TurboPuffer on The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast

I also want to talk about our season sponsor, Turbo Puffer. But this time, I don't want to talk about how they are fast, cheap, and extremely scalable search engine built on object storage. Instead, I'd like to talk about their team. I interviewed Simon, the co-founder and CEO on stage at AI Injury World Fair, and also hung out with their team for a few days in person. Here's a few of the interesting things I learned about them. The company is full remote yet feels pretty connected. They have a Slack-first culture. For example, all of their customers have a dedicated Slack channel and engineers are in these channels seeing feedback from these customers, often fixing their bugs. The team gets together for annual summits at least twice a year and campfires form several times a month anytime several remote employees gather in the same city. Simon describes their engineering culture as hardcore and whimsical. They focus on solving difficult problems but also try to have fun. A good example is the Pragmatic Engineering landing page that they built. We agreed to have a custom landing page and then their team decided to build a cool logo that animates on mouse movement. Another interesting thing is their team composition. Pretty much everyone currently working at the company has 10-15 years of experience. For a startup, they are an unusually seasoned team. Finally, I really appreciate how pragmatic their engineering philosophy is. Simon and the team strongly believe in how simplicity scales and this is the reason that object storage is TurboPuffer's only dependency. The team do seemingly silly things like build their job queue in a single file on object storage because they understand their core primitives and they know how they scale. To check out the whimsical animation, or if you're building AI products, head to turbopuffer.com slash pragmatic.