It Scales Until It Doesn’t
Talk video
Talk presentation
We are used to thinking that “high-load” means distributed systems, computing power, application, and kernel profiling. But sometimes you can’t simply scale your cluster. Maybe your hashmaps don’t fit in the server memory. Maybe you need single-digit millisecond latency. Maybe the cost is too high. Or your server is a … mobile phone.
In this talk, we will show how popular and lesser-known algorithms, data structures, and systems tuning helped us to overcome these blockers. Who said you don’t need to know algorithms nowadays?
Dmitry Tiagulskyi
Grammarly
- Tech Lead of the Core Services team at Grammarly
- Develops natural language processing services running in the cloud for millions of users
- As a long-time on-call warrior, interested in making software simple and reliable
- Nostalgic about programming BASIC on a Soviet PC "Korvet"
Yaroslav Yermilov
Principal Software Engineer at Superhuman
- Principal Software Engineer at Superhuman (formerly Grammarly)
- Over nearly nine years at the company, he has focused on 0-to-1 projects, taking ideas from concept to production
- In 2025, Yaroslav became one of the early drivers of AI coding adoption at Superhuman, leading the rollout of AI coding agents across the company and building the internal AI coding harness
- He hasn’t written a single line of code manually since May 2025