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

• Red Hook March 18, 2019. Red Hook, Brooklyn.
• Grand Central Station March 25, 2019. Grand Central Station at night.
• Choosing the Adventurous Route: The Career Path for Non-Managers Video of my PyTennessee 2019 keynote, about making the most of a lifetime as a coder.
• Choosing the Adventurous Route: Resources Links to articles and papers I mention in my PyTennessee talk about the career path for coders.
• Meaningless Striving Each new year, Americans resolve to work harder and be more austere, for no reason. Let's stop torturing ourselves.

… 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.