Comment by a_tartaruga

It sounds like you're doing the normal sort of things that systems people do to get started. The fact that you have lots of ideas to jump off of is very good. In general just follow all of your ideas down as far as you can to the base systems. Write the TCP implementation for your HTTP server and run it over the internet for example. You've only gone too far when you start worrying about noise and debugging looks like randomly grounding metal things.