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 →DuckDB Community Extensions: Rusty completed a maintenance cycle across multiple community extensions, bumping versions for airport, datasketches, bitfilters, geosilo, textplot, and lindel. This work was followed by six corresponding PRs on duckdb/community-extensions that update each extension to their latest commits — PR #1862 through PR #1866. These updates keep the extension ecosystem current with upstream development.
Rusty had a productive day with work spanning the vgi-rpc-python library and contributions to the DuckDB core project.
Rusty provided community support on two fronts within the DuckDB project today. He reviewed PR #22265, which proposes replacing awscli s3 uploads with rclone — a change aimed at improving upload efficiency and reducing dependencies. Additionally, he weighed in on issue #21471 regarding support for LogicalTypeId::VARIANT through the ADBC interface, helping troubleshoot compatibility concerns.
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
Building on Flight: Real-World Lessons from the DuckDB Airport Extension
Apache Arrow Summit 2025 — Paris, France
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've been deep in ecosystem stewardship this quarter, modernizing the DuckDB extension landscape while shipping production infrastructure across multiple languages and platforms. From future-proofing 40+ extensions for DuckDB 1.5 compatibility to contributing upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow, I've focused on work that scales across communities. February culminated in launching the complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with unified branding and multi-language implementations, while also transforming Fair Weather Friend into a delightfully practical PWA with specialized modes for cyclists and dog walkers.
- Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility overhaul across Query-farm extensions, standardizing documentation and APIs while opening 40+ PRs to future-proof the entire portfolio
- Contributed upstream Arrow enhancements across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages and fixing silent data drops
- Shipped production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript with unified branding, documentation sites, and Apache 2.0 licensing