HACKER Q&A
📣 whocanfly

Learn Distributed Systems Interactively


Hi HN,

TLDR: What are the interactive tools to learn distributed systems?

I have been trying to learn distributed systems by reading papers, blogs, and open-source docs. Every time it feels I haven't grokked the fundamental concepts.

For no particular reasons, I have failed finish any book or complete an online courses on the topic.

So, I want to explore different approach to learn. For example, a visual or interactive tool like pythontutor.com

Thanks

  👤 brudgers Accepted Answer ✓
Erlang. Specifically, Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong who designed Erlang for Ericisson. Whether or not Erlang is the right language for a particular distributed job, Erlang is a message passing system and messages are the logical construct by which any distributed system communicates among its parts. Whether they are called messages or not.

With a REPL and hot code swapping and remote launching Erlang is interactive at production scales and on a laptop.

👤 harveytoro
Raft has a visualisation that you can interact with to understand it better https://raft.github.io/

Also might be worth checking out https://github.com/theanalyst/awesome-distributed-systems not sure if any of these resources are interactive though.