I was lucky to have a good education: my B.A. involved courses in contemporary experimental physics and independent research in nonlinear quantum dynamics (esp. proofs, experimental design, writing), cognitive and social psychology (more experiment design and stats), math structures (proof techniques), philosophy (metaphysics, philosophy of science), and English (rhetoric). All of those helped give me a foundation for doing this kind of experimental work and communicating it to others.

Jepsen draws inspiration from a long line of work on property-based testing, especially Quickcheck & co. It also draws on roughly 10 years of experience building & running distributed systems in production. A lot of Jepsen I invented from whole cloth, but some of the checkers in Jepsen are derived from specific research papers, like work by Wing, Gong, and Howe on linearizability checking.

Then it's just... a lot of thinking, experimenting, and writing. Jepsen's the product of ~6 years of full-time work. Elle, the system which detected the anomalies in this report, was a research project I've been puzzling over for roughly two years.

I write the Jepsen series, and open-source all of the code for these tests, partly as a resource so that other people can learn to do this same kind of work. :-)