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 optimizing DISTINCT ON query handling in DuckDB, specifically targeting hash join deduplication filters. Work was spread across both his personal fork and the main DuckDB repository.
Rusty had a productive day spanning multiple projects, with a focus on DuckDB enhancements and community contributions.
Rusty was actively engaged across the DuckDB ecosystem today, balancing community support with new feature development.
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 and infrastructure work over the past few months, orchestrating compatibility upgrades across dozens of DuckDB extensions while contributing upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow and shipping production-ready systems. My focus has been balancing high-impact open-source contributions with systematic modernization—from spring-cleaning telemetry pipelines to rolling out unified branding across multi-language ecosystems. Some of the most satisfying work involved hunting down subtle data corruption bugs and ensuring community extensions stay fresh and future-proof.
- Led a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility push across the Query-farm extension portfolio, opening 40+ PRs to standardize documentation and future-proof extensions like airport, shellfs, webmacro, and inflector.
- Contributed upstream Arrow enhancements across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go implementations, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages that fixed silent data drops in production systems.
- Shipped the complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript, including unified branding, documentation sites, and Apache 2.0 licensing across all repositories.