Podcasts

• p99 Podcast with Sam Lambert: Taylor Otwell of Laravel
  Sep 2026
• p99 Podcast with Sam Lambert: Ankur Goyal of Braintrust
  Jul 2026
• p99 Podcast with Sam Lambert
  Jun 2026
• Cafe Cursor: Scaling Shopify, building turbopuffer, and the future of databases
  May 2026
• p99 Podcast with Sam Lambert: Erik Bernhardsson of Modal
  Apr 2026
• Latent Space Podcast: Retrieval After RAG with Turbopuffer
  Mar 2026
• p99 Podcast with Sam Lambert: Daniel Lockyer
  Mar 2026
• p99 Podcast with Sam Lambert: Building reliable infrastructure
  Feb 2026
• p99 Podcast with Sam Lambert: Scaling AI infrastructure
  Feb 2026
• Eventual Podcast: Search Is the Missing Layer of AI
  Jan 2026
• The Database School Podcast: Faster vector search
  Nov 2025
• Jason Liu Podcast: Billion-scale vector storage for RAG
  Nov 2025
• The PMF Show: He built a new database in his bedroom
  Oct 2025
• Software Engineering Daily: turbopuffer
  Sep 2025
• Vector Podcast: Economical way of serving vector search workloads
  Sep 2025
• Postgres FM: turbopuffer
  Sep 2025
• Bessemer Podcast: Memory, evals, and efficient storage in AI systems
  Sep 2025
• The Hard Part Podcast with Evan McCann
  Aug 2025
• Barrchives Podcast: How to build 10x cheaper with object storage
  Aug 2025
• Unsupervised Learning: Infrastructure powering top AI apps
  Jul 2025
• The Infra Pod: Building a serverless full-text + vector search on S3
  Apr 2025
• The Geek Narrator Podcast: How do vector databases work?
  Mar 2025
• Podcast with Geek Narrator on Object Storage Databases
  Nov 2024
• Every Podcast: How to use AI to become a learning machine
  Sep 2024
• Inteview on Data Engineering Podcast on Data Diff
  Jul 2022
• Podcast with Changelog on Napkin Math
  Sep 2020
• Interview with Every.to/Superorganizers: How I Learn
  Mar 2020
• Podcast with Scale Your Code on Scaling Shopify, Round Two
  Jan 2018
• Podcast with Scale Your Code on Scaling Shopify and Running Docker in Production
  Sep 2015

Talks

• Talk at AI Engineer World's Fair: Building turbopuffer, with The Pragmatic Engineer
  Aug 2026
• Talk at AI Engineer World's Fair: Connect AI to Billions of Legal Documents (with Legora)
  Jul 2026
• Panel at Toronto Tech Week: AI's New Primitives — Turbopuffer, OpenCode, Shopify
  May 2026
• CMU Database Seminar: turbopuffer, Object Storage-native Database for Search
  Mar 2026
• Data Council Conference: Billion-scale vector search with Notion
  May 2025
• Talk at The Kids Are In Charge: Learning, Solving Problems, and Competitive Programming
  Apr 2020
• Talk at SRECON EU: Advanced Napkin Math: Estimating System Performance from First Principles
  Oct 2019
• Talk at GOTO Copenhagen: Shopify's Pods Architecture
  Oct 2017
• Talk at @Scale: Resiliency Testing with Toxiproxy
  Aug 2017
• Talk at Railsconf: 5 Years of Rails Scaling to 80K RPS
  Apr 2017
• Talk at Full Stack Fest: Multi-DC
  Sep 2016
• Talk at QCON Sao Paulo: Shopify at Scale
  Mar 2016
• Talk at CUSEC: Reliable Software in a Chaotic World
  Jan 2016
• Talk at Euruko: Super-Reliable Software
  Oct 2015
• Talk at Goruco: Building and Testing Resilient Applications
  Jun 2015
• Talk at GOTO Chicago: Patterns for Docker Success
  May 2015

Posts

• turbopuffer: fast search on object storage
  Jul 2024
• Scaling Causal's Spreadsheet Engine from Thousands to Billions of Cells: From Maps to Arrays
  Jul 2022
• Metrics For Your Web Application's Dashboards
  Mar 2022
• Careful Trading Complexity for 'Improvements'
  Nov 2021
• Pig Pit
  Jul 2020
• Adjacent Possible: Model for Peeking into the Future
  May 2020
• How does progress(1) work?
  Jan 2020
• 2018
  Jan 2019
• How I Read
  Jul 2018
• Media Playlists
  Jun 2018
• Positive Unknown-Unknowns
  Mar 2018
• Peak Complexity
  Feb 2018
• 2017
  Dec 2017
• Shitty First Software Drafts
  Jun 2017
• What Happens To a Webserver When Clients Refresh Really Fast?
  Feb 2017
• Minimum Viable Airtable
  Feb 2017
• 2016
  Jan 2017
• Shitlist Driven Development
  Dec 2016
• How I use Airtable
  Nov 2016
• Employees Only Podcast
  Jul 2016
• Mental Modeling
  Mar 2016
• 2015
  Jan 2016
• Season Driven Cooking
  Dec 2015
• Why Docker is Not Yet Succeeding Widely in Production
  Jul 2015
• Building and Testing Resilient Ruby on Rails Applications
  Jan 2015
• Kafka Producer Pipeline for Ruby on Rails
  Jul 2014
• Letterpress Cheater Algorithm
  Sep 2013
• Unix Background Queue
  Sep 2013
• Keeping it simple with Test::Unit
  Mar 2013
• Why I'm glad my iPhone broke
  Jan 2013
• 30 days of super productivity
  Jan 2013
• Multitasking makes you dumb
  Nov 2012
• My journey to the International Olympiad in Informatics
  Jun 2012
• Stop relying on your ORM and learn SQL
  Mar 2011
• Setting up Unicorn with Nginx
  Oct 2010
• A simple Imgur Bash screenshot utility
  May 2010

Napkin Math

• Index Merges vs Composite Indexes in Postgres and MySQL
  Nov 2022
• Neural Network From Scratch
  Jan 2022
• When To Write a Simulator
  Sep 2021
• Increase HTTP Performance by Fitting In the Initial TCP Slow Start Window
  Jul 2021
• Using checksums to verify syncing 100M database records
  Jan 2021
• Filtering with Inverted Indexes
  Nov 2020
• Recommendations
  Sep 2020
• Circuit Breakers
  Aug 2020
• MySQL transactions per second vs fsyncs per second
  Jul 2020
• Inverted Index Performance and Merkle Tree Syncronization
  Jun 2020
• Data Synchronization
  May 2020
• Revision History
  Apr 2020
• In-memory Search
  Mar 2020
• Composite Primary Keys
  Feb 2020
• Redis throughput
  Jan 2020
• Membership Intersection Service
  Dec 2019
• Expected Database Query Latency
  Nov 2019
• Logging Cost
  Oct 2019

Press

• The Pragmatic Engineer: Pushing software engineering limits with “napkin math”
  Jul 2026
• The Globe and Mail: Inside the fastest-growing Canadian AI startup you've never heard of
  Jul 2026