Preface

It’s ironic that in writing a book, the last part of the book you write is often the beginning of the book. It’s also often the most difficult part to put down on paper. Why? Because you have to explain to everyone why you’re so passionate about a subject that you spent the last one and a half years of your life writing a book about it. It’s hard to articulate why anyone would spend such a large amount of time on a technical book. One rarely writes software books for the money or the fame.

Here’s the reason why I wrote this book: I love writing code. It’s a calling for me and it’s also a creative activity—akin to drawing, painting, or playing an instrument. Those outside the field of software development have a hard time understanding this. I especially like building distributed applications. For me, it’s an amazing thing to see an application work across dozens (even hundreds) of servers. It’s like watching an orchestra playing a piece of music. While the final product of an orchestra is beautiful, the making of it is often a lot of hard work and requires a significant amount of practice. The same goes for writing a massively distributed application.