Hey! I'm Phil (he/him). I was a software development manager at Oracle, I was a cofounder and led marketing at TigerBeetle, I was a developer working on Postgres products at EnterpriseDB. Today I'm bootstrapping The Consensus to provide research and analysis for experienced programmers.
I am a college dropout (not by choice; stay in school!) and for the last 10 years I've chased my way down the software stack starting from humble beginnings with the venerable jQuery and PHP.
I try to practice healthy obsession.
To that end, I run an online Software Internals Book Club (3k+ members), run /r/databasedevelopment (10k+ members), and I run a Software Internals Discord (9k+ members) that has, among other things, become a home for database and distributed systems developers.
I keep cooking new dishes, love to read, started running, and occasionally play music.
My writing, which in 2026 passed 1.5 million total views, has been cited in the book Writing for Developers.
I hope you connect with me on LinkedIn (11k+ followers), Twitter (28k+ followers), Bluesky (6k+ followers), my mailing list (3k+ subscribers), or over email.
Highlighted posts
- Watching Go's new garbage collector move through the heap
- The feature in OxCaml that more languages should steal
- Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole
- Serving files over HTTP three ways: synchronous, epoll, and io_uring
- Automating Hermitage to see how transactions differ in MySQL and MariaDB
- Things that go wrong with disk IO
- Build a serverless ACID database with this one neat trick (atomic PutIfAbsent)
- What's the big deal about Deterministic Simulation Testing?
- A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability
- Implementing MVCC and major SQL transaction isolation levels
- An intuition for distributed consensus in OLTP systems
- Implementing the Raft distributed consensus protocol in Go
Recommended books
These are my favorite business books, technical books, and books in general.
Misc resources
- Data Storage, Replication, and Integrity Syllabus
- Tactical marketing
- B-Tree resources
- Consensus resources
- Compiler and interpreter resources
- Getting started with database development
Videos and streaming
Other things I'm affiliated with
Who else to follow
If you enjoy my writing, go follow these writers.