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 productive day spanning multiple repositories across the DuckDB ecosystem and supporting infrastructure projects.
VGI RPC Libraries — Rusty released v0.6.2 and v0.6.1 across the three VGI RPC language implementations (vgi-rpc-typescript, vgi-rpc-go, and vgi-rpc-python), with multiple commits on main pushing updates to each.
Rusty pushed commits across two repositories today, continuing work on upcoming releases.
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 spent the last three months deeply invested in DuckDB ecosystem stewardship, shipping both foundational infrastructure work and delightful user-facing tools. From future-proofing dozens of extensions for DuckDB 1.5 compatibility to contributing upstream enhancements across Apache Arrow's multi-language implementations, I've focused on the intersection of scale and elegance. Recent highlights include launching a production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem across four languages and transforming Fair Weather into a practically magical weather app with cycling-specific scoring and dog safety alerts.
• Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility work across 40+ extensions, standardizing documentation and opening paths for airport, shellfs, webmacro, inflector, and two dozen others to future-proof their implementations.
• Contributed upstream to Apache Arrow across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go with custom metadata support and dictionary serialization APIs that fix silent data loss issues in production systems.
• Shipped Fair Weather Friend with PWA support, astronomical stargazing mode, cycling weather scoring, and dog walking safety alerts—making weather information genuinely practical rather than merely informative.