Shows
BarrchivesHow to Build 10x Cheaper Object Storage, with Simon Eskildsen, Co-founder & CEO at TurbopufferIn this episode of Barrchives, Barr Yaron sits down with Simon Eskildsen, co-founder and CEO of turbopuffer, to explore how he went from infrastructure challenges at Shopify to launching a groundbreaking vector database company.Simon shares his journey from recognizing the inefficiencies of traditional vector storage solutions to creating TurboPuffer, a revolutionary database designed specifically for AI-driven applications. He details key moments of insight—from working with startups struggling with prohibitive storage costs, to realizing the untapped potential of affordable object storage combined with modern vector indexing techniques.This ep...2025-08-0549 min
Unsupervised LearningEp 71: CEO of TurboPuffer Simon Eskildsen on Building Smarter Retrieval, AI App Must-Have Features & Current State of Vector DBsFill out this short listener survey to help us improve the show: https://forms.gle/bbcRiPTRwKoG2tJx8In this episode, Simon Eskildsen, co-founder and CEO of TurboPuffer, lays out a compelling vision for how AI-native infrastructure needs to evolve in an era where every application wants to connect massive amounts of context to large language models. He breaks down why traditional databases and even large context windows fall short—especially at scale—and why object-storage-native search is the inevitable next step. Drawing on his experience from Shopify and Readwise, Simon introduces the SCRAP framework to explain the limi...2025-07-2251 min
tman's random youtube archiveSREcon19 Europe/Middle East/Africa - Advanced Napkin Math: Estimating System...Advanced Napkin Math: Estimating System Performance from First Principles
Simon Eskildsen, Shopify
Ever stood in front of the whiteboard with a group of your co-workers designing a system, but found yourself in that awkward position where none of you were able to answer whether something would be fast enough? In this talk, you'll learn how to combine base rates to answer challenging questions in a jiffy on pull requests, technical reviews, or in meetings, for example: Can we in the 5-second critical window on a regional failover, do a snapshot-and-restore of Memcached to the other...2025-05-2300 min
The GeekNarratorHow do vector (search) databases work? ft: turbopufferFor memberships: join this channel as a member here:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_mGuY4g0mggeUGM6V1osdA/joinSummary:In this conversation, Kaivalya Apte and Simon Eskildsen talk about vector databases, particularly focusing on TurboPuffer. They discuss the importance of vector search, embeddings, and the challenges associated with building efficient search engines. The conversation covers various aspects such as cost considerations, chunking strategies, multi-tenancy, and performance optimization. Simon shares insights on the future of vector search and the significance of observability and metrics in database performance. The discussion emphasizes the need for practical application and experimentation in...2025-04-071h 08The GeekNarratorHow would you design a database on Object Storage?Join Kaivalya Apte and Simon Hørup Eskildsen from Turbopuffer as they talk about the complexities of building a database on top of object storage. Discover the key challenges, the nuances of various storage formats, and the critical trade-offs involved.
Learn from Simon's rich experience, from his time at Shopify to creating Turbopuffer. This episode covers everything—from approaches to write-ahead logs to multi-tenancy and object storage advancements. Perfect for database enthusiasts and those keen on first-principles thinking!
00:00 Introduction
00:17 Simon's Background and Journey to TurboBuffer
02:42 Challenges in Database Scalability
04:21 Experimenting with Vector Databases
05:02 Cost Implications of Vector Databases
05:52 Architectural Con...2024-12-021h 08
AI and IHow to Use AI to Become a Learning Machine - Ep. 34 with Simon EskildsenThis episode is sponsored by Reflect. It’s the ultra-fast note-taking app that’s about to change the way you take notes. To boost your productivity with advanced features like custom prompts and voice transcripts, give Reflect a try by clicking on this link: https://reflect.app/?utm_source=every&utm_medium=sponsorship&utm_campaign=september2024
Simon Eskildsen is a learning machine.
I first interviewed him in 2020 about how he leveled up from an intern at Shopify to the company’s director of production engineering by reading and applying insights from hundreds of books.
A lot...2024-09-111h 13
AI & IHow to Use AI to Become a Learning Machine - Ep. 34 with Simon EskildsenSimon Eskildsen is a learning machine. I first interviewed him in 2020 about how he leveled up from being an intern at Shopify to becoming the company’s director of production engineering by reading and applying insights from hundreds of books.A lot has changed over the last four years. Language models have made it possible to access and contextualize information faster, easier, and more cheaply than ever before—and in this episode, Simon and I talk about how this changes the way he learns. Simon...2024-09-111h 13
Hacking Creativity263 - Diventare una macchina per l'apprendimento (DAILY)Simon Eskildsen è diventato in breve tempo il direttore dell’ingegneria di produzione di Shopify, e questo gli ha richiesto di dover imparare tante, tante cose in un tempo limitato. Obiettivo riuscito: oggi hackeriamo il suo metodo! P.S. Vuoi provare il tool di Edo che riassume video molto lunghi? Abbiamo il link anche di questo: www.heydrafter.com▫️ Entra nella nostra community: https://bit.ly/3jUs8Ez ▫️ Vuoi ricevere gli Appunti (la nostra newsletter)? https://bit.ly/3RJkbA5CONTATTI▫️ Email: info@hacking-creativity.com▫️ Instagram: https://bit.ly/2HVP8D42023-12-1211 min
Data Engineering PodcastBe Confident In Your Data Integration By Quickly Validating Matching Records With data-diffSummary
The perennial challenge of data engineers is ensuring that information is integrated reliably. While it is straightforward to know whether a synchronization process succeeded, it is not always clear whether every record was copied correctly. In order to quickly identify if and how two data systems are out of sync Gleb Mezhanskiy and Simon Eskildsen partnered to create the open source data-diff utility. In this episode they explain how the utility is implemented to run quickly and how you can start using it in your own data workflows to ensure that your data warehouse isn’t mi...2022-07-031h 10
4-togetNattoget, SMUK-fest, status på VAR og bodega-kulturI går var det muligt at stige på et nattog i Høje Taastrup med kurs mod Tyskland. Det er 7 år siden et nattog sidst har gjort hold i Danmark, men nu kommer Snälltoget fra Stockholm og holder i Høje Taastrup, før det futter videre mod Hamborg og Berlin. Sommeren 2021 er for mange blevet lidt som sommeren 2020: en hel del anderledes, end man havde regnet med. Det gælder også Skanderborg Festival - eller SMUK-fest - der som alle andre festivaler måtte opgive at åbne dørene til klassisk festival. Derfor arrangerer de i år et alternativ...2021-06-2854 min
The Changelog: Software Development, Open SourceEstimating systems with napkin math (Interview)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 discussionChangelog++ 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 usin...2020-09-121h 04Changelog InterviewsEstimating systems with napkin mathWe’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 discussionChangelog++ 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 usin...2020-09-121h 04
The Kindle ChroniclesTKC 534 Power Reader Simon Eskildsen Site Reliability Engineering Lead at Shopify Interview starts at 10:07 and ends at 43:36 “If someone were to come around with some hardware that was even 50 percent worse than the Kindle but was opened up for easy highlight consumption, making it easier to see what highlights my friends have done, and all these sorts of things--I would switch in a heartbeat. ” News “Amazon Kindle versus iPhone XS Max: choosing the best e-book reader” at AppleInsider - October 24, 2018 “Jeff Bezos wants us all to leave earth--for good” by Steven Levy at Wired - O...2018-10-2644 min
The Kindle ChroniclesTKC 533 New Kindle Paperwhite! Joerg Tewes, Head of Kindle Product Management, and Kevin Keith, VP Amazon Devices New Paperwhite at Amazon.com Kevin Keith, VP-Amazon Devices Joerg Tewes, Head of Product Management for Kindle Press Release on new Paperwhite - October 16, 2018 Click here to check for software updates for your Kindle or Fire device Next Week’s Guest Simon Hørup Eskildsen, author of “How I Read” Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version...2018-10-1944 min