For me one of the best ways to learn about difficult concepts is to reinvent the wheel and implement existing solutions. Riak was one of the early distributed systems that applied the principles described in the dynamo paper. This was cutting edge distributed systems engineering back then.
So it is one thing to know the theory and a totally different thing to actually go and implement it. The latter provides plenty of opportunity to test how well one really understands how everything works together. This is what I do here. Implement a riak inspired BASE system using my current weapon of choice, Common Lisp.