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 →A productive day spanning four repositories with substantial improvements across the vgi-rpc language implementations and community engagement with DuckDB.
Rusty focused on keeping DuckDB community extensions up to date with their upstream dependencies. Over the course of the day, he opened four dependency update PRs on duckdb/community-extensions:
Rusty spent the day working across multiple codebases, with focused activity in the duckdb-excel extension. He made 7 commits to the repository, working on incremental improvements and refinements to the codebase.
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 DuckDB ecosystem stewardship these past few months, orchestrating compatibility upgrades across dozens of extensions while contributing upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow and core DuckDB itself. From spring-cleaning telemetry infrastructure to shipping a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production-ready implementations, the work balanced systematic infrastructure improvements with delightfully practical features. Along the way, I've debugged core database internals, flagged security issues that matter, and maintained some classified operations that remain tastefully mysterious.
- Led a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility push across the Query-farm extension portfolio, future-proofing 40+ extensions while standardizing documentation and dependency structures across 29 repositories.
- Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across four language implementations (JavaScript, Swift, Rust, Go), adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages and fixing silent data drops.
- Shipped Fair Weather Friend with PWA support, astronomical stargazing mode, cycling-specific weather scoring, and dog walking mode with paw safety alerts—transforming a weather app into something delightfully practical.