[stub] there’s something about being in a metal tube at altitude that makes distributed systems metaphors obvious. the plane is a node. the airport is a message broker. your checked bag is an async job that may or may not arrive at the same time you do.
[stub] the interesting part isn’t the metaphor. it’s that the failure modes are the same. network partitions, split-brain, eventual consistency — these aren’t abstract concepts when you’re watching a gate agent manually reconcile a seating chart because the system is down. the fallback is always a human with a clipboard.
[stub] I don’t have a conclusion. just that the next time someone asks me to explain CAP theorem, I’m going to describe a delayed connecting flight and see if that’s clearer.