Napkin Math
In the Napkin Math newsletter, I share articles reasoning from first principles about how systems work, and use these mental models to analyze the performance and characteristics of systems. I have found this skill to be invaluable when designing production systems.
Some examples:
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How many writes per second can MySQL fundamentally do?
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How fast can a neural network be trained?
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How much might logging for an average website cost?
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How much data can be transferred in the initial TCP congestion window?
Check out the archives for more.