What does extreme ownership really mean?

Do not wait to be told what to do, but rather seek out work and take the initiative to complete it. Keep everyone "on the same page" by proactively sharing the progress and potential roadblocks.

Thank you so much for resonating with what I share in this newsletter. I hope the content I share and the resources I list are making you a better engineer and accelerating your career growth. If you want me to share something else, let me know by dropping me a message or leaving a comment on the post.

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💡 Career growth nugget

What does extreme ownership really mean?

Showing extreme ownership at work helps you climb the ladder faster, but what does it mean? ⚡

Do not wait to be told what to do, but rather seek out work and take the initiative to complete it. Keep everyone "on the same page" by proactively sharing the progress and potential roadblocks. Know every single bit of data and detail about it, including - timeline, blockers, future extensions, limitations, etc. - every single minute detail.

Acknowledge the work that the team pulled off and appreciate the folks who went out of their way and helped you all succeed. Do this even if you are a junior engineer in the team.

Extreme ownership does not mean you work twice as hard or pick work from your peer’s plate, but instead, it means the work you have been assigned, you are doing it with complete ownership, knowing every bit of detail in it, and ensuring it gets delivered.

The next time you are given some work, go an extra step and drive your project with extreme ownership and leave a lasting impact on your work.

You can find this post on my LinkedIn and Twitter; do leave a like.

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📹 Video I posted this week

This week I posted Picking the right string column datatype - CHAR vs VARCHAR vs TEXT

Databases offer multiple data types to store strings in SQL tables, and they are char, varchar, and text. But which one should we pick, when, and why?

In this video, we go through these datatypes and understand how they are implemented behind the scenes, the trade-offs they take, their use cases in the real world, and more importantly debunk some misconceptions and generalizations about how certain string datatypes are stored.

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🧠 Research paper I read this week

This week I spent reading SIEVE - an Efficient Turn-Key Eviction Algorithm for Web Caches

SIEVE’s approach is simple, rather, so simple that you will even doubt if it would work efficiently at scale.

The algorithm outperforms almost all popular cache eviction algorithms for lower miss ratios and is scalable because of its simplicity. A classic case of simplicity scales. I found it interesting, hence putting out this recommendation.

You can download this and other papers I recommend from my papershelf.

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📰 Articles I read this week

I read a few engineering blogs almost every single day, and here are the three articles I would recommend you to read.

• First do it, then do it right, then do it better

• On the Costs of Syscalls

• How to forget what you read

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Thank you so much for reading this edition of the newsletter 🔮 If you found it interesting, you will also love my courses

1. System Design Course for Beginners

2. System Design Course for Experienced Engineers

3. Redis Internals Course

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