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 tackled a variety of integration and compatibility challenges across the DuckDB ecosystem today.
Rusty focused on low-level transport and worker lifecycle improvements across the vgi-rpc-typescript and vgi-rpc-python codebases, with parallel development on private infrastructure.
Rusty spent the day working across two main repositories, with significant activity in private repos as well.
Compiling Isn't Running: Functionally Testing DuckDB-WASM Extensions
A DuckDB extension that compiles for WebAssembly has only proven that it compiles. Whether it loads, and whether it actually runs, are separate questions. I built a Node harness to ask them across 124 community extensions. Here's what it found and the fixes that came out of it.
Quack and VGI: Two Approaches to Bringing RPC to DuckDB
Quack — the new client/server protocol extension for DuckDB — was announced today. It's been built since November 2025, almost exactly as long as I've been building VGI. Here's what's interesting, what's surprising, and where the two projects converge and diverge.
DuckDB ↔ Arrow Compatibility: A Status Page
A working status page for the Arrow-related issues and PRs I've filed against duckdb/duckdb — the UNION saga, schema/data disagreements in nested appenders, type fidelity through round-trips, and the bigger question of how defensive the C Data Interface should be.
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.
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've been focused on ecosystem stewardship and cross-language infrastructure work, shipping production-ready systems while systematically improving foundational libraries. February involved a major compatibility push across the Query-farm extension portfolio alongside upstream contributions to Apache Arrow, while January balanced classified work with meaningful open-source improvements and security work. Between these months, I've been building tools for performance analysis, teaching DuckDB extension development, and ensuring data systems are both robust and delightfully practical.
- Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility upgrades across 40+ extensions while standardizing documentation across 29 repositories, future-proofing the entire portfolio.
- Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go implementations, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages.
- Shipped a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem in four languages with unified branding, production documentation, and licensing infrastructure.