Notes on Implementing Raft for the First Time

I implemented the Raft consensus algorithm (the poster child of distributed algorithms) in Python. It's a pretty bad implementation! But also (somewhat) correct. Here are some notes I'd share with anyone else who's interested in taking on a similar challenge. In hindsight, these were the most useful resources for learning about Raft and implementing it correctly. The Raft paper (read up to section 5 and reference figure 2 heavily) Students' Guide to Raft one of the most widely used Raft implementations clone the repo, skim raft.go and go back and forth with an LLM to understand the code base and design decisions Eli Bendersky's blog series I'd suggest spending an hour or so reading the paper first, then stubbing out some code for a UDP or TCP server that reads incoming bytes and adds them to an array. I then followed along with Eli's implementation, adding features to my Raft implementation in the same order. After getting something that looks like elections working, I started looking