I’m a senior staff engineer at MongoDB in New York City, specializing in C++ and distributed systems. I wrote Motor, the async MongoDB Python driver, and I’ve contributed to the MongoDB C Driver, PyMongo, asyncio, Python, and Tornado. I studied at the International Center for Photography and I practice at the Village Zendo. You can read more about me or find me on Twitter.

Latest Articles

• Multi-Paxos in Python, tested with Jepsen A 2-week toy project to learn a famous algorithm and try out a distributed systems test framework.
• Eye-Closing Ceremony at the Village Zendo Covering the statue of Manjusri and desanctifying the space, in preparation for moving to the zendo's new location.
• Cleaning Up Rikers Island Photos and story: faith leaders and incarcerated boys work side by side to repaint a youth jail.
• Paper review: Scaling Large Production Clusters with Partitioned Synchronization A clever algorithm for reducing conflicts in a distributed task scheduler.
• Current and Future Tools for Interactive TLA+ A talk I gave at the 2021 TLA+ conference with Samy Lanka.

… More Articles

Selected Articles

• API Evolution the Right Way Ten covenants that responsible library authors keep with their users.
• The Meteor What if you knew you had 30 minutes to live? Would you want to be awakened?
• Embed Interns In Your Team, Don't Assign Them Science Fair Projects Interns are much more likely to succeed if they work as regular team members, doing a real professional's daily work.
• Praxis Housing: Michael When you're in an atmosphere that's closed in, with noise in the hallway, no circulation, you start feeling like that room.
• Server Discovery And Monitoring In PyMongo, Perl, And C Our drivers' algorithms to discover and stay connected to your server, replica set, or sharded cluster.
• March To Triumph As A Mentor I've failed as a mentor, and succeeded. Here are the warning signs I watch for, and the steps I take to design a mentorship for success.
• Python C Extensions And mod_wsgi If you use mod_wsgi, or you're the author of a Python C extension, it's time for you to learn how they interact.
• Ordinary Zen A portrait series of Zen practitioners.
• Optimizing MongoDB Compound Indexes How to find the best multicolumn index for a complex query.

Projects

• libbson and libmongoc, the MongoDB C Driver libraries.
• Motor: A full-featured non-blocking MongoDB driver for Tornado.
• PyMongo: I help maintain the standard MongoDB driver for Python.
• GreenletProfiler: A performance profiler that groks greenlets and Gevent.
• A queue implementation for asyncio in the Python 3.4 standard library.
• I do portraits of Lower East Siders, residents of transitional housing, and American Buddhists.