I’m a staff engineer at MongoDB in New York City. I wrote Motor, the async MongoDB Python driver, and I’m the lead developer of the MongoDB C Driver. I contribute to PyMongo, asyncio, Python and Tornado. I study at the International Center for Photography and practice at the Village Zendo. You can read more about me or find me on Twitter.

Latest Articles

• How I'm Preparing For Sickness, Old Age, And Death Easily write a will, health proxy, and advance directive, and talk about death with strangers.
• The Heroic Efforts of Unix Code Archeologists and Restorers Read my story about the Unix Heritage Society and the Unix History Repo on Linux Weekly News.
• New Driver Features for MongoDB 3.6 A faster and smaller wire protocol, simple resilient code, and realtime change streams.
• Invitation to a Zen Street Retreat, July 2017 Join me and Genro Roshi for a four-day meditation retreat on the streets of NYC.
• Memorial Day Dharma Talk My father-in-law is a soldier and my mother is a peace activist. Buddha's Middle Way allows us both to honor veterans and to oppose war.

… More Articles

Selected Articles

• For Or Against?: 9/11 and The Precept of Non-Killing On the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I describe my difficulties practicing nonviolence in a world full of violence.
• How To Write Resilient MongoDB Applications How should my code respond to network errors, outages, and other exceptions?
• 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.
• PyCon Video: "Eventually Correct: Async Testing" My PyCon 2015 talk about testing asynchronous code with Tornado's included AsyncTestCase.
• 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.
• Review of "MongoDB Applied Design Patterns" by Rick Copeland An excellent new O'Reilly book on MongoDB gives detailed, well-thought-out designs for a range of applications.
• 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.