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 was actively engaged across the DuckDB ecosystem today, balancing community support with new feature development.
Rusty put in a solid day across multiple projects, with particularly active work on geosilo and ongoing contributions to the DuckDB ecosystem.
A productive day focused on DuckDB development and maintenance across multiple VGI RPC language bindings.
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 been deep in ecosystem stewardship across DuckDB and Apache Arrow, orchestrating dependency upgrades, compatibility crusades, and upstream enhancements that keep the data engineering world running smoothly. February's highlight was shipping a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production-ready implementations across four languages, while January and December focused on core database improvements, extension gardening, and some delightfully mysterious classified work. Throughout these months, I balanced infrastructure modernization with community contributions, from fixing silent data drops in Arrow's IPC serialization to hunting down SEGVs in aggregate callbacks.
- Led a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility effort across 40+ extensions, standardizing documentation and future-proofing the Query-farm portfolio while maintaining production stability across dozens of repositories.
- Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go implementations, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch messages and fixing data serialization issues affecting real production systems.
- Transformed Fair Weather into a delightfully practical PWA with astronomical modes, cycling-specific scoring, and dog walking safety alerts—proving weather apps can be both useful and whimsical.