A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

July 26, 2025.

Sojourner Truth Armstrong Davis, Jennifer’s and my Chinese dwarf hamster, died last night.

Phil Eaton wrote “From Web Developer To Database Developer In 10 Years” recently.

Since I joined MongoDB’s Distributed Systems Research Group a few years ago, I’ve relied on Google Scholar alerts to tell me when an author in my specialty publishes a new paper, or (much more often) when a new paper cites an author I’m interested in.

Climbing in the Gunks on June 21 and 22, 2025.

June 2025.

Opus 40, a sculpture park in Saugerties, New York, hand-built by Harvey Fite over 37 years from local bluestone.

Distributed systems people are suspicious of timers.

Cross-posted from the MongoDB engineering blog.

In 2016 and 2017, I photographed, reported, and wrote a two-part series on MongoDB’s sponsorship of computer science education in NYC public schools.

In 2016 and 2017, I photographed, reported, and wrote a two-part series on MongoDB’s sponsorship of computer science education in NYC public schools.

Gunks climber Liza Mills on the routes Lisa and The Sting with her husband Jordan and their cat Dwayne.

Antithesis has pioneered “autonomous testing”, a term they coined for their platform, which combines a deterministic hypervisor with coverage-guided fuzzing and fault injection.

At this year’s TLA+ community event, I tentatively proposed adding features to make the language useful for performance modeling.

Here are my notes from the 2025 TLA+ Community Event.

Holy Week services (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday) at Christ Episcopal Church in Poughkeepsie.

April 9, 2025.

When you’re hunting for bugs with a nondeterministic test, how many times should you run the test?

April 1, 2025.

March 25, 2025.

February 18, 2025.

I climbed with five friends in Red Rocks, outside Las Vegas.

SwiftPaxos: Fast Geo-Replicated State Machines, in NSDI 2024, proposes a Paxos variant for networks with high latency, and different latencies between different pairs of nodes.

Some of my photographer friends hand-make books, sculptures, etc. from their photos.

October 22, 2023.

January 27, 2025.

Which animals are sentient, and how can we liberate them from suffering?

December 2024.

This is a dharma talk I gave at the Village Zendo December 12, 2024, about my mother’s brain surgery and end-of-life decisions.

December 5, 2024.

November 23 and 24, 2024.

At MongoDB, we experimented to see if we could predict each DBaaS customer’s demand fluctuations, and auto-scale them using this foreknowledge.

Elizabeth Gross weaving a vessel for green burial.

I met a programmer of an antique tongue Who said: A vast, maintainerless pile of code Lies in GitHub.

October 19, 2024.

New York’s hottest club is NYC Systems.

September 21, 2024.

You can find yourself in a critical situation without warning.

Amazon MemoryDB: A Fast and Durable Memory-First Cloud Database, by six AWS engineers, in SIGMOD 2024.

The Washington Post says “the movement to diversify Silicon Valley is crumbling”, and the story is particularly dire for gender-diversity nonprofits: Girls In Tech has dissolved, so has Women Who Code, and software companies have sharply cut their grants…

Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington plan to make an AI health coach, which will address chronic illness by encouraging people to eat better, take their medications, and get more sleep and exercise.

August 2024.

June 26, 2023.

June 16, 2024.

June 15, 2024.

June 11, 2024.

June 7, 2024.

June 3, 2024.

Detock: High Performance Multi-region Transactions at Scale, SIGMOD 2023.

Timestamp as a Service, not an Oracle, by authors from Alibaba Cloud, in Proceedings of VLDB this year.