Distributed Systems Engineer

Learn Go: the language behind Docker, Kubernetes, and most of modern infrastructure. Static types, fast compiles, no class hierarchies. Every lesson is hands-on with real go run execution.

Level up from Go Fundamentals. Interfaces, error handling patterns, goroutines, channels, select, defer/panic/recover. The features that make Go unique — and how real Go services use them.

Beyond Go Intermediate. Context cancellation, sync primitives in depth, generics (1.18+), reflection, unsafe. The features Go services running at scale actually use.

Learn Erlang: the language behind WhatsApp, RabbitMQ, and most of the internet's telecom infrastructure. Built for concurrency, fault tolerance, and 'nine nines' uptime. The actor model in its purest form. Will rewire how you think about distributed systems.

Level up from Erlang Fundamentals. Process registry, links and monitors, ETS tables, records, error handling. The features behind Erlang's reputation for fault tolerance.

Beyond Erlang Intermediate. gen_server behaviour, supervision trees, ETS tables, distributed Erlang concepts. The OTP toolkit that powers WhatsApp and CouchDB.

Learn Elixir: a functional language on the BEAM (Erlang VM), behind WhatsApp's messaging core, Discord's chat infra, and Phoenix LiveView. Pattern matching, immutable data, the pipe operator. Every lesson is hands-on with real elixir execution.

Level up from Elixir Fundamentals. Pattern matching depth, the Enum/Stream split, structs, processes and message passing, GenServer basics. The features that make Elixir's concurrency story unique.

Beyond Elixir Intermediate. GenServer, supervision trees, OTP behaviours, Tasks and Agents, ETS basics, macros. The OTP toolkit behind WhatsApp's reliability.

Build the consistent hashing ring used by Memcached, Cassandra, DynamoDB, and CDNs. Implement the basic ring, virtual nodes, weighted distribution, replication, and the alternative rendezvous hashing.

Build the epidemic protocol used by Consul, Cassandra, DynamoDB, and Bitcoin. Implement membership tracking, anti-entropy, SWIM-style failure detection, phi-accrual, and convergence analysis. The foundation of every decentralized cluster coordinator.

Implement the Raft consensus algorithm: leader election, log replication, log consistency, snapshots, membership changes, linearizable reads. The protocol behind etcd, Consul, CockroachDB, and TiKV — every modern distributed coordinator.

Build a Kafka-style log: append-only segmented storage, partitions for parallelism, leader-follower replication with ISR, producers with batching/idempotency/transactions, consumer groups with rebalancing, exactly-once semantics, monitoring.

Build a working blockchain: blocks with prev-hash linking, Merkle trees with proofs, proof-of-work mining with difficulty adjustment, UTXO transactions, double-spend defense, and consensus alternatives (PoS, BFT). The data structure + cryptography behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and every cryptocurrency.

Build a Loki/Splunk-style log aggregator: ingest log lines via HTTP, structure them into label-keyed streams, store as compressed chunks, query by label + substring/regex (LogQL-style), aggregate over time, manage retention, and alert on thresholds. The observability stack every team eventually builds.

Build the registry behind Consul, Eureka, and Kubernetes service discovery: registration with TTLs, tags + metadata, health checks, load-balanced lookup, replicated HA, and the Kubernetes/service-mesh patterns. Used by every microservice architecture.