I'm documenting my journey building a distributed database using Elixir/OTP and RocksDB. Not trying to replace Postgres, but exploring whether Elixir's concurrency primitives and supervision trees offer a fundamentally different approach to distributed storage. This first post covers the known hard problems: CAP theorem trade-offs, conflict resolution, node failures, network partitions, and why these challenges are actually interesting to work through. Happy to discuss any of the technical decisions or answer questions about the approach so far.