Sualeh Asif (Co-Founder of Cursor) sits down with Simon Eskildsen (CEO of turbopuffer) to discuss scaling Shopify through flash sales, why a new database company emerges every 15 years, and what makes a P99 engineer.
0:00 - Scaling Shopify through flash sales and outages
7:11 - How the Shopify infrastructure team evolved
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
38:44 - What it would take for turbopuffer to become Google-scale
42:10 - Hiring P99 engineers in the AI era
48:45 - What's next for databases
