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 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.
vgi-rpc multilingual rollout continues across all language implementations. Work spans the Rust, Go, TypeScript, Python, and Java libraries, with a consistent theme: adding response byte capacity constraints (max_response_bytes and max_externalized_response_bytes) to the HTTP transport layer. This mirrors an earlier pattern across the stack — Rust and Go received the caps first, followed by TypeScript. The Go and Rust implementations also include in-progress work on shared-memory transport hardening with benchmark and soak tooling.
A productive day spanning documentation improvements, OAuth infrastructure work, and DuckDB feature development.
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 infrastructure stewardship and ecosystem modernization these past few months, from orchestrating DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across dozens of extensions to shipping a complete production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem across multiple languages. My work spans both high-level architectural initiatives and low-level performance optimization—whether that's contributing upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow, debugging gnarly core DuckDB internals, or introducing new cryptographic and data manipulation extensions to the community. A healthy portion of recent activity lives in classified projects, but the visible work shows a consistent pattern of building things that last and fixing things that matter.
- Led a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility push across 40+ extensions, standardizing documentation and future-proofing the entire Query-farm portfolio while maintaining production stability.
- Contributed upstream Arrow improvements across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go implementations, fixing silent data drops in dictionary message serialization and adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC.
- Shipped Fair Weather Friend with PWA support and practical modes (stargazing, cycling, dog walking), and delivered a unified vgi-rpc ecosystem with four language implementations, Cloudflare hosting, and complete open-source licensing.