The Consensus

Worth a read: @kmcd.dev from @buf.build writes about how Protobuf in Python and TypeScript is actually good now. Also: Replit.com acquired trychroma.com. And @tenstorrent.bsky.social is hiring a Performance Architect, CPU Cluster in Santa Clara. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/27/

Worth a read: Nuno Faria writes about best practices for single row lookups on the Apache DataFusion blog. Also: Flapping Airplanes raised a $1B Series A. And Gimlet Labs is hiring a compiler engineer in SF. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/26/

Wrote an article about open and closed loop benchmarking, looking properties of the two approaches and pitfalls while benchmarking simple workloads on nginx and PostgreSQL. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/10/25...

Worth a read: @pminborg.bsky.social writes about allocating off-heap memory (6-18x faster in JDK 28) for the Java blog. Also: Tractian.com raised a $130M Series D in Atlanta. And @tensorlake.ai is hiring a Distributed Systems Engineer in San Francisco. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/23/

Jobs (in software infrastructure) map. theconsensus.dev/jobs.html

Compression and Concatenation on the Web, by @theconsensus.dev: https://theconsensus.dev/p/2026/10/04/compression-and-concatenation-on-the-web.html?focus=1&ref=frontenddogma.com #compression #gzip #brotli

Worth a read: @duckdb.org announces DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS. Also: EkaRobotics.com raised a $150M Series A. And liquid.ai is hiring ML Scientist on the Japanese Multimodal team in Tokyo. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/22/

Worth a read: Nicholas Husin and Damien Neil write about better HTTP/1 connection reuse on the @golang.org blog. Also: daytona.io raised a $60M Series B. And arcade.dev is hiring a Distributed Systems Engineer in San Francisco. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/21/

Worth a read: Ming Ying from @paradedb.com writes about recent improvements for BM25 COUNT performance in their Postgres extension. Also: @tenstorrent.bsky.social raised a $1.5B Series E in Toronto. @sysdig.com is hiring a Director of Security Engineering in the US. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/20/

Worth a read: @joehellerstein.bsky.social walks through techniques for eliminating bugs. Also: duvo.ai raised a $32M Series A in Prague. And exploration.space is hiring a Software System Engineer in Munich. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/19/

I took my first look into the market and technologies spurring agent sandboxes. Exclusive for Standard subscribers. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/10/18...

Worth a read: Orson Peters writes about denial of service attacking hash tables without knowing the hash function. Also: Opsin raised a $21M Series A in San Jose. And Encord is hiring a Senior Software Engineer in London. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/16/

Worth a read: David Laban and @lambrospetrou.com from @cloudflare.social write about how D1 scales to millions of databases. Also: Modal.com raised a $750M Series D in NYC. And CoreWeave.com is hiring a Senior Manager, Data Center Security Engineering in New Jersey. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/15/

Short blog post on the little part The Consensus plays in promoting (good) human writing. theconsensus.dev/blog/2026/10...

Worth a read: Petros Angelatos from @materialize.com writes about building a linearizable log on READ COMMITTED isolation. Also: voltus.co raised a $225M Series D in SF. And Muybridge.com is hiring a Computer Vision Engineer in Oslo. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/14/

Worth a read: @gunnarmorling.dev writes about improved performance for the Parquet library, Hardwood, in 1.1.0.Beta2. Also: typesafe.ai raised a $870M Series A in SF. And @modular.com.web.brid.gy is hiring an Engineering Manager on the MAX Kernel team in the US. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/13/

Thank you to our newest site sponsor, @clickhouse.com, for supporting our work helping developers build a deep understanding of software infrastructure. theconsensus.dev

Worth a read: Anil Joshi from @percona.bsky.social writes about MySQL's new calendar-based versioning scheme (e.g. MySQL 26.7). Also: OllyGarden raised a $4M seed round in Berlin. And together.ai is hiring a Large-Scale Training Research Engineer in SF. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/12/

Everybody knows you can concatenate gzip files to form valid gzip files, but do the browsers know? We explore concatenation with gzip, brotli, and zstd. paywall has expired, give it a read theconsensus.dev/p/2026/10/04...

Now indexing 215 internships at companies building software infrastructure. All internships are freely and fully searchable as a service to students. Zero reason you should not be sharing with your students, friends, kids. Let's get them hacking. theconsensus.dev/internships....

I chatted with Deepthi Sigireddi from @supabase.com on her 25 years of experience as a developer, her time as the project lead of Vitess, her work on Multigres, and databases at Supabase in general. No paywall, give it a read. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/10/08...

Worth a read: Evan Chu, Wei Hern Lim, Manasbir Bagri, Akira Yoshiyama, & Brendan Graham from Proximal.ai write about their post-training infrastructure. Also: @oxide.computer raised a $445M Series D. And @elastic.co is hiring on the search algorithms team in the US. theconsensus.dev/g/2026/10/09/

Over 10,000 open software jobs now indexed on The Consensus, at nearly 900 companies building software infrastructure. theconsensus.dev/jobs.html

Worth a read: Maximilian Wilhelm from Hetzner.com writes about the history and design of their network stack. Also: Luminal.com raised a $29M Series A. And @cloudflare.social is hiring a Performance Engineer, Kernel and Memory in Austin, NYC, or DC. theconsensus.dev

Worth a read: @mrale.ph writes about microbenchmarks in the age of AI. Also: @gmicloud.bsky.social raised a $223M Series B. And FormEnergy.com is hiring a Manager, Site Reliability Engineering in Berkeley. theconsensus.dev

Worth a read: @ritchie46.bsky.social from @pola.rs announces the release of Polars 2.0. Also: @namespacelabs.com raised a $42M Series B. And @motherduck.com is hiring a Software Engineer on the database team in Amsterdam. theconsensus.dev

Worth a read: Bogdan Degtyariov from @percona.bsky.social writes about the impact of thread pools, newly available in community MySQL. Also: @supabase.com acquired @tur.so. And Meticulous.ai is hiring a Platform Engineer in London. theconsensus.dev

Everybody knows you can concatenate gzip files to form valid gzip files, but do the browsers know? We explore concatenation with gzip, brotli, and zstd. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/10/04...

As of this month, The Consensus has now passed 1,000 followers on Twitter, 1,000 followers on LinkedIn, and 1,000 newsletter subscribers. A decent first 9 months! Even in the age of AI, and likely supercharged due to it, people still want to understand how software works.

Worth a read: Thomas Kowalski and @scottgerring.com from @datadoghq.com write about building an async-aware profiler for Python. Also: flowengineering.com raised a $50M Series B. And @neo4j.com is hiring a Software Engineering on the clustering & distributed systems team in London. Links in bio

Required Reading in software infrastructure. theconsensus.dev/developers.h...

The semantic search isn't always perfect (it's a cheap model, made cheaper (and slightly worse) with model2vec), but this is just such a cool way to find jobs in compilers, os development, container runtimes, etc. theconsensus.dev/jobs.html

Worth a read: @haskell.org published a new edition of @lexi-lambda.bsky.social's famous explanation of the differences between foldl and foldr in Haskell. Also: Proximal.ai raised a $15M seed round. And MongoDB is hiring a Senior Software Engineer on Benchmarking in Mexico. Links in bio

Worth a read: @penberg.org from @tur.so writes about improvements to concurrent write performance in their implementation of SQLite. Also: modulate.ai raised a $25M Series A Extension. And MultiverseComputing.com is hiring an Engineering Manager in Spain. Links in bio.

New section on the Contribute page: What makes a The Consensus article. And bumped payments to $400 per article. theconsensus.dev/contribute.h...

Reads, jobs, and funding for the week in software infrastructure. theconsensus.dev/n/2026/09/27...

Wrote a new article on full text search and PostgreSQL. Exclusive for Standard subscribers. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/09/27...

Worth a read: Alexander Zaitsev from @altinity.bsky.social writes about drop-in compute-storage separation for ClickHouse MergeTree tables. Also: island.io raised a $400M Series F. And onsemi.com is hiring an Algorithm Design Engineer (Graduate/Junior Level) in Ljubljana. Links in bio

Worth a read: @xeiaso.net and @garrensmith.bsky.social from @tigrisdata.com write about moving from FoundationDB to Kafka for their message queue. Also: raindrop.ai raised a $35M Series A. And alpha-sense.com is hiring a Senior Product Security Engineer in the US. Links in bio

Trying something new to help you save time while reading about software infrastructure online theconsensus.dev/feed.html (this is a fairly dumb checker, may be wrong, may not catch everything, merely a hint)

Worth a read: @lukasvogel.bsky.social from @cedardb.com ported Doom to SQL, this time for real. Also: Verda.com raised a $189M Series B. And @figma.com is hiring a Software Engineer on the AI Platforms team in SF / NYC. Links in bio

Worth a read: Aleksey Kladov writes about fuzzing versus unit tests. Also, @feldera.bsky.social raised a $15.4M Series A. And tenstorrent.com is hiring a Midcore Design Verification Engineer in Santa Clara. Links in bio

Worth a read: Eric Ridge and Patrick Reynolds from @planetscale.com write about a new full-text search index for Postgres. Also: trycomp.ai raised a $34M Series A. And @grafana.bsky.social is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer on the Loki Query team in Germany. Links in bio

The Consensus Weekly is just such a cool place to find both jobs, articles, and funding info on all kinds of hardcore software engineering. And we just passed 1,000 email subscribers. theconsensus.dev/n/2026/09/20...

Short blog on job search for every visitor theconsensus.dev/blog/2026/09...

We take a look at some of the ways PostgreSQL rewrites your queries (or not). Paywall has expired, give it a read. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/09/13...

Worth a read: John Trengrove from @weaviate.bsky.social writes about 4-bit Rotational Quantization. Also: Mind.io raised a $72M Series B. And @ovhcloudus.bsky.social is hiring a Systems Engineer in Texas. Links in bio.

If you enjoy reading The Consensus, consider asking your company to sponsor. It has hit the front page of HN 9 times since starting in February, as one metric. A chance to get in front of developers who really want to understand how software works. theconsensus.dev/sponsor.html

Worth a read: Thomas Veasey, Chris Hegarty, Sergey Sidorov from @elastic.co share how they prove an agent's performance wins. Also, Exein.io raised a $270M round. And Spotify.com is hiring a Director of ML Engineering on the conversation product area. Link in bio.