Ask HN: Distributed system areas you'd be interested in reading about
I happen to work on a large and interesting distributed system - so far, this has been one of the bigger and more complex systems I've worked on. I have previously written a post on a few concepts I picked up while building this system (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852295).
I'm in the process of drafting a follow-up post, covering the operational part of keeping this system up and running (a big part of the day to day!), and perhaps one on migrating from the old system to the new one, without having users notice.
Before I shout into the vacuum, I'd love to hear what areas or topics those interested in distributed or high-availability systems would be interested to read about.
How does a new engineer to a project go from knowing nothing about how a distributed system to having a sense of mastery over the tasks of:
- Explaining the architecture of the system at a high level
- Given a change that needs to be made to the system, navigating to the relevant part of the codebases.
- Write an integration test which checks some invariant involving multiple components of the system
- Given an error report which might be noise or might indicate a real production issue, triage the report.
And how does the process of gaining mastery of these activities differ from doing so when joining as a contributor to a non-distributed system?