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 the day working across two main repositories, with significant activity in private repos as well.
A productive day across multiple DuckDB-related projects, with focus on compatibility improvements and upstream synchronization.
## DuckDB Testing Infrastructure
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.
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
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've spent the last three months deeply invested in ecosystem stewardship, modernizing the DuckDB extension landscape while contributing upstream enhancements to critical infrastructure projects like Apache Arrow. February was particularly productive, launching a complete multi-language vgi-rpc ecosystem and future-proofing dozens of extensions for DuckDB 1.5 compatibility. Across this period, I balanced open-source contributions with classified initiatives, consistently shipping improvements that range from core database observability to practical consumer applications.
• Spearheaded DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across the Query-farm portfolio with 40+ PRs standardizing documentation and upgrading 29+ extensions, while simultaneously bumping dependencies across the broader community-extensions ecosystem to keep the entire analytical database plugin landscape current.
• Contributed upstream Arrow enhancements across four language implementations (JavaScript, Swift, Rust, Go), adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages and public APIs for dictionary serialization that prevented silent data corruption in production systems.
• Shipped production-ready vgi-rpc implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript with unified branding, documentation infrastructure, and complete licensing compliance, plus transformed Fair Weather into a feature-rich PWA with astronomical mode, cycling scoring, and pet safety alerts.