Rusty Conover

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.

DuckDB Apache Arrow Rust C++ TypeScript

Posts & Events

Query.Farm

Quack and VGI: Two Approaches to Bringing RPC to DuckDB

Quack — the new client/server protocol extension for DuckDB — was announced today. It's been built since November 2025, almost exactly as long as I've been building VGI. Here's what's interesting, what's surprising, and where the two projects converge and diverge.

Query.Farm

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.

Query.Farm

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.

Query.Farm

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.

DuckDB

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.

Query.Farm

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.

Query.Farm

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.

DuckDB

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.

What I've Been Working On

Full activity log →

I've been focused on ecosystem stewardship and cross-language infrastructure work these past few months. February was a masterclass in coordinated upgrades—I led a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility push across dozens of extensions while shipping a production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem with implementations in four languages. Beyond that, I've been contributing upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow, fixing subtle data handling issues, and shipping delightful user-facing features like weather apps with specialized modes for cyclists and dog walkers.

  • Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across the Query-farm extension portfolio, opening 40+ PRs to standardize and future-proof extensions like airport, shellfs, webmacro, and inflector while consolidating documentation structures.
  • Contributed upstream to Apache Arrow across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go with custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages and dictionary serialization APIs—fixing silent data loss issues in production systems.
  • Shipped complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript, including unified branding, documentation sites, and proper licensing across all repositories.