THE SAUNA ALGORITHM: SURVIVING ASYNCHRONY WITHOUT A CLOCK

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

The Sauna Algorithm is a metaphor for reasoning about time and safety in fully asynchronous systems without clocks. By anchoring an action to the arrival and departure of another participant who enters after you, it shows how causal relationships (happened-before) can bound execution safely without measuring time. The idea maps directly to distributed systems, where nodes rely on causality, rather than synchronized clocks, to guarantee consistency and correct ordering.