So... I decided to write my own social network platform. Started as a simple "I'm fed up of all the ads" thought which very quickly turned into a bit of an obsession. You'd think it was easy, it's just logging in, typing in a message and clicking post right? Nope... that's not even 1%...
What about polls, what about images, what about profiles with header data... what about security... pass keys, totp, password resets??? It goes on.. there's a social context, so you might want to follow people, or not follow people, or block them or mute them...
Ok... so the idea is starting to form. But then... how much data is this thing going to use? It's ok, I can just buy a cheap VPS. But what if it outgrows that... maybe I need a few... how do I keep them aligned or distribute the load?
Next minute I'm building a distributed file system... that's great but what about under or over replication. What if 1 node ends up with a corrupt chunk... how do I manage that? Should I now consider geo-redundancy?
I could just buy an off the shelf solution, but where's the fun in that...?