flaviojmendes/dinamos

Dinamos is a free web app for learning how distributed systems work through hands-on simulation rather than reading. Instead of just describing concepts like caching, load balancing, or consensus, it lets you run them in a browser, watch live request flows, inject failures, and see what happens. It is aimed at developers who want practical experience with the patterns that underpin large-scale software systems. The platform is built around interactive simulators. Topics covered per the README include cache behavior, circuit breakers, load balancers, sharding, and consensus algorithms. Alongside the simulators, there are real-world case studies and a structured learning roadmap to guide progress. An interactive system editor is also mentioned, where you can build and stress-test configurations. Under the hood, the frontend is a single-page React app. The backend is a small HTTP API built with Hono, a lightweight framework that runs as a serverless function in production on Vercel and as a regular Node server locally. Content is stored in PostgreSQL via Drizzle ORM. User authentication goes through Firebase. Optional integrations include OpenAI for challenge feedback, Resend for email, and Stripe for billing, though all three can be left unconfigured for local development. To run it locally you need Node.js 20 or later and a PostgreSQL database (a free hosted option like Supabase or Neon works). You clone the repo, install dependencies, copy the example environment file and fill in the values, then start the frontend and API as two separate processes. Database schema changes are managed with Drizzle migration commands provided in the README. The project accepts contributions and has a contributing guide and a code of conduct. The README is also available in Portuguese. It is released under the MIT license.