Touring The Consensus, six months in
28 articles published by 6 authors, 20,000 jobs and 350,000 articles indexed; plus comments, gift links, dynamic RSS, and email alerts.
By Phil EatonAugust 5, 2026 Focus
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The Consensus is a bootstrapped site, started February this year, dedicated to software infrastructure, run independent of any software vendor. It's my full-time job and, aside from writers who are paid to contribute articles, I'm the only one running it. (If, in this article, I say "we" it's only because it can feel less vain than always saying "I".)
While the core of the site is independent, in-depth human-written coverage of key software we all depend on, I wanted the site to be slightly broader: providing developers in software infrastructure with tools and data to help them make technical decisions and further their careers.
Aside from the writing, the process for which hasn't changed significantly, the site was built to keep developers up-to-date on jobs, events, and funding in the field. In the beginning this was an entirely manual process.
When I first published the site it started with 9 jobs. In the last blog post I wrote in early April, we had just passed 100. Later in April I started the first automation that I would run on my laptop to index jobs, and indexed jobs jumped to over 1,000. In July I moved to a dedicated server for indexing jobs at which point we've gone to over 20,000 indexed jobs, around 10,000 of them being directly related to programming (or engineering management) and around 7,000 of those 10,000 currently live.
Around half of the 10,000 jobs are in North America, around a quarter are in Europe.
The platform is written mostly from scratch aside from payments, email, and analytics. The UI you see is powered by Go and PostgreSQL. The indexing pipeline is Go, Python, and SQLite. The functionality of the site has changed significantly in general since the launch, and that's what the rest of this post is about. If I don't say so otherwise, features I mention are generally for paid subscribers.
Articles#
We've published 28 articles by 6 authors in the last 6 months. Articles on The Consensus are paywalled when first published. The paywall expires within a week or two (two probably will be the long-term number).
A few Exclusive-marked articles, like WasmGC in Wasmtime are permanently reserved for subscribers at the Standard tier. Otherwise, all subscribers get immediate access to most articles once they're published.
All paid subscribers get access to the comment system.
All paid subscribers also get access to the Focus mode UI which was a neat idea a subscriber suggested.
And subscribers at the Standard tier get access to Gift links, of which they can create two per month, including to the Exclusive-marked articles.
The feed#
The feed is a machine-curated view of articles published by the 600+ companies, 400+ projects, and 80+ developers we index — going back the last five years. At the moment, among 350,000 articles visited, 30,000 have qualified for the feed.
It has been a fun challenge to discover and evolve rules that set a baseline for articles worth general reading. It's mostly static guards like:
- The article must have an author and must not be published by "The Company" or "The Team"
- The article must be mostly prose or code
- It shouldn't be release notes or events
The sole use of machine learning in the feed pipeline is when we optionally assign articles a category among ~40 topics. In this way you are able to filter on articles on Consensus & replication protocols or Formal methods & verification and so on.
We apply this same optional categorization for job openings. Allowing you to find jobs that appear to be about, for example, "Compilers & code generation".
The Consensus also extracts links and mentions of projects we track from articles in the feed. This (and mentions in job postings) is how we construct pages like Most Popular Programming Languages and Most Popular Databases. Only articles that enter the feed are taken into consideration here. So these rankings have a pretty specific meaning: these are the projects that developers at software infrastructure companies are talking the most about in depth. And they exclude any self-mentions, among the company and any of its acquisitions or parents or siblings.
As of today, you can now search for backlinks across every article that has entered the feed. For example, here's every article in the feed that links to Antithesis.
Dynamic RSS and email alerting#
All paid subscribers can build up filters on jobs, funding news, and the feed. Subscribers at the Standard tier gain the ability to turn filters into dynamic RSS feeds or email alerts.
À bientôt#
It's been a massive past six months, some of the most fun I've had, and a huge learning experience in so many dimensions. Thank you to the paid subscribers who've been following along!
Should you like to join the gang, get 25% off your first month with codes ESSENTIAL6MONTHS or STANDARD6MONTHS.
Happy hunting!
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