There is no distributed system without Lamport. His Time, Clocks and Ordering paper to distributed system is like Ted Codd’s A Relational Model paper to database (which is also math!). His elegant analogy between the special relativity, space-time diagram, reasoning distributed systems as state machines, and TLA+; each one is breathtaking.

Paxos is so beautiful. It’s a piece of art. It’s way more elegant and beautiful than Raft (as it solves the smallest consensus problem instead of a log). I will die on this hill.