About halfway into my four month internship as a platform developer at 500px, I was faced with the problem of load balancing UDP packets. The rate limiting service that I had been writing was ready to ship: the code was finished, the Chef cookbooks were written, and the servers were provisioned. The only thing left on my plate was to come up with a load balancing solution. I needed to make sure that the rate limiter didn’t get overwhelmed with packets. There was no precedent in our codebase; thi...