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 →Today focused on community engagement with the Apache Arrow project. Rusty replied to issue #49744 on apache/arrow, which addresses inconsistent skips in datagen functionality. The issue involves integration and format concerns, suggesting work around data generation tooling and how skip behavior is handled inconsistently across different scenarios. By providing feedback on this integration issue, he contributed to the ongoing effort to improve Arrow's data generation and testing infrastructure.
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.
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, systematically upgrading the DuckDB extension universe while shipping production infrastructure across multiple languages. February's work culminated in launching a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with unified branding and polished implementations, while January and December focused on future-proofing the community extensions landscape through dependency management and core database improvements. Alongside visible open-source contributions to Arrow and DuckDB, I've maintained active classified work that's kept things appropriately mysterious.
- Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility upgrades across 40+ extensions and standardized documentation structures for 29 repositories, while contributing upstream Arrow enhancements across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go to fix silent data loss in production systems.
- Shipped a production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem in four languages with unified branding, Cloudflare-hosted documentation, and SEO infrastructure, plus transformed Fair Weather Friend with PWA support and practical modes for cycling and dog walking.
- Contributed meaningful DuckDB core improvements including profiler hooks, enhanced table scan explanations, and multi-file operation fixes, while maintaining consistent community gardening through dependency bumps and ecosystem quality hardening.