I Built a Storage Engine from Scratch in C++ — WAL, Raft, and Object Storage I wanted to understand one thing: how does data actually survive a crash? Not what the documentation says. Not what the abstraction promises. What actually happens at the byte level when a process dies mid-write, and how a storage engine recovers from it. So I built VeriStore — a correctness-first key-value storage engine in C++, built from first principles, evolving from a simple in-memory store to a Raft-replicated distributed system with a mini S3-style object storage layer. Why Build a Storage Engine? Every database, stream processor, and distributed system you've ever used is built on top of primitives like: Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) Crash-consistent recovery Group commit batching Consensus replication Understanding these primitives doesn't just make you a better infrastructure engineer — it makes you better at using these systems because you understand what guarantees they actually provide.…