Gossip Glomers

The text discusses a series of distributed systems challenges called Gossip Glomers, developed by Fly.io in collaboration with Kyle Kingsbury, author of Jepsen. These challenges combine real-world coding experience with academic rigor to teach people about distributed systems theory. Maelstrom, a tool built on top of Jepsen, is used to run toy distributed systems on a simulated network. The challenges start off easy and increase in difficulty, covering topics such as unique ID generation, message broadcasting, g-counters, replicated logs, and transactional databases. These challenges were initially designed for evaluating staff engineers at Fly.io but have been released for anyone to try.