I’m a staff engineer at MongoDB in New York City. I wrote Motor, the async MongoDB Python driver, and I’m the lead developer of the MongoDB C Driver. I contribute to 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

• "Ordinary Zen" Photos in the Edge of Humanity Magazine My Village Zendo photos were published by an online photo magazine.
• Video of My PyCon 2017 Talk, "Grok the GIL: Fast and Thread-Safe Python" Read ancient CPython source code, and learn a principle so pithy you can write it on the back of your hand.
• Let's Grok the Gil at PyCon, Friday I'm talking about fast and thread-safe Python tomorrow at 12:10, in the Oregon Ballroom 201-202.
• Off-Broadway Musical About the Life of the Buddha My partner Jennifer Keishin Armstrong and I reviewed and photographed "Under The Bodhi Tree."
• Praxis Housing: John When I got out of prison, I'd never had a job in my life.

… More Articles

Selected Articles

• For Or Against?: 9/11 and The Precept of Non-Killing On the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I describe my difficulties practicing nonviolence in a world full of violence.
• How To Write Resilient MongoDB Applications How should my code respond to network errors, outages, and other exceptions?
• 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.
• PyCon Video: "Eventually Correct: Async Testing" My PyCon 2015 talk about testing asynchronous code with Tornado's included AsyncTestCase.
• 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.
• Review of "MongoDB Applied Design Patterns" by Rick Copeland An excellent new O'Reilly book on MongoDB gives detailed, well-thought-out designs for a range of applications.
• 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.