A. Jesse Jiryu Davis is a Senior Staff Research Engineer at MongoDB specializing in distributed systems, Python concurrency, and serverless architecture. He contributes to MongoDB drivers, async frameworks, and writes on software design and open source projects.
55 articles from this blog
According to legend, Zen’s Sixth Ancestor was chosen in a poetry contest. I discuss the facts behind the legend, and the role of ambition and jealousy
MongoDB engineers discuss the challenges of conformance testing a dozen client drivers in different languages, and their journey to create a shared test suite.
Originally published on the MongoDB Research Blog. There’s an arms race in database research. Every year, papers have more and more benchmarks. Resear
A recap of SIGMOD 2026, focusing on presenting a database research paper, conference logistics, visa issues, and talk formats.
Analysis of CockroachDB's scalable leader lease protocol for multi-consensus groups, addressing failover and liveness issues.
Learn how to use TLA+ with LLMs to model and verify system correctness through a classic bean puzzle example.
Summary of the Antithesis BugBash Conference 2026, covering software verification, distributed systems, formal verification, and test coverage talks.
Review of a paper on using a meta-agent to automatically design novel AI agent architectures, outperforming hand-crafted systems.
Review of SysMoBench, a benchmark evaluating AI's ability to write TLA+ formal specs for real-world distributed systems.
Analysis of METR paper measuring AI's ability to complete long software tasks, showing LLM time horizons doubling every seven months.
Analyzes the decline of on-the-job training for junior engineers due to remote work and AI automation, posing a risk to the industry's future talent pool.
Explores how LLMs and AI challenge traditional definitions of privacy, analyzing the ethical implications of machine vs. human data observation.
Introducing a Zotero plugin to find and tag duplicate research papers by title or PDF hash, helping researchers clean up their libraries.
A computer scientist explains how large language models (LLMs) work, tracing their history from the Turing Test and ELIZA to modern AI, demystifying their operation.
Explores the impossibility of achieving common knowledge for coordinated attack in asynchronous distributed systems, based on Halpern and Moses' 1990 paper.
A critical review of a research paper proposing Raft optimizations for faster reads/writes while preserving linearizability in distributed systems.
Argues that YCSB and TPC benchmarks are flawed because they use closed-loop models, and advocates for open-loop benchmarks to better simulate real-world cloud database workloads.
Introducing LeaseGuard, a new lease protocol for Raft consensus that simplifies leader leases and enables faster crash recovery.
A guide to efficiently writing a Related Work section using Zotero and Overleaf, including tips for finding papers and managing citations.
A senior engineer shares his experience learning to code effectively with AI, from initial frustration to successful 'vibe-coding'.
