How to get First and Last record from a sql query?

I have a table in PostgreSQL, I run a query on it with several conditions that returns multiple rows, ordered by one of the columns. In general it's:

SELECT <some columns> 
FROM mytable
<maybe some joins here>
WHERE <various conditions>
ORDER BY date DESC

Now I'm only interested in getting the first and the last row from this query. I could get them outside of the db, inside my application (and this is what I actually do) but was wondering if for better performance I shouldn't get from the database only those 2 records I'm actually interested in.

And if so, how do I modify my query?

[Caveat: Might not be the most efficient way to do it]:

(SELECT <some columns>
FROM mytable
<maybe some joins here>
WHERE <various conditions>
ORDER BY date DESC
LIMIT 1)

UNION ALL

(SELECT <some columns>
FROM mytable
<maybe some joins here>
WHERE <various conditions>
ORDER BY date ASC    
LIMIT 1)

You might want to try this, could potentially be faster than doing two queries:

select <some columns>
from (
    SELECT <some columns>,
           row_number() over (order by date desc) as rn,
           count(*) over () as total_count
    FROM mytable
    <maybe some joins here>
    WHERE <various conditions>
) t
where rn = 1
   or rn = total_count
ORDER BY date DESC

First record:

SELECT <some columns> FROM mytable
<maybe some joins here>
WHERE <various conditions>
ORDER BY date ASC
LIMIT 1

Last record:

SELECT <some columns> FROM mytable
<maybe some joins here>
WHERE <various conditions>
ORDER BY date DESC
LIMIT 1