I am fully aware that birthdays are just rituals. Functionally, they don’t really mean much at the end of the day; they just happen to be easy enough to use when we want to represent milestones and impactful events. And yet, I love these rituals. They are an opportunity to…

Throughout the course of this series, we’ve been learning time and again that distributed systems are hard. When faced with hard problems, what’s one do to? Well, as we learned in part one of this post, sometimes the answer is to strip away the complicated parts of a problem and…

Over the course of this series, we’ve seen many instances of how things can more complicated than they seem. We saw this with failure, and we saw it with replication. More recently, we discovered that even the concept of time is more complex that we might have originally thought. However…

One of the hardest things about distributed systems is that we often find ourselves needing to approach them very differently than other problems in computing. Distributed computing forces us to reevaluate how we’d approach even the simplest obstacles in a single system model. We recently began exploring one such example…

We often spend a lot of our lives blissfully unaware of how something works. Most of the time, this ends up being an okay thing, since we don’t really need to know how everything around us works. But there are some times when we realize just how much complexity been…

When it comes to tech jargon, one thing seems to always hold true: everyone has a different opinion about what certain words mean. I realize this fact every once in awhile; most recently, I came across it while trying to learn a new distributed systems concept. The term “partition” is…

When it comes to programming, there are certain conventions, idioms, and principles that we run into and reference as a community quite often. One of those principles is the idea of “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, or DRY for short. I encountered this idea early on in my programming career, and it…

So much of what makes distributed systems hard to content with is the fact that, as a system grows, it changes. Furthermore, the things around the system — parts of the system itself, its dependencies, and the people who maintain it — are also each capable of changing as well. …