I was not actually aware of the paper, and it is indeed pure gold, thanks for linking it. It is _also_ extremely timely, as with my current project (TigerBeetle), we are exactly at the point of transition from first-principles back-of-the-envelope performance architecture to measurement-driven performance engineering, and all the advice here is directly applicable!

See the Book review: A Philosophy of Software Design (2020) (johz.bearblog.dev)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27686818

for more in this vein.