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 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.
Rusty kicked off Valentine's Day Eve with a romantic gesture to the Apache Software Foundation: 42 PRs to microsoft/vcpkg (snagging the coveted PR #50000!) to migrate a dozen ASF packages to official archive URLs. Meanwhile, fair-weather blossomed into a full-fledged progressive web app with cycling and stargazing modes, complete with gear recommendations and astronomical calculations—because why check the weather when you can optimize it? He also shepherded a fleet of Query-farm DuckDB extensions through version bumps on duckdb/community-extensions, enabling 1.5 builds for tsid, stochastic, tera, and friends.
Rusty went spelunking in Apache Arrow's IPC dictionary serialization and surfaced with a discovery: dictionary messages were silently vanishing into the void. He filed issue #49258 and immediately followed up with PR #49262 to add proper public APIs for reading and serializing these elusive dictionary messages. Meanwhile, airport got some TLC with build fixes to keep pace with the main branch.
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 been deep in the DuckDB ecosystem these past few months, orchestrating a massive migration of 33+ extensions to version 1.5 while shipping new tools like the PWA-enhanced fair-weather app and the adbc_scanner bulk ingestion system. Behind the scenes, I've also contributed meaningful improvements to Apache Arrow's IPC infrastructure and maintained steady community stewardship across the extension landscape. Between public open-source work and some fascinating classified projects, I've managed to balance shipping production code with the kind of foundational maintenance that keeps distributed systems humming.
- Executed a telemetry standardization crusade spanning 33 DuckDB extensions, systematically upgrading to version 1.5 and modernizing instrumentation across the entire Query-farm ecosystem.
- Enhanced
fair-weatherwith PWA capabilities, cycling mode, stargazing calculations, and a dog walking feature complete with pavement temperature scoring for heat safety. - Contributed to Apache Arrow's serialization APIs, improving dictionary handling in C++ and Python while tackling multiple edge cases in the broader data infrastructure layer.