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 →A high-velocity day focused on filter accessor improvements for DuckDB and coordinated updates across the Query-farm extension ecosystem.
Rusty spent the day focused on modernizing the WebAssembly build infrastructure and supporting community work across multiple DuckDB-related projects.
A productive day spanning multiple repositories across the DuckDB ecosystem and supporting infrastructure projects.
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 deep in ecosystem stewardship across the DuckDB universe, from future-proofing dozens of extensions for compatibility upgrades to shipping production-ready implementations of the vgi-rpc ecosystem across four languages. February's work balanced systematic infrastructure modernization—telemetry cleanups, documentation standardization, unified branding—with upstream contributions that fixed silent data loss bugs in Apache Arrow. Beyond the extension landscape, I shipped delightfully practical features like PWA support and dog-walking safety alerts for Fair Weather Friend, proving infrastructure work doesn't have to be boring.
• Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across 40+ pull requests, future-proofing extensions like airport, shellfs, and webmacro while standardizing documentation across 29 repositories.
• Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go implementations, adding custom metadata support and fixing production-level data loss issues.
• Shipped complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript, including unified branding, documentation sites, and Apache 2.0 licensing infrastructure.