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.
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.
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.
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've been focused on ecosystem infrastructure and cross-language compatibility work, modernizing extension portfolios and upstream libraries to future-proof critical data pipelines. February highlighted systematic upgrades across dozens of repositories and a complete production ecosystem rollout, while January balanced classified work with meaningful open-source contributions and security improvements. These months reinforced that infrastructure stewardship—when done deliberately—creates elegant foundations that benefit entire communities.
- Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility standardization across 29+ Query-farm repositories with 40+ PRs, future-proofing extensions like airport, shellfs, and webmacro while establishing consistent documentation patterns.
- 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 loss issues in production workflows.
- Shipped a production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem in four languages with unified branding, Cloudflare documentation hosting, and complete licensing infrastructure, plus enhanced Fair Weather Friend with PWA support and specialized modes for cycling and dog walking.