Klaviyo Data Science Podcast EP 17 | The Power of Back-of-the-Envelope Math

Welcome back to the Klaviyo Data Science podcast! This episode, we dive into…

Slow Problems, Quick Solutions

We’ve devoted quite a bit of time on this podcast to robust, carefully tuned, and vetted-in-a-thousand-ways solutions. This episode, we venture beyond the land of neatly trimmed hedges and into the unknown, where scrappy solutions may be the only ones that are feasible — or even possible. And we’ll hear about settings where a quick calculation on a napkin can be the difference between success and failure — including the biggest weekend of the ecommerce year. You’ll hear about all that and more, including:

• How to solve Fermi problems (and possibly get put on a watch list)
• When quick calculations can save hours of painstaking work
• How even the simplest math can help you prepare for the most complex engineering challenges of the year

“We really are talking huge surges here… The systems you really want to watch out for, between the hours of 9 to 11 a.m. on Black Friday, move as much data as they had to move in the month of June.”
 — Zac Bentley, Lead Site Reliability Engineer

See the full show notes, including the statistical explanations of the paradoxes we discuss, on Medium.