A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

According to legend, Zen’s Sixth Ancestor was chosen in a poetry contest.

MongoDB engineers juggling many implementations of many specs.

Originally published on the MongoDB Research Blog.

July 17, 2026.

July 5, 2026.

July 3, 2026.

June 21, 2026.

This is a dharma talk I gave at the New Paltz Zen Center on June 19, 2026.

This is one of the two top database research conferences (the other is VLDB).

After a short trek in Nepal and a few days in Kathmandu, I flew to Bengaluru (which everyone still seems to call Bangalore) for the SIGMOD conference.

Scalable Leader Leases For Multi Consensus Groups in CockroachDB, by Ibrahim Kettaneh, Tsvetomira Radeva, Arul Ajmani, Sumeer Bhola, Rebecca Taft (all at Cockroach Labs), and Nathan VanBenschoten (now Turbopuffer).

I spent two days visiting temples in the Kathmandu valley, then four days on the Ghorepani Poon Hill trek in the Annapurna region.

Most engineers’ first objection to using TLA+ is, the syntax is hostile.

My father’s dishonesty was frustrating and disappointing to many people, but I think he got the worst of it.

Zhihua Gan climbing Tiers of Fear (5.12a) in the Gunks.

The person in charge of keeping time in a Zen temple is called the jikido.

This was my second BugBash, and it’s still my favorite conference—the right combination of industry and academia, research and practice.

Reverend Emily Carter preparing the wine and wafers at Christ Episcopal Church.

The services leading up to Easter Sunday, led by my friend Reverend Emily Carter at Christ Episcopal Church in Poughkeepsie.

Automated Design of Agentic Systems, by Shengran Hu, Cong Lu, and Jeff Clune (UBC, Vector Institute), at ICLR 2025.

My friend Tyler leading Retribution, a 5.10b trad route.

LeaseGuard is a new enhancement to the Raft consensus protocol that strengthens Raft’s consistency guarantees and time-to-recovery.

The Latin poet Petronius wrote that when we die, we join the majority.

SysMoBench: Evaluating AI on Formally Modeling Complex Real-World Systems, by authors from Nanjing University, Microsoft Research Asia, University of British Columbia, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks, a paper by dozens of authors working at Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR).

My sangha held its first sesshin, a Zen meditation retreat.

He climbed a skyscraper and risked dying on live TV.

For all my 25 years in the industry, large companies have needed junior engineers to write code.

Last week, Anthropic refused to let the Department of War use their models to spy on Americans or kill people autonomously.

“Did I Already Save This Paper?”

February 16, 2026.

What is an LLM?

Athena, goddess of wisdom.

In Rethink the Linearizability Constraints of Raft for Distributed Systems (behind the IEEE paywall, dammit), some academic researchers describe Raft optimizations that make reads and writes quicker, while preserving linearizability.

Let’s build a simulation of a coffeeshop.

Many distributed systems have a leader-based consensus protocol at their heart.

Portrait of Paul Valery by Jacques-Emile Blanche Back in 1928, Paul Valéry predicted streaming media: It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or e…

This week I’m writing a Related Work section for a research paper in a field outside my specialty.

Actually it won’t shock you.

October 6, 2025.

In late-1950s Buenos Aires, on a quiet night, Juan is in his attic, playing cards with his close friends.

September 28, 2025.

September 27, 2025.

If you want to wear sunglasses and/or prescription glasses while belaying a climber, especially outdoors on multipitch climbs, I hope this post helps you cobble together a system that is functional and fairly robust.

That’s right, I’ve found it.

I want to explain computer science on my blog, and show photos, and I want every article to look exquisite.

Odin, god of wisdom.

Certain topics seem off-limits in Zen, like: What’s the goal of meditation?

Saraswati, goddess of knowledge We usually reason about distributed systems by asking, what can one process know about the state of the system?

Well, a SAT solver can optimize the retreat schedule.