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 tackled a variety of integration and compatibility challenges across the DuckDB ecosystem today.
Rusty focused on low-level transport and worker lifecycle improvements across the vgi-rpc-typescript and vgi-rpc-python codebases, with parallel development on private infrastructure.
Rusty spent the day working across two main repositories, with significant activity in private repos as well.
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.
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
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've been orchestrating infrastructure upgrades and ecosystem stewardship across the DuckDB extension landscape while shipping production-ready systems and upstream contributions. February's focus spanned future-proofing 40+ extensions for DuckDB 1.5 compatibility, enhancing Apache Arrow with custom metadata support across four language implementations, and completing a full vgi-rpc ecosystem rollout with unified branding and multi-language implementations. The work balanced systematic infrastructure improvements with practical shipping—from core database enhancements to delightfully feature-rich weather applications.
- Led a compatibility crusade across the Query-farm extension portfolio, modernizing 29+ repositories for DuckDB 1.5 while standardizing documentation structures across
airport,shellfs,webmacro,inflector, and two dozen other extensions. - Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go implementations, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages and fixing silent data drops in dictionary serialization.
- Shipped a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production-ready implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript, including unified branding, documentation infrastructure, and transformed Fair Weather Friend with PWA support, astronomical modes, and activity-specific weather scoring.