I’m a 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 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

• Yokoji Zen Mountain Center August 2019. Yokoji Zen Mountain Center, in the San Bernardino Mountains.
• Year End Meditation Retreat December 2019. Yoga and sutra-copying at the Village Zendo's year-end meditation retreat at the Garrison Institute.
• You Look So Zen On a visit to some Buddhists incarcerated on a jail barge, I had to improvise how to practice Zen, just like we always have to improvise our practice.
• When The Buddha Met A Murderer Everyone deserves a place where we can practice together, and the chance for redemption. A talk I gave at the Village Zendo on December 5, 2019.
• PyGotham 2019 Speaker Coaching Recap This year thirteen PyGotham speakers received free training from opera singer and speaking coach Melissa Collom. Here's what they said.

… 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.