All Posts | A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

Career Fairs, Part 2: How Can Startups Get Noticed? (2/20/2012) - I wrote the other day about what I think Comp Sci majors are doing wrong at career fairs and how they should be distinguishing themselves from their peers. There’s a fun debate in the comments about whether I gave the right advice. Regardless, here’s a followup question I need answered from CS undergrads: If you’ve [...]
So You’re Coming to a Career Fair (2/18/2012) - I went to a career fair at Big Ivy University recently, and talked to fifty or so computer science undergrads who were looking for internships or full-time jobs with my employer, 10gen. I’m sure some of them were very smart, but they had not learned how to distinguish themselves from each other. One after another, [...]
Zen Portraits (2/15/2012) - My portraits of some friends from the Village Zendo.
Third Normal Form and Ultimate Truth (2/14/2012) - I have an opinion: most people learned about relational databases as if RDBMSes were designed to store the ultimate truth about some data. They figured that once the schema had been properly diagrammed and normalized, then they could load all their data into it, and finally, start doing some queries. To pick on an easy [...]
Philly MongoDB User Group: Python, MongoDB, and Asynchronous Web Frameworks (2/13/2012) - Photo (C) Parent5446 I’ll be recapping last week’s talk on Python, MongoDB, and Asynchronous Web Frameworks this Thursday at 7pm, in Philadelphia, at the Philly MongoDB User Group’s inaugural meetup. We’ll be at the Devnuts office, at 908 North 3rd Street. We’ll have pizza, naturally. First Philly MongoDB User Group
Slides from my talk on asynchronous web frameworks, Python, and MongoDB (2/9/2012) - Here’s the slides for the talk I gave at the NYC Python Meetup tonight, on asynchronous web frameworks, Python, and MongoDB. Direct link. Embedded: Python, async web frameworks, and MongoDB View more presentations from emptysquare.
Andrea Bruce, “Uncovering the Sadness of Young Deaths” (2/8/2012) - Photo: Andrea Bruce A photo essay by Andrea Bruce for the NY Times, on infant deaths in Afghanistan. The chiaroscuro lighting she uses (or finds naturally, in huts with small windows) links her to Renaissance religious painters like Caravaggio. An ugly subject like a dead child in a poor country is made beautiful and tragic. [...]
This Thursday: a talk on Python, MongoDB, and asynchronous web frameworks (2/5/2012) - This Thursday in NYC I’m talking about Python, MongoDB, and asynchronous web frameworks at a meetup called For the Love of Python: Wine tasting, Red velvet cupcakes, and Tech Talks. The talk is a work in progress. To be strictly accurate, I have not yet started working on the talk, because the code I’ll be [...]
How To Do An Isolated Install of Brubeck (1/5/2012) - I wanted to install James Dennis’s Brubeck web framework, but lately I’ve become fanatical about installing nothing, nothing, in the system-wide directories. A simple rm -rf brubeck/ should make it like nothing ever happened. So that I remember this for next time, here’s how I did an isolated install of Brubeck and all its dependencies [...]
Photos of Old Animals (1/2/2012) - The Times the other day linked to an excellent photo project, Isa Leshko’s “Elderly Animals”. The Times says, Ms. Leshko was inspired to carry out her project after spending a year caring for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease and is now in a nursing home. She considered documenting the experience through pictures but soon [...]
Zencation (12/25/2011) - Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis I’m back in NYC tonight. I spent a few days in Chicago with my girlfriend’s family for Christmas, and we’re leaving tomorrow for our habitual weeklong Zen retreat with the Village Zendo. I’ve had a pretty good year—I ran my first half-marathon, I did a street retreat, I spent August [...]
Tornado Unittesting: Eventually Correct (12/16/2011) - Photo: Tim Green I’m a fan of Tornado, one of the major async web frameworks for Python, but unittesting async code is a total pain. I’m going to review what the problem is, look at some klutzy solutions, and propose a better way. If you don’t care what I have to say and you just [...]
The Rise of Developeronomics (12/10/2011) - I have some thoughts about Venkatesh Rao’s Forbes article, “The Rise of Developeronomics”. The article, in brief, argues that “software is now the core function of every company, no matter what it makes,” and that, as “software eats the world,” maintaining relationships with excellent software developers is a prerequisite for survival for all firms. One [...]
Save the Monkey: Reliably Writing to MongoDB (12/8/2011) - Photo: Kevin Jones MongoDB replica sets claim “automatic failover” when a primary server goes down, and they live up to the claim, but handling failover in your application code takes some care. I’ll walk you through writing a failover-resistant application in Python using a new feature in PyMongo 2.1: the ReplicaSetConnection. Setting the Scene Mabel [...]
August Sander and Seydou Keïta (12/8/2011) - Photo: August Sander I trudged to Chelsea through the disgusting rain tonight for a lecture on August Sander and Seydou Keïta at The Walther Collection. Art historians Shelley Rice and Lisa Binder gave a quick, entertaining intro to the two photographers. August Sander, who worked in Germany in the 1910s and 20s, set out to be [...]
Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery (12/5/2011) - Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Illinois. More Chicago pix on Flickr.
More photos of Scott (12/5/2011) - Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis More photos from September of Scott in Chicago. More Chicago pix on Flickr.
Book: MongoDB In Action (12/5/2011) - My colleague at 10gen Kyle Banker has published his book MongoDB in Action: MongoDB in Action is a comprehensive guide to MongoDB for application developers. The book begins by explaining what makes MongoDB unique and describing its ideal use cases. A series of tutorials designed for MongoDB mastery then leads into detailed examples for leveraging [...]
Photo Fire Sale – Everything Must Go! (12/5/2011) - Luca Pizzaroni. Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis I want to sell the remainder of the prints from my solo show at the Lower East Side Visitor Center. All prints are sold framed, 16 inches square for $75. View these prints at the Lower East Side Visitor Center, 54 Orchard St, or in the Flickr set. [...]
Spontaneous Shrines (12/3/2011) - Spontaneous shrine in Kern County, CA. Photo: Shady Grove Oliver My friend Shady Grove Oliver blogs about spontaneous shrines. She writes that a “type of stranger-ritual is performed by passersby who stop or change course specifically to experience the shrine up close. Despite the fact that shrines are often located in sparsely populated areas and [...]
Transcendental Meditation for veterans (12/3/2011) - Photo: Mark Davis/Getty Images How interesting—David Lynch, who’s practiced Transcendental Meditation for 40 years, gives a million dollars to teach TM to veterans. I’ve never practiced TM and I don’t know much about it, besides that it was popularized in the Sixties by the Maharishi and that The Beatles famously went to India to learn [...]
Scott (12/1/2011) - Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis September 17, 2011. Scott in Chicago.
New York C++ Meetup recap (11/29/2011) - My gig, 10gen, sponsored the The New York C++ Developers meetup tonight. Roman Shtylman presented a just-the-facts primer on writing C++ extensions for Node.js. The use cases were: if you need to spawn threads, if you need to interface with an existing C or C++ library, or if you need to do CPU-intensive work and [...]
Matthew (11/29/2011) - Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis November 7, 2011. Matthew in Union Square.
3D printed math sculptures! (11/28/2011) - I happened across this hyperdodecahedron sculpture on Shapeways, available in a dozen materials. It’s designed by Bathsheba Grossman, who has a series of math art on her site.
Nginx spellcasting (11/20/2011) - Gandalf in Ralph Bakshi’s animated version of The Lord of the Rings. I write the following lines for the sake of future generations, seeking lore about Nginx. Should this omen appear: nginx: [warn] 1024 worker_connections are more than open file resource limit: 256 Recite the following incantation in a deep, resonant voice: sudo bash; ulimit [...]
Consistency in MongoDB (11/20/2011) - Friend and colleague Dan has a nice post on ensuring consistency in MongoDB by maintaining a version number in your documents.
Dharma Combat (11/19/2011) - Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis August 2010. Dharma combat with Enkyo Roshi during the Village Zendo’s summer ango at Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY. Dharma combat’s the most fun you can have at a Zen temple. A senior Zen student or a teacher—in this case my teacher, Enkyo Roshi—sits at the front of the room and takes on [...]
Mongo profiling hacks (11/18/2011) - Two interesting things about MongoDB. Primary thing: Mongo introduced a $comment option to queries in version 2.0.0. The comment shows up in the profiler log. Try this on the Mongo shell: > db.setProfilingLevel(2) > db.my_collection.find()._addSpecial("$comment", 'my comment') > db.setProfilingLevel(0) 1234 > db.setProfilingLevel(2) > db.my_collection.find()._addSpecial("$comment", 'my comment') > db.setProfilingLevel(0) The ‘$comment’ value is stored in the [...]
Adding an “include” tag to Underscore.js templates (11/18/2011) - I use Backbone.js a lot lately, and since Backbone requires Underscore.js, I usually end up using Underscore’s templates rather than introducing another Javascript library dependency like Mustache templates. But Underscore’s micro-templating language has an omission that bothered me today: templates can’t include each other. So here’s a quick and dirty tag for Underscore templates: // [...]
NYC Python Meetup recap (11/15/2011) - I went to the NYC Python Meetup tonight at an East Village Bar. We drank, we ate pizza, we fended off recruiters (they knew they couldn’t recruit at the meetup proper, but one ambushed me as I left!), and heard two quirky presentations: · Roy Smith of songza.com talked about Songza’s complex tech stack, and [...]
More on Google Reader (11/15/2011) - Two quick followups to my rant against Google Reader’s new UI the other day: Followup the first: A friend from Google points out that you can hit the F key to toggle all the bullshit away and just see your list of articles: In fact, if you hit ‘?’ you’ll see a whole list of [...]
MakerBot in the New York Times (11/14/2011) - My friend and old Wireless Generation colleague Adam Mayer’s 3D-printer startup is featured in the New York Times.
Unittests’ code coverage in PyCharm (11/14/2011) - PyCharm‘s my favorite IDE in years. Granted, learning how to use it can be like the first few minutes of Flight of the Navigator, but whenever I begin a new kind of task, PyCharm surprises me with the depth of its feature set. Today was my first day at 10gen. One of my first tasks [...]
I’m the new Python Evangelist at 10gen (11/14/2011) - Photo: Russell Lee Today’s my first day at 10gen, working on the Python driver for MongoDB. I have a lot of ideas about what to do next, but we shall see what the next few months bring. My first priorities are to improve testing for pymongo, update its feature set to match what the latest [...]
Letter From Buddhist and Yoga Teachers in Support of the Occupy Movement (11/8/2011) - OWS sign. Photo: David Shankbone. Two awesome thirtysomething Buddhist teachers I’ve practiced with, Michael Stone in Toronto and Ethan Nichtern here in NYC, have published An Open Letter From Buddhist and Yoga Teachers in Support of the Occupy Movement. My own teacher, Enkyo Roshi at the Village Zendo, is a signatory. We believe that individual [...]
Balance (11/7/2011) - My online dharma buddy and fellow Jiryu, Jiryu Mark Rutschman-Byler, writes: …silence to noise, stillness to busyness, zazen to work, isn’t necessarily integration—it’s oscillation. So we talk about “balance” as though if we could get the mix right, we’d achieve integration. But integration is more than just the right rate of back and forth. I [...]
Myoji Sunim gravely ill (11/3/2011) - Photo: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis On of my favorite Zen masters in New York City, Myoji Sunim, is in the hospital. A message from her temple says, Myo Ji Sunim had a massive brain hemorrhage yesterday late afternoon and was brought to St. Luke’s Hospital after having been found by a student. She is now [...]
Against the new Google Reader UI (11/2/2011) - The update to Google Reader highlights a profound error in Google’s interface updates: Each update decreases information density. With Google Reader’s new interface, I can see a list of only 12 new articles. I subscribe to 115 blogs, so I need a little more information to fit on one screen, thank you very much. The [...]
Eido Roshi Resigns (11/1/2011) - Photo: Michael Dougan Eido Shimano Roshi has resigned his leadership of The Zen Studies Society, one of the oldest and most traditional Zen groups in the U.S., and his successor, Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi, has taken his place. She will lead the society and its main practice center, the Dai Bosatsu Zendo. The society’s [...]
Pieter Hugo: “Permanent Error” (10/28/2011) - I’ve only had my Macbook Pro for two years, but the poor thing was a lemon to begin with, and I’ve abused it until it coughs like an old Chevy. I got the latest top-of-the-line laptop to replace it today, and since we were in the neighborhood, the new machine and I went to Yossi [...]
My Tools (10/28/2011) - I’ve used a lot of software development tools since I first taught myself to program in high school (using Turbo C++ and Windows 3.1 — those were the days). Now I use emacs for quick tasks, but I spend most of my time in: PyCharm PyCharm takes a solid minute to start up, but saves [...]
Python Coroutines (10/26/2011) - David Beazley’s Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency in Python is the best coroutine tutorial I’ve seen. It makes an essential distinction between generators, from which you pull data, like this: def squares(): for i in range(10): yield i * i # send data for j in squares(): print j 1234567 def squares(): for i [...]
Using jQTouch.js with iButton.js (10/26/2011) - jQTouch is a jQuery-based Javascript library that simulates an iPhone-like interface using only Javascript and HTML5. It’s designed for WebKit browsers (Safari Desktop, Safari Mobile, Android, Chrome) but is adaptable to Firefox with little work. (Don’t ask about IE.) By default, it renders HTML like this: <span class=”toggle”><input type=”checkbox”></span> … as toggle switches, like this: [...]
My photo show on the Lower East Side (10/25/2011) - Check out my photo show, titled “Strangers”, at 54 Orchard St. The show opened October 20th and will be on display for about two months. More info on The Lo-Down.
First post (10/25/2011) - I’m going to blog like it’s 1999. People may come here primarily to read about Python, MongoDB, and other software topics, but I also intend to post occasionally on photography, Zen, and personal stuff — but nothing icky.