For distributed system design, there's great material out there. ByteByteGo, DDIA, countless blog posts. But when I needed to understand the layer below that, the internal design of the systems themselves, I kept finding the same pattern. The real explanation was in the xv6 source, a Gorilla paper from 2015, a Raft visualization someone made years ago, or chapter 9 of a textbook that assumes you read chapters 1 through 8. No single resource took "design X from scratch" seriously and walked through the full thing.

So I wrote it. If you know me, you know I was going to eventually. Each post is what I wish someone had handed me: clear enough that you finish it feeling like you could build the thing, rigorous enough that you'd trust it before building the real thing.

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Contact: hello@fromscratch.systems