Following on from part 1, in which we learned about Raft’s leader election mechanism, we continue our journey into the Raft paper. In this installment, we’re learning about Raft’s approach to log replication.

The unique selling point of Raft is that it’s easy to understand – at least, far more so than it’s scary older cousin Paxos. Although I’ve read a Medium article or two about it, and played around with the visualizer, I figure a good way to really get it is to implement it directly from the paper. But first we need to actually read the paper. Here follow my notes from doing exactly that.

After a limited trial run of Auxify - working Friday at my mom’s house, playing Spotify in the background - I spent last night and this morning ironing out some kinks and usability issues we discovered over the course of the day, and deployed the changes this morning.

Welcome to reidswan.com (or reidswan.github.io, depending on how you got here). It’s the personal site of Reid Swan (me) - a software engineer with a handful of years of experience. I’m also a guitar student, avid reader, and learning to speak Swedish!