Appreciate Generously; It Costs Nothing, But Builds Everything
If there's one underrated superpower at work, it's giving credit - generously, and often. When your teammate goes out of their way to help, contributes meaningfully, or quietly ships something excelle
This edition of the newsletter contains
I have also shared 3 super-interesting articles to read over the weekend. Thank you once again for reading this edition of my Newsletter. Now, without further ado, let’s jump right in.
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Appreciate Generously; It Costs Nothing, But Builds Everything
If you want people to show up for you, show up for them first.
If there's one underrated superpower at work, it's giving credit - generously, and often. When your teammate goes out of their way to help, contributes meaningfully, or quietly ships something excellent, take a moment to recognize it, publicly.
A quick message, a public shout-out, or just looping them into appreciation can go a long way. This simple gesture builds real trust. Over time, people start showing up for each other more. It leads to faster, better collaboration - because everyone knows they’re seen, respected, and safe to contribute.
Here are a few low-effort, high-impact ways to build this habit into your everyday workflow:
call out thoughtful reviews
mention someone in a demo who helped unblock you
add a thank-you line in retros or Slack updates
tag a teammate in a PR comment for their idea that helped
shout out to folks who support behind the scenes - infra, ops, etc
Professionally, this isn't just feel-good advice - it is also strategic :) You're actually shaping a culture where wins are shared, and where people want to work with you, not just around you.
Don't underestimate how far a little gratitude can go. It's one of the fastest ways to earn trust, build influence, and strengthen your team.
Give credit often - it costs nothing but builds everything.
Here's a video from me
I published a video - Designing Workflows in Microservices - Orchestration vs Choreography
How do you model a workflow for an e-commerce product in a microservices-based architecture?
Take a simple example: when an order is placed, the system needs to send a confirmation to the user, notify the seller to prepare the shipment, and assign a delivery partner.
Modeling this kind of workflow can get complex, and in this video, we break it down by exploring two popular architectural patterns: Orchestration and Choreography.
We'll look at how each approach works, its pros and cons, and when you might choose one over the other.
Here's a paper I recently read
I spent some time reading Segcache: a memory-efficient and scalable in-memory key-value cache for small objects
In-memory caches are supposed to be memory-efficient and scalable under high-throughput workloads, and to leverage the learning as I continue to build DiceDB ...
This week, I'm revisiting a 2021 paper from CMU and Twitter titled Segcache, which talks about what it takes to handle billions of small objects efficiently, while keeping latency low. The paper asks one question that challenges the absolute core: Do we really need to manage objects individually?
The entire paper revolves around sharing metadata, expiring keys in bulk, and reducing contention without losing fidelity. After my initial skim, a few details that stood out:
ttl-indexed segments allow bulk expiration without scans or lazy deletes
aggressively sharing metadata does not affect in any way
If you are interested in in-memory databases or data structures & optimizations in general, this paper will push your thinking. It's highly practical and backed by real production traces; a must-read. I will be reading and digging deeper over the weekend, hence shooting out a recommendation.
You can download this and other papers I recommend from my papershelf.
Three interesting articles I read
I read a few engineering blogs almost every day, and here are the three articles I read and would recommend you read.
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Very thoughtful Arpit