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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.
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.
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