The Curious Engineer

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A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

emptysqua.re/blog

A. Jesse Jiryu Davis's blog on MongoDB, Zen, and photography.

Distributed systems / cloudDatabasesTesting / QAEssays / personal

’15’20’25
Posts
115 from 8 Oct 2012 to 24 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (42 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://emptysqua.re/blog/index.xml

2026 36

  1. ISSRE 2026 Recap
  2. The Humanoid Lesson, or, Will AI Leave Anything for Database Researchers to Do?
  3. Crag Portraits
  4. Huineng Didn't Win the Poetry Contest
  5. The Polyglot's Dilemma: Conformance Testing a Dozen Specs in as Many Languages
  6. Let's Not Waste Time on Excessive Benchmarking
  7. Night Climbing 2
  8. Aerial silks nears
  9. Night Climbing
  10. New Paltz Zen Center's First Shuso Hossen Ceremony
  11. Keep the Dharma Wheel Rolling
  12. SIGMOD 2026 Recap
  13. Bengaluru
  14. Review: Scalable Leader Leases For Multi Consensus Groups in CockroachDB
  15. Nepal trek
  16. Intro to TLA+ for the LLM Era: Prompt Your Way to Victory
  17. The Kid Is Not My Son
  18. Climbing Tiers of Fear
  19. How Zen Monasteries Tell Time
  20. Antithesis BugBash Conference 2026
  21. Preparing the Eucharist
  22. Holy Week at Christ Episcopal Church
  23. Review: Automated Design of Agentic Systems
  24. Climbing Retribution in the Gunks
  25. LeaseGuard: The Movie
  26. The Dead Majority
  27. Review: SysMoBench: Evaluating AI on Formally Modeling Complex Real-World Systems
  28. Review: Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks
  29. New Paltz Zen Center's precepts retreat
  30. The Dharma of Alex Honnold
  31. Will the Training of Junior Engineers Be a Tragedy of the Commons?
  32. What Does Privacy Mean Now?
  33. Deduplicate Your Zotero Library: A Plugin For The Forgetful Scholar
  34. Snow Grooming
  35. A Zen Talk: AI OMG!
  36. Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment, Part 3

2025 45

  1. Review: Rethink the Linearizability Constraints of Raft for Distributed Systems
  2. YCSB Is Obsolete, We Need New Benchmarks
  3. LeaseGuard: Raft Leases Done Right!
  4. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Creation
  5. How I Write a Related Work Section with Zotero and Overleaf
  6. This Senior Staff Engineer Vibe-Coded for the First Time, What Happened Next Will Shock You
  7. Aerial Silks in the Gunks, part 2
  8. Versions of The Eternaut
  9. Ridicullissima
  10. Eye Opening Ceremony at the New Paltz Zen Center
  11. How To Belay With Prescription Glasses Or Sunglasses
  12. How To Check All Your Feeds With One Tool
  13. How My Blog Handles Math and Images in HTML, Atom, and Email in 2025
  14. Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment, Part 2
  15. Speak Up If You're Stuck in a Zazen Rut
  16. Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment, Part 1
  17. Optimizing a Meditation Retreat with a SAT Solver
  18. Aerial Silks in the Gunks
  19. RIP Sojourner
  20. From Python Programmer to Distributed Systems Researcher in 10 Years Without a PhD
  21. Taming Google Scholar Alerts
  22. Gunks, June 2025
  23. Genuine Climbing retreat for women with cancer
  24. Opus 40
  25. Can We Rely On Timers For Distributed Algorithms?
  26. Conformance Checking at MongoDB: Testing That Our Code Matches Our TLA+ Specs
  27. MongoDB and CS Education for All, Part 2
  28. MongoDB and CS Education for All, Part 1
  29. Liza Mills
  30. Jesse's Notes from the Antithesis BugBash Conference
  31. Are We Serious About Using TLA+ For Statistical Properties?
  32. Jesse's 2025 TLA+ Community Event Notes
  33. Holy Week at Christ Episcopal Church
  34. Mohonk Preserve Rangers, part 2
  35. How Long Must I Test?
  36. Zen priest Kenzen in New York City
  37. Mohonk Preserve Rangers
  38. Gravity Vault Climbing Team
  39. Red Rocks
  40. Review: SwiftPaxos: Fast Geo-Replicated State Machines
  41. Mixed-Media Climbing Art
  42. New Paltz in the Fall
  43. Dustin Portzline
  44. Which Beings Are Sentient?
  45. Winter 2024 Meditation Retreat

2024 19

  1. Is an Enlightened Person Afraid of Illness and Death?
  2. Peter's Kill in the Snow
  3. Supper's Ready
  4. Predictive Scaling in MongoDB Atlas, an Experiment
  5. Burial Vessel
  6. Fossymandias
  7. Climbing at Bonticou Crag
  8. Join Me At NYC Systems October 17
  9. Antlion Crag
  10. Are You Prepared To Save A Life?
  11. Review: Amazon MemoryDB: A Fast and Durable Memory-First Cloud Database
  12. What's Next for Women in Tech?
  13. Coaching Will Be The Last Human Job
  14. Summer Meditation Retreat
  15. Lights Out Climbing
  16. New Abbot Ceremony
  17. Climbing in Lost City
  18. Mohonk Trail Builders
  19. Absurdland in the Gunks

2022 2

  1. Psilocybin session at Johns Hopkins
  2. Paper Review: E-Store, P-Store, and Elastic Database Systems

2021 3

  1. The MongoDB Stable API
  2. How To Understand Non-Self: Buddhism And Conway's Game Of Life
  3. Paper review: Paxos vs Raft

2020 4

  1. Two attempts to compare a TLA+ spec with a C++ implementation
  2. Meditation at Home
  3. Reading A Journal of the Plague Year in New York
  4. You Look So Zen

2019 2

  1. PyGotham 2019's ASL and Live Captioning Playbook
  2. Five Ways to Establish a Rock-Solid Meditation Habit

2018 1

  1. The Meteor

2013 1

  1. Ordinary Zen

2012 1

  1. Optimizing MongoDB Compound Indexes

Undated 1

  1. … More Articles