I’m a Senior Staff Research Engineer in MongoDB’s Distributed Systems Research Group. 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 work on long-term documentary photo projects. I’m a senior Zen student at the Village Zendo and New Paltz Zen Center. You can read more about me here.

Latest Articles

• RIP Sojourner In memory of Sojourner Truth Armstrong Davis, a singular and solitary hamster.
• From Python Programmer to Distributed Systems Researcher in 10 Years Without a PhD How I wound up on MongoDB's research team.
• Taming Google Scholar Alerts Instead of a daily deluge, get a weekly summary.
• Gunks, June 2025 Climbing in the Gunks on June 21 and 22, 2025.
• Genuine Climbing retreat for women with cancer June 2025, in the Gunks.

… More Articles

Selected Articles

• Psilocybin session at Johns Hopkins Photos from the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research in Baltimore.
• Paper Review: E-Store, P-Store, and Elastic Database Systems A PhD thesis and two papers about reactive and predictive autoscaling.
• The MongoDB Stable API For MongoDB 5.0, I designed a new Stable API that permits you to upgrade without code changes.
• How To Understand Non-Self: Buddhism And Conway's Game Of Life John Conway's Game of Life is a math puzzle that gives us insights into the Buddha's teaching of anatman.
• Paper review: Paxos vs Raft Which consensus algorithm will win?
• Two attempts to compare a TLA+ spec with a C++ implementation At MongoDB we tried two methods to test that a spec matches the code: one worked, one didn't. We explain our results in a VLDB 2020 paper.
• Meditation at Home Photographs of Village Zendo members in early 2020.
• Reading A Journal of the Plague Year in New York Daniel Defoe's account of London in 1665 is eerily like New York in 2020.
• 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.
• PyGotham 2019's ASL and Live Captioning Playbook Here's what we did for Deaf and hard-of-hearing accessibility, in detail. I hope this recap can be a playbook for future conferences.
• 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.
• The Meteor What if you knew you had 30 minutes to live? Would you want to be awakened?
• Ordinary Zen A portrait series of Zen practitioners.
• Optimizing MongoDB Compound Indexes How to find the best multicolumn index for a complex query.