My Curiosity Got Out of Hand - So I Built a Rate Limiter in Go 🔧

Hey everyone! I am Mohak 🙋🏼‍♂️, an MSCS student who apparently likes distributed systems. Thus, I decided to build one and this is my very first blog post ✍🏼 about it 🙂. So please be gentle🙏🏼. As a student, I have spent a lot of time reading about distributed systems be it in textbooks or papers or YouTube videos. There's CAP Theorem, consistency models, fault tolerance which look fascinating on paper. But, there's this gap which I feel is always present between understanding a concept and actually building something upon it. So I thought well why not just try to close the gap a little if possible? Thus, I went with rate limiting which is something every real world API needs and decided to build it from scratch. No libraries doing the hard parts for me. Just Golang, Redis, and a lot of debugging sessions. Well here I am documenting what I learned: the decisions, the gotchas, and the moments where textbook didn't quite prepare me for reality. 🤔 What even is rate limiting in the first pl