This would have saved a lot of time for learning WebRTC, Blockchain, OAuth, HTTP2, and so many other protocol designs that don't always clearly explain race conditions or other edge cases like this animation does.
Enjoyed reading this article. The Greeks had this amazing knack to get into subjects like this and then _write_ about it, isn't. I am thinking of Plutarch's narration of the Ship of Theseus, a good starting point on issues related to identity and relationships among objects, such as products, software componentes, etc. etc., in a large enterprise.
Thanks for writing this up, I enjoyed reading it. I work with distributed systems every day and collected most of this knowledge from practice, but it was useful to see it all compiled in one place.
Lately I have been really enjoying articles like this about distributed programming, and have been doing some code experiments on my own to learn more about it (using Akka right now). Do you have a roadmap for how someone could get into a role like yours?
It's mostly a collection of papers on different distributed protocols and systems, with good lecture notes and FAQs for each one. It also has programming assignments if you like hands-on practice.
If you are a visual learner, a really slick animation explaining Raft distributed consensus protocol is here: http://thesecretlivesofdata.com/raft/