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.