Estimating systems with napkin math (Interview)
Show notes
We’re joined by Simon Eskildsen, Principal Engineer at Shopify, talking about how he uses a concept called napkin math where you use first-principle thinking to estimate systems without writing any code. By the end of the show we were estimating pretty much everything using napkin math. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019 OR changelog2020. To learn more and get started head to linode.com/changelog. Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Pixie – Pixie gives you a magical API to get instant debug data. The best part is this doesn’t involve changing code, there are no manual UIs, and this all lives inside Kubernetes. Pixie lives inside of your platform, harvests all the data that you need, and exposes a bunch of interfaces that you can ping to get the data you need. It’s a programmable edge intelligence platform which captures metrics, traces, logs and events, without any code changes. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring: Simon Eskildsen – Website, GitHub, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: Napkin Math on GitHub (PRs welcome) Napkin Math newsletter zk - Zettelkasten on the command-line How to Make Yourself Into a Learning Machine Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
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