes, temperature warnings, and stargazing conditions while continuing to debug everything from pipe mysteries to batch index collisions across multiple repositories.