Phil Eaton

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/26...

I spoke with Kosta Tarasov who contributes to DataFusion and arrow-rs in his free time. This article is not paywalled, read it now.

A big goal of The Consensus is to highlight and celebrate the work of open source contributors, both newcomers and long-time contributors.

I started a software research company

notes.eatonphil.com/2026-02-25-i...

Also, a little announcement, without a subscription you're going to see paywalls on new articles for the first week after publication.

This work depends on your support. You can subscribe at a discount with FIRST100. DM if you have any issues! <3

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/22...

You're probably right to pick a modern extension to support vector similarity search in Postgres. But did you know Postgres already has one built in?

I took a look at the cube extension in Postgres, pgvector, and model2vec for some impressively fast embeddings generation.

what are some examples of technical books/booklike things that do nontraditional things structurally ala The Little Schemer? not necessarily the Q&A format specifically, but not being structured like a normal book

Poor Deming never stood a chance This post is an elaboration of a shorter post I wrote about five years ago. The two management giants of the mid-twentieth century were Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming. Ironically, while Drucke…

Whenever the topic of OKRs comes up, I think about Drucker vs Deming. Not a particularly topical thing to write about, but I think it's evergreen.

surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/02/16/p...

It's weird to me that indexes are expected to be correct and completely in sync with your data, never missing what is or isn't there, until we start talking about vector search

I wanted to understand how to generate my own vector embeddings and understand semantic search in general without external services. It became a significant rabbit hole. I wrote a post on some of what I learned.

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/15...

groups.google.com/g/golang-dev...

> I think we need to focus on our overall approach to software engineering and treat AI as a tool. A powerful tool, a new kind of tool, but still a tool.

Hard to pick what to quote from Russ Cox on how the Golang team should think about AI contributions (and more broadly).

I noticed that and forgot. Thanks! Just pushed the fix.

(Go to /2025/ not /2025.html.)

VillageSQL came out of stealth this week, prompting me to understand the state of plugins and vector indexes in forks and rewrites of MySQL.

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/08...

I'm scheduling speakers for NYC Systems 2026. Please DM or email me if you've got a staff/principal engineer or phd student who can come tell us something interesting about compiler / database / systems / infrastructure work!

Schedule is on the site. nycsystems.xyz

> if we had not done all of our own software, thought of this all holistically, you just have a ghost. And that's what we actually have in other systems. Systems where you aren't doing that hardware/software co-design, you just have ghosts, bad juju, voodoo.

YouTube video by Jane Street Bryan Cantrill: Andreessen’s Folly - The False Dichotomy of Software and Hardware

I watch very few technical talks on video (I prefer to read) but found Bryan Cantrill's recent presentation at Jane Street enthralling.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0Jj...

BugBash is one of the best conferences I've been to. Experienced systems programmers both speaking and attending. It's like NYC Systems but two full days and focused on reliability. Thanks Antithesis for the ticket to attend again this year. I'm excited to see everyone!

If you've run seaweedfs, versity, juicefs, beegfs, or rustfs—permissively-licensed s3-compatible storage systems— and are open to chatting about your experience, I'd like to chat with you for The Consensus.

One thing I'm excited about with The Consensus is giving you a hub to find interesting 1) jobs and 2) events going on in systems programming.

I wrote a short article about the major companies behind the most recent release of Postgres. Also mentioned interesting commits by smaller contributors, including a first-time contributor who fixed a bug involving ctid scans that might have dated back to 1999.

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/02...

LLC purchased

0th session of the NYC Reading Club today at 5:45pm, Maiden Lane Public Atrium! Be there or be Square! (This one will be primarily logistics and planning, amd some discussion of the book!)

The era of humans using pointers is over. The era of humans managing threads is over. The era of humans writing SQL is over.

This is a very good post about how/where a very conscientious developer chooses to use LLMs (and how/where he chooses not to).

matklad.github.io/2026/01/20/v...

I like this post by @eatonphil.bsky.social. I have tried to convey this sort of info to every new grad/junior who's asked me for advice, because early in my career it was not obvious to me that pay varied so much by company type notes.eatonphil.com/2026-01-03-d...

Feel free to DM or email me. Always happy to help organizers.

LLMs and your career

notes.eatonphil.com/2026-01-19-l...

3) The first 300 invites are out since I get rate limited. All 800+ folks who signed up will definitely eventually get in.

Looking forward to this!!

2) Invites are out for the first 12 discussion starters are out. If your name is in this list please check your email/spam for phil@eatonphil.com and confirm/deny your interest.