Yeah, and we're getting to this topic. How do we actually deal with stress, pressure, and blackouts? Because we can prepare as well as we want to. This might happen anyway. And what I want to talk about here is how you can actually build up resilience and, you know, learn a couple of methods that might help you to get out of the state of just being completely blank. And here we actually have four things I want to talk about. First would be ask clarifying questions. Second is think aloud. Then focus on progress. And last but not least, stay positive, which might sound trivial, but we're going to get to this, and you see there's actually much more behind that than you think. Asking clarifying questions. Sometimes it might not be clear how to proceed. It could be that an interviewer interferes and points you in a certain direction, and if you start feeling unsecure because you don't know exactly what the interviewer wants, asking clarifying questions is the best way to get out of the situation. And that means such questions are not even, you know, penalized. They actually appreciate it because that shows that you can navigate even difficult terrain. shows that you can navigate even difficult terrain. And this helps to just not design the wrong thing for five minutes till then the interviewer might tell you that he or she wanted to see something else. Thinking out loud is also a really interesting one because this also helps to keep the interviewer in the loop. They know where you are and it also helps you to stay on track. So the next one is very interesting because focus on progress might help you if you actually got stuck, which can happen. And this here is the approach that you can actually try to get out of this situation by making incremental progress on the problem instead of trying to solve it all at once. And this is a little bit also related to this Redis example we just had before. So instead of you jumping on saying, oh, this feature needs caching, oh, it's Redis. No, you can go step by step and just say, okay, this is a service that's requested very often. It means it's going to have high load. This means you might need a caching layer. And then go step by step what this would mean. And if you have a warm interviewer, then the interviewer is probably going to help you get to a solution and it's also not going to be penalized. And this is really about building up momentum and then regaining confidence when you know sometimes hit this wall where you think i don't know nothing about what this person asks of me last but not least stay positive and here it's important to understand that's intended that candidates get to struggle in an interview you, once you start to have a hard time, you are where people expect you to get to. And that means, yeah, you actually get to the point where the interviewer kind of wants to have you because then the interviewer can see a couple of things. They can see your problem-solving skills and your approach, your ability of learning from mistakes, and how you can get out of a tricky situation. And staying positive means you accept the situation, you expect them to appear, and then you just show that you are aware of this, and you have this resilience to not just be, you know, done by something difficult coming up, but you're prepared for this. We're going to have a Q&A just right away, but I think we just move on and then have a final one after this, because this is actually the last chapter. And I want to use this to wrap up the talk because we talked about how to prepare for interviews, how to run them. And now we get to this last chapter where we talk about how to learn from every single interview. And to illustrate this and why it's important, I actually want to share a quote of Michael Jordan. It's one of the greatest basketball players of all time, I guess. And here's this quote of him I want to share. I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. 26 times I have been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life, and that's why I succeed. So Michael's contribution contributes his success, really, to all the failure he experienced during his career. And adopting the same mindset will also help you in your career, because let's have a look at some concrete action items to recap your system design interview. First of all, before you do anything else, take a break. Of course, well-deserved. take a break. Of course, well-deserved. And what you do then is to start building a strong recap habit. And this basically always runs through the same steps. Write down your impressions, analyze your performance, seek feedback, and update your strategy. In more detail, that looks as follows. Write down your impression. First of all, take a break and then you write down everything you remember and you really let it flow. Write down everything you remember in details because it's still fresh. That's important. So the questions that were asked, how you felt during the interview, any areas you think your performance was great, and others where you struggled. Once this is done, you move into analyzing all of those. That means you start, for example, with technical skills. And there you can look at how you are able to demonstrate your knowledge and problem-solving skills. Have you been able to demonstrate your knowledge and problem solving skills. Have you been able to really do that? Did this show? And which are the areas you might can improve on? And besides the technical, also communication skills, an area you can look into. Did you clearly articulate your thoughts and reasoning? How did you do articulate your thoughts and reasoning? How did you explain your approach? And did you actively listen to the interviewer? Time management is another one. And this came up as one of the earliest questions here. How did you do with time management? Did you have enough time for each step? And where did you spend too much time or too little? And the last area to analyze is the personally probably most challenging one, but also the most rewarding one at the same time. Because you shouldn't skip reflecting on yourself and how you felt during the interview. Have you been confident, approachable for feedback? Or did you lose your nerves and completely became defensive? how you felt during the interview. Have you been confident, approachable for feedback, or did you lose your nerves and completely became defensive? And with all those four areas covered, I think you have a really good personal perspective on the interview. Now the actual real challenge is to also get external feedback. And this is about seeking feedback from your interviewer or recruiter, HR person, whoever you work with in that company. And that's not always easy because you're asking more from them than they normally would give. It's not very common that you get detailed feedback. detailed feedback. But it's definitely worth asking because it gives you a lot of insight into things you might haven't seen yourself or confirmation that things that didn't work out well or didn't work out well, in your opinion, actually did also for your interviewer. And the key here is really to be friendly but persistent. And the key here is really to be friendly but persistent. With that, the recap is pretty much complete. You only need to take all those learnings and combine them and adapt your preparation strategy for the next interview. And here it makes sense to go deeper on specific technical topics, practice your routines by designing more systems or practicing communication skills in mock interviews. But what I believe really is most important is to not stop practicing until you have a positive response. Otherwise, you start probably feeling like an interview you didn't pass is a personal failure or thoughts come up which makes it hard to stay consistent and just keep preparing and learning until you eventually have the positive feedback. And with that, we have really reached the end of this presentation. I just want to wrap up the key takeaways, and then we can have probably a final Q&A afterwards. And let's just move through the initial questions again to reflect on the different things we have been working through. First, we started off with talking about how to best prepare for system design interviews. First question was, how does the system interview, who does the system interview apply for? Then we went through the different kinds of systems, questions that exist. We talked about the high level and low level ones. And then I shared a little bit of a framework, how you can assess which of those are relevant to you. And there we have input factors like your role, your experience, the company you interview with. And once we were clear on that, we actually started to look into more hands-on preparation questions. This is the famous six steps interview structure. And then we also looked into how you could systematically practice the system design questions. And here we have this cluster-by-cluster approach. So you jump from technical central topics from one to the other, and then you have mix and match to add this little bells and whistles to all the systems and do this as long as you actually own them and have a good library of additional features to add. And next, we actually looked how you can improve your performance during the interview, where you can first start to analyze a little bit who you're actually working with, what kind of interviewer you have in front of you. Do you have a warm or rather a cold one? Once that was done, we actually looked into the comprehensive answers and how to deliver them. And here we're really into this communication skills and making sure you're driving the discussion in the right direction. Last but not least, this was like talking about stress, pressure, and blackouts. And then we just wrapped up with how you can actually draw from every interview. With that being said, thank you very much for your attention. You're a great audience, and I really hope you could draw something from this talk. And yeah, if you want to stay in touch, you'll find my Twitter down there. You can check out my YouTube if you want. There's more content also on my blog. And with that, Wesley, I would hand back to you. Sure. Fabian, thank you very much. I personally learned a lot because you are a guy that has a – you think you are very analytical, you know? So you know how to structure. Software engineer. Yeah. And normally topics like system design, if you don't do this, everything gets a kind of mess because you can, like, merge the capacity plan with the database, with everything, and then you deliver nothing. So I think the way that you structure everything, I think it's a good playbook for everybody here. Yeah, that's very nice of you, Wesley. So, people, this is it. Fabian, thank you very much again for your talk.