Phil Eaton
@eatonphil
on software infrastructure @theconsensus.dev. theconsensus.dev
I wrote an article surveying how distributions handled (and in the Varnish -> Vinyl case, haven't yet handled) a few contentious forks and license changes. Paywall has expired, give it a read. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/07/11...
Half an hour observing our patio garden (middle of concrete Astoria, three floors up) and must have seen 20 bees of at least five different species. What incredible creatures.
Standard tier subscribers can now get recurring, personalized digests from jobs, the feed, and funding on The Consensus. Give it a shot and let me know what you think!
Buffalo potato and chicken casserole with chives from the garden. (What looks like bacon is actually salted chicken thigh which is an incredible substitute for pork belly when cooking for friends or fam who don't eat red meat.)
For each project you'll see our ranking of companies (that we track) that focus most on the project, alongside jobs that mention the project. theconsensus.dev/project/qemu...
Every one of the over 350 projects tracked by The Consensus. Over 200 projects have jobs that mention them. (Harder to say jobs that involve them but at least jobs that mention them.) theconsensus.dev/projects.html
While everyone (paid or not) gets eventual access to long-form writing, Standard tier subscribers are the only ones who get regular updates and explanations of what's going on in open-source with context to help you understand. (screenshot from the newsletter)
The monthly newsletter for Standard subscribers to The Consensus went out yesterday. But I need to do a blog post explaining some of these product updates in more depth.
I wrote an article on OxCaml's zero_alloc feature for annotating a function that must not allocate. It 1) helps you statically find allocations and 2) prevent future ones. To my knowledge, only Swift and Clang have something similar. Paywall has expired, give it a read!
And because we've got all this data on project mentions we can do our own ranking of databases and programming languages. theconsensus.dev/databases.html theconsensus.dev/languages.html It is a small but growing dataset. Rankings will change as we track more organizations and stabilize somewhat.
Very cool to be linked to from @infoworld.bsky.social. The summary isn't quite right though in that it wasn't a purely negative change. The article demonstrates cases where both versions of the GC do well. Python developers decided (for now) to prefer the characteristics of the previous GC.
I spoke with Pierre Zemb from French neo-compute company Clever Cloud. They're building data services API-compatible with popular systems like Redis, PostgreSQL, and etcd on top of FoundationDB and Pierre is leading the work. There is no paywall, give it a read. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/06/18...
New in The Consensus: comments (all paid subscribers can comment) and gift links (Standard tier can gift link). We'll see how this goes!
I wrote an article about Python reference counting and GC basics by example to show why the Python moved to a new incremental GC in Python 3.14 but then reverted it in Python 3.14.5. Paywall has expired, give it a read! theconsensus.dev/p/2026/06/06...
The Consensus tracks around 200 technologies and now ties together job postings and companies to technology. Each technology gets it's own dedicated page. You can filter companies by technology, jobs by technology. Find who's hiring who's talking about C or Postgres or Pulumi.
> The biggest problem with AI is not correctness - it is architecture sanity 💯 www.reddit.com/r/Experience...
Went out to my favorite spot in Connecticut over the weekend and stumbled on a few Great Blue Herons on the way. This beautiful guy on the left in the near background.
Been working with John on this article the last four months to show you Postgres's new graph query support in SQL/PGQ. He doesn't stop there though; exploring the same features in LadybugDB (recent fork of Kuzu acquired by Apple) and DuckDB. Paywall has expired, give it a read!
The Consensus Standard for May just went out to paid subscribers at the Standard tier. Extended coverage of goings-on in software infrastructure (open source and from vendors). Member link: theconsensus.dev/n/2026/05/st...
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