What consistently amazes and pleases me is software that cleverly uses algorithms and data structures to prevent complexity. In particular, everything CRDT-like

What consistently amazes and pleases me is software that cleverly uses algorithms and data structures to prevent complexity. In particular, everything CRDT-like still seems like magic to me. So I'm unreasonably excited by bittorrent, storage based on consistent hashing, and rsync (rolling checksums are just amazing). Interestingly I hate distributed consensus with a passion because it always seems to achieve the opposite - causing more complexity.