CAP Theorem Explained: What I Learned Setting Up MySQL Replication

I recently started my journey into system design and data-intensive applications. This experience has completely changed how I look at software — especially around the hard tradeoffs of consistency, availability, and what happens when things go wrong at scale. Let me start with a scenario that surprised me when I first encountered it: Imagine you just inserted a record in your app. A millisecond later, a read on a different server returns the old data. How? Welcome to distributed systems. What i