I’m A. Jesse Jiryu Davis, a Senior Staff Research Engineer in MongoDB’s Distributed Systems Research Group. I live and climb in New Paltz, NY.
Here’s my speaking schedule.
Past Projects: #
- MongoDB Serverless.
- The Server Discovery and Monitoring Spec that governs how all MongoDB drivers connect to MongoDB server clusters.
- libbson and libmongoc, the MongoDB C Driver libraries.
- Motor: A full-featured non-blocking MongoDB driver for Tornado.
- PyMongo: I helped maintain the standard MongoDB driver for Python.
Contributions: #
- The queue implementation and an optimization to getaddrinfo in asyncio in the Python standard library.
- Locks and queues for the Python Tornado async framework.
- A bugfix to Python’s threading module.
- Concurrent getaddrinfo in Python on BSD.
- VLDB 2024 program committee.
Publications: #
- LeaseGuard: Raft Leases Done Right, SIGMOD 2026: an elegant enhancement to the Raft consensus protocol that improves consistency, with optimizations that improve availability compared to previous lease protocols.
- eXtreme Modelling in Practice, VLDB 2020: how to check that a TLA+ specification matches a C++ implementation.
- Patents: System and method for linearizable leader read optimization in Raft, Systems and methods for scalable database hosting data of multiple database tenants.
- Co-author with Guido van Rossum of the “Web Crawler With asyncio Coroutines” chapter in 500 Lines or Less, the fourth book in the Architecture of Open Source Applications series.
- Lion’s Roar: “5 Ways to Get into the Meditation Habit”, “Ordinary Zen”, “If Siddhartha Didn’t Leave Home”, “Steve Jobs”.
- LWN.net Linux Weekly News: “Assembling the history of Unix”.
- RedHat’s OpenSource.com: “Grok the GIL: How to write fast and thread-safe Python”, “How to avoid humiliating newcomers: A guide for advanced developers”.
Photography: #
I’ve done portraits of transitional housing residents, climbers, and American Zen Buddhists.
Religion: #
I’m a Zen student at the Village Zendo and New Paltz Zen Center. I’m a secular Jew.
Training: #
I got a BA in Computer Science from Oberlin College, took photo classes at The International Center for Photography, and lived for a year at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center.
Contact Me: #
Unless you’re a recruiter.
Email jesse@emptysquare.net or jesse@mongodb.com.
emptysqua.re on Bluesky, ajdavis on GitHub, emptysquare on Flickr.
I look like this:
