A conversation with
@sirupsen on scaling Shopify, building turbopuffer, and the future of databases.
0:00 - Scaling Shopify through flash sales and outages
8:13 - How top infrastructure teams collaborated in the 2010s
10:35 - Engineering principles from Logrus and on-call
17:38 - The story behind Simon’s famous-ish blog, Napkin Math
23:05 - Why new database companies keep winning
32:21 - How Simon became a fan of databases
35:45 - AI coding, and where agents still fail
42:10 - Hiring P99 engineers in the AI era
48:45 - What’s next for databases