It is a good post but I'm suggesting it is missing a Step 0: find a distributed computing problem and spend some time playing with it. Like writing a few toy se

It is a good post but I'm suggesting it is missing a Step 0: find a distributed computing problem and spend some time playing with it. Like writing a few toy services and using a text file to coordinate instead of a database even, if you don't have access to an industrial level problem. A lot of this stuff makes a lot more sense to someone who has a bit of "why we care" context - I'd suggest that for most people transactions look much more exciting after realising how much pain is involved in systems that don't have them. Conversely things like CAP theorem are a lot easier to contextualise as "ah ok, so there are failure cases I can't recover from theoretically; I have to make sure they are rare in practice" - it helps to know how big the magnitude is of these sort of theoretical limits.