The Secret Lives of Data is a project that explains how computer systems work on the inside through interactive animations you can watch in a browser. The goal is to make the internal mechanics of databases, servers, and distributed systems visible and understandable, rather than treating them as black boxes. The first and, at the time of this README, only completed visualization covers Raft, which is a protocol for keeping multiple servers in agreement about stored data even when some of them go offline. This is a concept that matters in any system where you need reliability and consistency across more than one machine. The animated walkthrough shows step by step how messages pass between nodes and how the system recovers from failures. A second visualization covering Apache Kafka, a system for moving large streams of data between services, was listed as planned but not yet built. The project is explicitly open to contributions. The README notes that you do not need to know how to build data visualizations yourself. If you understand a system and want to explain it, you can open a GitHub issue describing the topic and work with others to turn it into an animation. The README is brief and the codebase is the source for the thesecretlivesofdata.com website.
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