Thank you both for the answers!

> the thing that would have helped me most in avoiding some of the missteps might have been a richer test interpreter, where I could have "mocked" a network

This is a really intriguing idea. Debugging distributed can be a huge headache, and I can see a lot of value in having something like that.

> We’re planning on doing several of these articles to show different applications.

Looking forward to future articles and definitely will be following this project!