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
- Village Zendo's Summer Meditation Retreat 2022
Photos of my Zen community's first in-person sesshin since December 2019.
- Climbing in Peterskill
May 29, 2022. Photos of my friends climbing in upstate New York.
- Why Should Async Get All The Love?: Advanced Control Flow With Threads
Writeup of my PyCon 2022 talk. How to write safe, elegant concurrent Python with threads.
- Buddhist Groups Supporting Refugees
My Zen group, the Village Zendo, is leading a Buddhist project to resettle refugees in NYC.
- Paper Review: E-Store, P-Store, and Elastic Database Systems
A PhD thesis and two papers about reactive and predictive autoscaling.
… 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.