GitHub - sirupsen/napkin-math: Techniques and numbers for estimating system's performance from first-principles

Napkin friends, from near and far, it's time for napkin problem number three! If you are wondering why you're receiving this email, you likely watched my...

Napkin friends, from near and far, it's time for napkin problem number four! If you are wondering why you're receiving this email, you likely watched my talk...

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.

Took 10 years, but there's finally a better list.

Second article about building fika. In this one, I'm going to review the napkin math behind it

Perspectives Section covering Business, project/programming perspectives Laws of Frugal Architecture Cognitive load is all that matters Stick to boring Architecture Your tech stack is not the product Architecture anti-patterns Don’t call yourself a programmer Grasp Responsibility Patterns Things every programmer should know Guiding principles after 20 years of programming Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B The New Business of AI (and How It’s Different From Traditional Software) Hype driven Development Momentum vs Urgency in Software Project Management Data Science: Reality Doesn’t Meet Expectations Quantum computing for the very curious How to Speak (MIT) How Software Groups Rot: Legacy of the Expert Beginner What questions should systems architects ask before creating anything Basecamp for Personal Project Management Marketing for Engineers - Resources Approach to Exception Handling PRESALES (SE) LEADER? 10 THINGS YOU MUST BE DOING The Tail at Scale Long tail (99th percentile) latency Models for integrating data science teams within organizations Techniques and numbers for estimating system’s performance from first-principles The Amazon Builder’s library System Design Primer Telemetry Collection - Corelation in Latency Analysis Advice to Young kids by Stephen O’Grady Distributed Systems Reading List Awesome cold showers Behaviors to avoid in Software Architecture Role App Maintenance Cost Can Be Three Times Higher than Development Cost Foundational papers on distributed systems Dont end week with nothing Awesome Scalability - Collection of Articles around Performance, Scalability etc. Ego is the Enemy How to remember what you read? First Principles You are not Google 42 Lessons Learned in building production database Data structures implemented in JavaScript - I Data driven enterprises of 2025 Some Benefits of Simple Software Architecture Determining how Architectural decisions impact business via Value Use just one big Server When are Microservices a b

Numpy can multiply two 1024x1024 matrices on a 4-core Intel CPU in ~8ms.This is incredibly fast, considering this boils down to 18 FLOPs / core / cycle, with...

Describing how turbopuffer measures the recall (accuracy) of its vector indexes in production continuously. This ensures that turbopuffer's search results are accurate and reliable, despite using approximate nearest-neighbour algorithms to speed up queries.

A customer query was taking over 4× longer than it should have. The profiler pointed at Rust code we'd assumed was free. We followed the trail all the way down to assembly to find the true cost.

How many molecules from Caesar’s last breath do we inhale with each breath we take? Shockingly, the answer is about one molecule—we actually do share breaths...

I’ve been on a bender for the past few weeks. I haven’t been able to stop reading and watching content about TigerBeetle. I was especially enamored by videos...

In this post we explore how starting from resources (CPU, RAM, DISK, NETWORK) can drive clearer, simpler and more robust system design — rather than beginnin...

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