I’m a senior staff engineer at MongoDB doing research at MongoDB Labs. I live and climb in New Paltz, NY. I wrote Motor, the async MongoDB Python driver, and I’ve contributed to MongoDB, the MongoDB C Driver, PyMongo, asyncio, Python, and Tornado. I studied at the International Center for Photography and I practice at the Village Zendo and New Paltz Zen Center. You can read more about me or find me on Twitter or Mastodon.

Latest Articles

• Climbing and Falling May 19, 2023. Warrior's Way Falling and Commitment, a one-day climbing class taught in the Gunks by Dustin Portzline.
• Gunks Climbing Photos May 7, 2023. Photos I took in Irene Yee's climbing photography clinic.
• Consistency and Isolation for Python Programmers My PyCon 2023 talk about using databases safely.
• Pseudocode Is Not Durable Use Python: it's less ambiguous, well-known, and concise enough.
• Review: Distributed Reset A 1994 paper describing how to bring a distributed system to a known state.

… More Articles

Selected Articles

• Paper Review: E-Store, P-Store, and Elastic Database Systems A PhD thesis and two papers about reactive and predictive autoscaling.
• Paper review: Paxos vs Raft Which consensus algorithm will win?
• Five Ways to Establish a Rock-Solid Meditation Habit Meditation can transform your life, but it only works if you sit regularly. You can establish a strong, serious practice following these five methods.
• 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.
• 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.
• Ordinary Zen A portrait series of Zen practitioners.
• Optimizing MongoDB Compound Indexes How to find the best multicolumn index for a complex query.

Projects

• Motor: A full-featured non-blocking MongoDB driver for Tornado.
• PyMongo: I help maintain the standard MongoDB driver for Python.
• A queue implementation for asyncio in the Python 3.4 standard library.
• Portraits of Lower East Siders, residents of transitional housing, and American Buddhists.