sidenote : implementing RAFT myself was really tough. The original paper has 2 or 3 obscure points which were really hard to figure out...

My approach when learning new protocols like Raft or Paxos is to implement them in Pluscal (TLA+'s higher-level language) or P (px-1">https://github.com/p-org/P). I've found that helps separate the protocol-level concerns from the implementation-level concerns (sockets? wire format?) in a way that reduces the difficulty of learning the protocol.