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 high-velocity day focused on filter accessor improvements for DuckDB and coordinated updates across the Query-farm extension ecosystem.
Rusty spent the day focused on modernizing the WebAssembly build infrastructure and supporting community work across multiple DuckDB-related projects.
A productive day spanning multiple repositories across the DuckDB ecosystem and supporting infrastructure projects.
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
Query.Farm: Growing DuckDB Community Extensions
DuckDB Amsterdam Meetup #3 — Amsterdam, Netherlands
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've been deep in ecosystem stewardship across the DuckDB and Apache Arrow landscapes, balancing infrastructure modernization with meaningful open-source contributions. Over the past few months, I've led major compatibility initiatives, shipped production-ready systems, and maintained a steady stream of core database improvements alongside some classified operations. The work spans from low-level performance optimization to high-level community gardening—keeping mature ecosystems healthy while building new tools that actually solve problems.
• Spearheaded DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across 40+ extensions and standardized documentation structures, while shipping a complete multi-language vgi-rpc ecosystem with unified branding and production infrastructure.
• Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow (JavaScript, Swift, Rust, Go) adding custom metadata support for IPC messages, fixing silent data loss bugs that likely haunted production systems.
• Built and enhanced developer tools including Fair Weather Friend (PWA with specialized weather modes), memory benchmarking tools, and numerous extensions like JSONata, Inflector, Blake3, and A5 geospatial indexing.
