on AI and your growth

There are beehives on rooftops all around the city. I did a tour of one with Astor Apiaries in LIC over the weekend. Highly recommend!

Let us help you fill hard technical job openings theconsensus.dev/sponsor.html

Cited on in the SQLite docs. That's pretty cool.

After speaking with SQLite folks I've just made this completely available today. Give it a read.

Phil Eaton@eatonphil.bsky.social · 2d ago

I found a minimal reproducer for SQLite's WAL-Reset bug (100 lines of C) that triggers data loss and/or data corruption in seconds. The integrity_check Tailscale did would not necessarily alert you to the former. Exclusive for Standard subscribers. Otherwise, upgrade SQLite!

I found a minimal reproducer for SQLite's WAL-Reset bug (100 lines of C) that triggers data loss and/or data corruption in seconds. The integrity_check Tailscale did would not necessarily alert you to the former. Exclusive for Standard subscribers. Otherwise, upgrade SQLite!

Trying out a new format of The Consensus Weekly where we focus on a few major categories most important to us. Jobs and funding flow out from categories like Databases & distributed systems, Performance & testing, Machine learning, etc. theconsensus.dev/n/2026/08/23...

Trying out a new format of The Consensus Weekly where we focus on a few major categories most important to us. Jobs and funding flow out from categories like Databases & distributed systems, Performance & testing, Machine learning, etc. theconsensus.dev/n/2026/08/23...

Two cool bits: 1) extending our database concurrency testing tool to hammer with concurrent reads and writes to observe behavior statistically, and 2) finding a bug in not-yet-released Accord. Very cool to count members of the Cassandra team at Apple among our readers!

The Consensus@theconsensus.dev · 5d ago

Atomic batches in 2013, single-partition compare-and-sawp later that year, and now serializable cross-partition transactions with Accord in unreleased Cassandra 6. We explore each in this article, and find a bug. Paywall has expired. Give it a read! theconsensus.dev/p/2026/08/16...

The Consensus isn't a crazy growth startup, just me bootstrapping full-time. But subscriptions and sponsors have slowly, steadily grown. I paid $300 to an author for an article this month, up from $100 in the start, and bumped our illustrator's rate up another $5/hr. Progress!

mojo is now open source www.modular.com/blog/mojo-op...

This is the only correct policy, and I'm glad Brown is being light-handed instead of doing things because "something must be done". today.brown.edu/announcement...

Featuring events in The Consensus has been a bit of a gamble. Is there much of a payoff highlighting "random" events around the world to a global audience? Heartening to see this though.

I wrote about the road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/08/16...

New little blog post on how deploys of The Consensus works. tldr; jobs and the feed are updated more frequently and more regularly now! theconsensus.dev/blog/2026/08...

writes up basic guide for how the thing works the thing doesn't work documenting the basics undefeated for qa

From the patio: bumblebees and sweat bees on our sunflower

ICYMI, here's a discount code in celebration of our first 6 months. > Should you like to join the gang, get 25% off your first month with codes ESSENTIAL6MONTHS or STANDARD6MONTHS.

Phil Eaton@eatonphil.bsky.social · 3w ago

I wrote a guide to what The Consensus is, six months in. I've also increased the scope of jobs you can see without a paid account: 1,000 historic job openings that are still active. Happy hunting! theconsensus.dev/blog/2026/08...

I really enjoyed learning about quorum replication and the ABD algorithm ("precursors" to Paxos, Viewstamped Replication, Raft) from Evgenii, who is now the sixth published author under The Consensus. Paywall has expired. Give it a read! theconsensus.dev/p/2026/08/02...

New batch of interesting engineering blog posts on writethat.blog, courtesy of @sarna.dev - Tailscale didn’t stop the Hugging Face intrusion // @apenwarr.ca - @tailscale.com - Watching Go’s new garbage collector move through the heap // @eatonphil.bsky.social - @theconsensus.dev

I wrote a guide to what The Consensus is, six months in. I've also increased the scope of jobs you can see without a paid account: 1,000 historic job openings that are still active. Happy hunting! theconsensus.dev/blog/2026/08...

Wow this new enormous bottom bar on Chrome on Android is bad. Reintroduces the *home page button* just so they could justify a new menu for the Gemini button that I don't want to press?

👊I've joined the crew at @clickhouse.com to establish the *ClickHouse Labs* research group. We'll be working side-by-side with ClickHouse engineers to cook up ways to make the system even faster. I'll also be exploring new research topics related to PostgreSQL. clickhouse.com/blog/andy-pa...

Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs | ClickHouse

I am excited to announce that I am joining ClickHouse, Inc. to establish and lead a new research team at ClickHouse Labs.

clickhouse.com

I too understood what consensus is better by pondering exactly how/why ABD cannot support Compare-And-Swap operations. (And also after reading Murat's blogs.) I feel like a number of database/distsys concepts are easier to learn by looking instead at good examples of what they are not.

The Consensus@theconsensus.dev · 3w ago

From Thomas's 1979 majority voting, to ABD's linearizable register, to Cassandra's read repair: we provide a runnable Python tour of quorum replication, and show how ABD does not solve consensus. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/08/02...

Spent the afternoon pruning the patio garden while listening to Seirian Sumners excellent book on wasps. What amazing creatures. One of my favorite books on the natural world I've read.

From Thomas's 1979 majority voting, to ABD's linearizable register, to Cassandra's read repair: we provide a runnable Python tour of quorum replication, and show how ABD does not solve consensus. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/08/02...

Looking for great developer-writers to follow? Here's who The Consensus tracks. theconsensus.dev/developers.h...

New rule on /r/DatabaseDevelopment

Watching Go's new garbage collector move through the heap Shows fragmentation and recovery of memory using the new tea GC. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/07/19...

There's so much cool software development in North Carolina, and I'm surely missing more. One of, if not the, biggest tech hubs outside of VHCOL cities made it an obvious place to continue bootstrapping The Consensus. Excited to move there this winter. eatonphil.com/northcarolin...