High Performance on a Low Budget: Gwen Shapira’s Tips for Startups

Gwen Shapira, co-founder of Nile, shared her insights on delivering high performance on a tight budget for startups during her keynote at P99 CONF. Drawing from her extensive experience with data systems performance, she emphasized the importance of understanding and meeting users' performance expectations early in the product development process, advising against the common notion of deferring performance considerations until after product launch. Shapira highlighted the significance of optimizing perceived latency, particularly in web applications, and addressed common performance pitfalls like the N + 1 problem. She advocated for strategic benchmarking, suggesting that tests should be simple and directly tied to user experience improvements rather than exhaustive industry-standard benchmarks. Additionally, she stressed the value of investing in long-term infrastructure for observability, which helps answer performance-related questions throughout a product's lifecycle, and advised leveraging experienced engineers to make intuitive performance enhancements to avoid "pessimization" even when time constraints prevent thorough optimization.