[nwmcsween]

Honestly you need to plan things similar to anything in life. Have a 1000 foot view of what you want to achieve, which in this case is distributed systems, now break that down e.g. distributed fs, etc. And again paxos, raft and match it up with whatever language that has market share and meshes well with what you want in a language. If you get stuck breaking things down do very brief and simple research into it and do not fall down the interesting rabbit hole.