Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
eric_b
calpaterson
> The most important thing Antirez did, in my opinion, was to say "No" to things. No to new features that didn't make sense.
Redis has had tremendous mission creep over the years. It started of course mostly as a volatile cache but I've now seen it also used as a message bus (in three different ways: BLPOP, PUB/SUB and Streams), for service discovery and as a general purpose database - something that Redis Labs (in my opinion: wrongly) encourages.
Memcache existed in 2009 when Redis was first released, also as a volatile cache...and still is just a volatile cache. Memcache is what "saying no" looks like. Redis is what "saying yes" looks like - and there are a lot of gotchas.
derefr
Memcache is what saying no to changing the use-case looks like. Redis is what saying no to changing the architecture in order to implement features looks like.
Redis has stayed the same, architecturally, from the beginning: it’s a keyspace where the values are arbitrary in-memory objects owned by their keys, and where commands resolve to synchronous function-calls against the objects (or ref-cells) at those keys.
Anything that can be done without changing that architecture, is in-scope for Redis. (Though if a data structure doesn’t have wide use outside of a domain, it’s best left to a module.) Anything that cannot be done without changing the architecture, won’t be done.
Much of the “fun” I’ve personally had in watching Redis evolve, has been seeing how Antirez has managed to solve the puzzles of getting features that intuitively wouldn’t be a good fit for this architecture, to fit into it anyway: changing technologies that are implemented one way everywhere else, into something else for Redis, that still work, are still performant, and still solve isomorphic use-cases—if not with the same steps you’d use to solve them in other systems. (E.g. using Streams vs. using a regular MQ; using Redis Cluster vs. using regular RDBMS replication; etc.)
calpaterson
Memcache also is about saying no to changing the architecture. That chosen architecture is similar to Redis Cluster -which is a change of architecture Redis did undertake.
I personally have not enjoyed all the strange and wonderful ways people have found to use Redis. Most of them are pretty fragile and (most dangerously) they often put all Redis uses in the same instance...with eviction turned on.
antirez
Wow you totally got it. This is exactly the idea I was using, I even saw an opportunity when the Redis model was potentially able to solve a new use case.
lifeisstillgood
Would you mind elaborating on some of those 'fun' items - part of the problem of being aware of certain technologies without really 'following' them is understanding why they change.
undefined
mrkurt
It didn't really start as a volatile cache, it started as an in memory data structures server. It's useful for all kinds of stuff memcached isn't (and has been since day 1).
jupp0r
This. To me, Redis was always about the rich set of operations you can atomically perform on data without going full ACID. It's very different from a pure cache (although it's probably a good choice if all you need is a cache).
reitzensteinm
Yeah. I do think that Redis has suffered from some mission creep, including a deprecated misadventure in to a mode where values could be stored on disk and only temporarily cached in memory.
Maybe that's what Cal and his colleagues were using it for at the time, but the claim that it started as a volatile cache is just not true. Interesting datastructures and the fork based persistence model were there from the start.
jfkebwjsbx
It started as a memcached with persistence to disk for fast startup.
xani
Well, kinda. Feature list does look like basically random assortment of vaguely related things (or "toolbox" if you want to be nice).
But... things that are also just useful often and for what you'd need to spin off a separate service for, or make suboptimally in whatever (No)SQL you use to store your data.
So it is perfect if you just want to prototype whether given approach is viable, and "good enough" for many apps.
nurettin
> but I've now seen it also used as a message bus
It works excellent as a message bus, though. And you can add HSET/HDEL to your list as the fourth way.
calpaterson
Strongly, strongly, disagree that Redis works well as a message bus.
Lots of reasons why but here is just one because I'm short on time: all of these (four) ways of doing a message bus with Redis offer either a work queue mode or publish/subscribe - but not both (perhaps excepting streams which I've forgotten some of the details of). I have yet to see many real world messaging scenarios where you don't end up using both.
A "proper" message bus needs to have topics, exchanges and queues - like Rabbit. 50% of that functionality is usually not 50% of the value but 10% or less (especially when you consider all the other things about Redis you need to think about - like how eviction is configured).
This is a bit typical of Redis: for any X, you can normally do X in Redis, but is it really a good idea to do X in Redis? IMO, usually no.
sph
> There are plenty of problems with BDFL-style projects, but I think there are a lot of advantages too.
BDFL governance is extremely underrated in the opensource world. People attribute the success of the Linux kernel to its open contribution style, but I will argue that Linux is successful because there's a dictator at the top that enforces a direction, a long term goal, and most importantly, says NO.
Community based governance is a direct cause of that jwz's Cascade of Attention-Deficit problem one can find all over the open source world, especially Linux desktop related.
sitkack
Does FreeBSD have a BDFL?
We don't have enough data points to determine if what you are saying is correct. I have also seen lots of BDFL projects smoke out.
Is the lesson that actual dictatorships only survive long term if 1) the dictator is a nice person and 2) they eventually get managed by an open democratic process?
I think you are actually describing the two clocks problem. Lots of BDFL projects have their own Cascade of Attention-Deficit issues, the project only goes in the direction the BDFL actually cares about.
1_player
A (software) dictator is not necessarily good. But let me double down and say that a community cannot create a product as good as a single head at the top can do, for the single reason that people care only about their own garden, and integration needs someone to oversee and be responsible for all parts.
There is no Steve Jobs in a democratic committee.
njharman
The main differentiation (and risk) with BDFL projects is having (or not) a very competent (like one percenter) BDFL.
The structure of a committee project doesn't make it better or worse than BDFL. It just makes it more average. Any greatness present is toned down. And substandardness is brought up.
This also main reason the "led by greatness" BDFL projects are better than the committee run ones and the "led by less than great" BDFL projects "smoke out". The committee's tend towards the middle of the bell curve, BDFL's are all over the place.
coldtea
>Does FreeBSD have a BDFL?
No, but it doesn't have as much success as Linux either
cat199
this is IMHO no different the real world - a 'good' despot/monarch/etc can be a good leader, but this is highly dependent on the situation (read: leader), and leadership transition process is always a risky one. Democracies/Republics work well so long as the community has a generally shared vision, but can be hampered when there is too much dissent, but generally avoid the succession problem
ddevault
If you're comparing FreeBSD to Linux then I think that says a lot about the merits of BDFLs, really.
KajMagnus
Underrated in the open source world — whilst at the same time, feels obvious in the writing world?
Imagine an author has gotten started writing volumes 1 and 2, and those volumes became popular — maybe the Harry Potter books as an example. Now, adding more authors with equal "story-line decision making power", or a committee, for volumes 3, 4, 5, is a weird idea, right.
secondcoming
Look at what happened with Game Of Thrones! Total disaster at the end that ruined the whole thing for everybody.
easterncalculus
> I will argue that Linux is successful because there's a dictator at the top that enforces a direction, a long term goal, and most importantly, says NO.
Linux is made because of many people all over the world, but it is successful because of the BDFL at the top. A consistent sense of mission absolutely benefits a project in the long term. There just isn't anyone that's going to get your idea better than you, when you're doing something that you know enough about to seriously get started on.
alexchamberlain
I think it's _just_ underrated; I think it's underrated in the business and government worlds too. A good leader should take different points of view into account, but should also be able to make a decision when needed.
derefr
I feel like Antirez has already done everything needed to ensure this doesn’t happen, by 1. building the module system into Redis, and then 2. working with companies like Redis Labs to establish that Redis is enhanced through these modules, and to ensure that modules offer everything required to enhance Redis in all the ways that matter.
In essence, Antirez has protected the core of Redis from needing to bloat, by making it possible for anyone who wants to build on top of Redis to literally do so—build on top, rather than inside. As such, I expect future PRs to Redis Core to look much like current PRs to Redis Core: just fixing bugs, adding stability, and resolving infrastructure-level interoperability concerns.
cletus
I 100% agree with you and I think it explains why most OSS UI projects are, well, terrible. Questionable features, inconsistent UX, millions of "options"... these are the hallmarks of a community model lacking strong leadership and a coherent vision.
As for the future of Redis I choose to be more optimistic. I think the Redis philosophy (thanks to Antirez) has become ingrained. The benefits of a minimal feature set are hopefully well-established.
In the very least I suspect this will last much longer than many expect before the bureaucrats take over.
neogodless
BDFL: Benevolent dictator for life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
(This is also referenced and linked in the article.)
umvi
> The most important thing Antirez did, in my opinion, was to say "No" to things.
This is hard. It makes you feel bad inside to tell people "No", especially when they open PR and clearly did a lot of work adding some feature.
makapuf
Thats something a have regarding PR and code reviews: much frustration can be avoided by discussing what to do and how to do it before showing the work done (avoiding also infinite bikeshedding). Often code review talk about the strategy to do X and not the way to do X
louthy
And some people take the 'No' badly. It's frustrating having to explain that the code in a PR needs to be maintained forever, and it's the repo maintainer that will have to do it, not the contributor. A simple proposal upfront makes all the difference, and saves human effort and feelings.
jffhn
>Saying no is one of the most important jobs of a project maintainer. It's a thankless task that upsets a lot of people. But it's critical for a project to stay successful and achieve the leader's vision.
Reminds me of Brian Goetz: "We have to say no to almost anything. If we didn't, things would pretty quickly degenerate to the point where the system collapses on its own weight (...) if we did this, which of these eighteen possible features might we foreclose on, and might we want to leave those possibilities open, at the cost of saying no to this thing here." (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/java-history-present-fut..., 24m+)
dvirsky
The one drawback of the BDFL model is that you need a person, and a very specific kind of person at that, which tends to be irreplaceable - to sustain it.
Redis has succeeded because of antirez. I really wish it can continue doing so for the long run without him. More than anything it reminds me of Steve Jobs' death (although gladly this is in much happier circumstances and I wish antirez many more decades of hacking). It's true that a decade later Apple is still doing great, but you just know things would have been different if he was still around.
antirez
Ok, so many thank you here, thanks! It's very nice to read the comments here. But I hope to interact more on HN, since basically the idea is to write more blog posts, write more OSS software too. Just totally random :D I'll just do whatever every morning I want to do for a long time. Then maybe I'll find a new long term interest.
munificent
I want you to know that your code is a real inspiration to me. Redis is a beautiful C artifact and an excellent reminder of how joyful it can be to create and read code.
Also, congratulations to moving off of Redis. In open source, there is a thing where people look at retiring from a project as some sort of failure of either the project or the maintainer, but I think the opposite is true.
We all have a finite amount of time on Earth, and everything has its natural beginning and end. Moving on to something else means creating the opportunity for yourself to find the next big project for you. And for the project itself, it means bringing in new eyes and perspectives.
Change is scary, but healthy.
jacquesm
Hello Salvatore,
I normally don't write about what I come across during my work, but in aggregate I can tell you that Redis, Linux and MySQL are the most common recurring elements across 150+ jobs looking at different companies, and using it rarely if ever leads to trouble.
So even if I don't use it myself directly quite a few of the companies we have invested in do, and an indirect 'thank you so much' is well deserved. I am very curious what it is that you will do next besides blogging. Linus had 'git' as his second major project, arguably it has had just as much effect on the world of free software as Linux did, you've definitely raised the bar for yourself :)
Much good luck!
takeda
As someone who was in ops, I really disagree with MySQL in that category.
Saw it multiple times at multiple jobs just break on its own.
Most memorable one was a bug where certain pattern of data caused mysql think data is encrypted, crash and refused to start until data was restored from backup. It took quite time to fix it because it happened randomly and initially we assumed it was broken hardware.
jacquesm
MySQL used to be pretty bad in that respect but lately has come of age and I was mostly commenting on how frequently it was used.
_urga
Thank you antirez!
I started using Redis around 2010 and I learned to appreciate so many things from you along the way:
* Data structures are fun.
* In-memory is fast and can be safe!
* Append-only logs are awesome.
* Databases can be more than MySQL.
* Complexity analysis is worth making clear in the documentation.
* Hybrid L1 cache-friendly data structures beat complexity analysis for small data.
* There are only so many hours you can work in a day.
* It's cool to sit by the pool.
* It's cool to have a screen name.
* Above all, code is poetry, not dependencies.
krp
@antirez Thanks man! Maximum respect for everything so far, and for your honesty over the years. I rarely login or post on HN but I have just for this post.
I've been using redis since I think 2.2 and have learned so much from your posts over the years! More than just about redis. Are you able to post links on your site to the videos you're making? I don't speak Italian but I'd love to learn from subtitles.
I'm really excited for you and look forward to whatever fun things you decide to do next! Greets from NZ
vsmhn
> I write code in order to express myself, and I consider what I code an artifact, rather than just something useful to get things done. I would say that what I write is useful just as a side effect, but my first goal is to make something that is, in some way, beautiful. In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer.
This entered my list of favorite quotes! For this, if not for your huge contribution to OSS, grazie!
portroyal
Thank you! As people have commented, your ability to stick to your convictions, even under fire, is admirable. I look forward to your blog posts.
ibrault
Thank you Salvatore! You have been an inspiration to me as a young programmer and have opened my eyes to the wonders of OSS. Excited to see whatever you do next!
xsace
Thank you for your dedication. You will not be forgotten
koolba
@antirez - Thank you for Redis! It's been a joy to use across so many projects.
> However I never wanted to be a software maintainer.
And nothing say that you have to be. There's this perverted view that anytime someone creates a popular FOSS project, they need to dedicate every waking minute to maintaining it. That's neither economically feasible nor psychologically reasonable.
> Redis was the most stressful thing I did in my career, and probably also the most important. I don’t like much what the underground programming world became in recent years, but even if it was not an easy journey, I had the privilege to work and interact with many great individuals.
What is "underground programming world"?
amelius
> What is "underground programming world"?
The programming world that nobody else sees.
Everybody uses shiny FOSS tools, and some even make big $ using them, but nobody wonders where they come from and how much pain went into building them.
cies
I was also intrigued by that sentence. I expect it means (open source) programming that happens outside of of big corps.
But I'm unsure.
antirez
Yep it's the open source, and in general the "spontaneous" development world, that happens without big money, just for hacking. This "place" once was kinda free and not observed much. Now you can't say anything, if you don't respect a good practice (LOL) people yell at you on Twitter. Even saying that commenting is a good idea is a problem. Not cool.
toyg
> people yell at you on Twitter.
Dude, the problem is just Twitter. Everybody shouts on Twitter, it's a system that encourages mob reactions. "Back in the day" people had to subscribe to a ML to yell at you, so fewer people did; and we all knew which lists were cesspools of trolls and flamers, making it easier to avoid the bulk of it. Twitter instead gives you the whole firehose, unfiltered and amplified. It's not a problem restricted to opensource or programmers, we see it everywhere at the moment.
pbowyer
> Even saying that commenting is a good idea is a problem.
I'm glad I'm not alone experiencing this.
One of the core open source projects I use has taken a no comments stance because "the code speaks for itself". It does if you're a core contributor, but if you dive in less frequently it takes a while to grok what's going on and re-build the mental model. Comments would reduce that.
Thanks for all you've done Salvatore, and for your blogging. Your enthusiasm puts the fun back into my programming!
koolba
> Yep it's the open source, and in general the "spontaneous" development world, that happens without big money, just for hacking. This "place" once was kinda free and not observed much.
Thanks for explaining.
> Now you can't say anything, if you don't respect a good practice (LOL) people yell at you on Twitter. Even saying that commenting is a good idea is a problem. Not cool.
Just because they're loud does not mean they're correct or that they're the majority. I can understand not wanting to deal with any of it though.
The larger than life you become in your space, they more your words, actions, and non-actions get parsed and twisted for political intent. It's either step away entirely or hide behind the mask of a pseudonymous alt.
discreteevent
I think some of these agile thought leaders have a bit to answer for here (but of course it's mainly up to the individual to be responsible for their own judgement - just because somebody else makes their money on marketing doesn't mean you are forced to buy the product)
dilandau
Lowering the barriers to open-source contribution has allowed in people who have absolutely no business being there. If you have standards, you get accused of gate-keeping.
Thanks for mentioning the T- website specifically, it takes a lot of courage to call it out directly these days, because all it takes is one of them with a lot of followers and then you get swamped with hate. It's fucking unreal man.
There's a ton of us down here programming and having fun, free of politics and bullshit. Look forward to seeing you (again).
rconti
There's absolutely nothing wrong with him not wanting to be a software maintainer. I don't want to be either, and I'm not even a programmer.
But there is DEFINITELY something wrong with the fact that, seemingly, NOBODY wants to be a software maintainer.
ilaksh
The problem is that people don't recognize the efforts of the ones who do it. Antirez did it for years. Do people expect someone to have the same very high-profile job with constant overtime and the same project for their entire lives? His efforts to stay on that project were heroic.
There are lots of other people who want to maintain it. Let them, and if they screw it up that is not his fault. He finished his project. Give him a break.
tdfx
> NOBODY wants to be a software maintainer.
I think everybody wants it on their resume, but the practical day to day work tends to be more filtering poorly written GitHub issues than writing any interesting code. For a job that doesn't pay much (often at all), that's not something I would want to spend my time doing.
conjectures
> What is "underground programming world"?
If you have to ask... ;)
brodouevencode
We're all violating the first and second rules of "underground programming world"
Bjartr
I'd expect the underground programming world to index from zero.
r_police
Sorry to be that guy but, why are you posting comments that lead to topic derailing that add nothing to the discussion?
nuclearnice1
Agree. I’d like to thank conjectures, brodouevencode, Bjartr, kungtotte, m0xte, fidelramos, chii and pokot0 for their contributions, but gently suggest none of the jokes were really that funny. Said well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289
chii
> "underground programming world"
it's where you program in a basement.
JamesSwift
Dang.
I say this frequently both online and when discussing system design with newer devs, but will repeat here: of all the production issues I've debugged, the culprit has has never been redis. In fact, redis has been a critical piece of achieving cost-effective scaling. It is one of only two pieces of software (along with postgres) that I blindly recommend without any caveats. From following along here and on your blog about how you approach things and think about the software, I think its clear that you and your vision for the project are a large factor of why it has been so reliable.
Thank you antirez!
wokwokwok
Redis is simple. Good. Has a nice api. Has good libraries. Single threadsed. Extremely hard to scale. Impossibly difficult to cluster in containers because it uses hard coded ips to address nodes. Performs poorly with large payloads. Doesn't run on windows properly. Is extremely expensive as a hosted service (orders of magnitude in some cases, eg. azure).
You'll love it until you don't.
The scaling and clustering story is not nearly as nice as the quick start.
It's definitely worth recommending... with caveats.
SkyPuncher
Redis works well until the point it doesn't - like a lot of other tools.
A half-ton pickup truck works well until you need to haul bigger loads. At some point, you either need to haul smaller loads or change to a different, bigger truck.
kristoff_it
> Is extremely expensive as a hosted service (orders of magnitude in some cases, eg. azure).
That seems to me an argument that should be pointed at cloud providers rather than Redis itself ;)
wokwokwok
The point being that clustering redis is actually very difficult to do at all, never mind in a way that scales.
This would be a significant down side to using redis at all, except you can get away with not caring if you out source the problem with your credit card.
sagichmal
Redis is extremely simple to scale. Treat each instance in a cluster as wholly independent from other instances, and build a thin layer on top to implement whatever sharding and availability requirements your use case requires. I've done it many times and it's always been simple and worked brilliantly. Redis's predictability makes it a joy to operate.
sethammons
We've done just that. Some folks at work wanted sentinel in front as a cluster management layer, but our particular use case did not work well there. Instead, we have some "logical clusters" of 3 nodes that we replicate reads and writes to, sharded to (currently) six clusters. Some logic around quorum for ensuring writes make it to at least 2/3 nodes in a given cluster, with some optimizations for reads sometimes only needing 1 node to respond. We had to do a bunch of tweaking around state and memory management, and all the details were in the docs, which was great. It does exactly what we need it to do, but it is more expensive to run, and we've not figured out a way to do this right in k8s. We don't care for the cost model going forward for when we want this model serving 10x traffic (which is not pie in the sky, it is known actual volume this solution would need to support). For 10x traffic, we'd be looking at 10x node count. At nearly 200 redis nodes, that can get expensive, esp. if we want to move to a managed solution. Anyway, not sure where I was going with this. Yes, redis can scale. Yes it can stay performant. At some point, it just becomes a lot to manage though and costs can add up. We are going to be designing a new solution to keep costs low and performance high.
sidlls
Extremely hard to scale in what sense? A single redis server running on fairly commodity hardware can serve some pretty intense loads (10s of thousands of ops/sec). Once "scale" bigger than that is an issue, companies should already have in place the development staff that will ensure scaling up is done in a sane way, i.e., that have enough sense and/or experience to choose the correct tools for the job.
Redis is one such tool--its clustering "story" may not be ideal but even a small, minimal cluster will be more than sufficient for any use-case that a distributed memory cache is fit for at a scale that will cover 99% of business' needs.
notyourday
> Extremely hard to scale in what sense? A single redis server running on fairly commodity hardware can serve some pretty intense loads (10s of thousands of ops/sec).
~90k/sec on a single core of L5520. Scaling Redis is a premature optimization for 99.99% of the use cases. While it may be sexy to talk about millions of ops per second that one's project does in reality the number of projects that have that as a requirement is probably barely in triple digits globally.
neop1x
I think you are using it wrong. It is not meant to be run in a K8S cluster woth dynamic IPs in multiple instances. You are supposed to deploy VM mesh of fixed IPs as database store. Moreover, it is design-dependent. You can live with just multiple master-slave pairs and have your data implicitly sharded by something, e.g. by user country or continent. It's sad that some people still think "perfect db" exists: partition-tolerant, high-available, durable, horizontal-scalable, low-latency, acid-compiant, open-source database dosn't exist and never will (see the CAP theorem, see the broken guarantees found by Jepsen[1]). Live with it and design your architecture appropriately.
johncolanduoni
I don’t think most people need a fully partition tolerant solution; even at very high scale and with high SLAs quorum based solutions are used successfully. If you remove strict partition tolerance from your above list there do exist such databases. And I’d argue it’s much easier to develop against such a database and you’re more likely to actually preserve its guarantees in your application than running an ad-hoc cluster of Redis instances with a home-spun clustering scheme where your application logic is heavily implicated in maintaining consistency.
dehrmann
I only used it once, but it's clustering story was bad, and I never really understood the niche it filled between Memcache and databases.
sethammons
better memory model over Memcache. If one of our memcached servers dies, that data is gone. Redis can write to disk, optionally. We mostly use redis and memcache as a cache to save load from the db. Even with dozens and dozens of dedicated read hosts, we can knock over our dbs if we are not caching data.
smoyer
I read it twice trying to figure out why you were invoking @dang.
In any case, I've had the same experience with only two programs - CouchDB and Redis.
eatbitseveryday
Dang is a word here, not a handle:
smoyer
It's been a word for a long time ... we used that when we were kids (at least in earshot of our parents). Searching for "dang" in Algolia results in (by a quick count) more than 80% of the results being for @dang (the person/handle) rather than the perjorative use.
justaguyhere
I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer
Takes a rare person to say this, made me smile :)
raverbashing
Sounds like a bit of Italian culture leaking into that phrase
But don't worry Antirez, Redis is far from a bad work of art, quite the contrary.
ilaksh
Personally I think it's mainly the result of having people constantly being hypercritical of your code.
And I think he's proven himself to be a superior programmer. In that in almost every category of engineering skill and knowledge, he is better than 90% of the people criticizing him. If he didn't start out that way, over the years his knowledge and skills grew to make it so.
But also maybe it reflects a bit that there is always some new "best practice" or something that some months ago no one heard about, but now many people are unfortunately using the adoption of as a proxy for programming skill because they are unwilling or unable to actually judge something or someone on actual merit.
tedk-42
When I read that line my heart broke a little.
I think he's done a great job with Redis. It goes to show sometimes that you need to let go of the thing you created for the good of the community. If I were in his position, I would have made the same move
bbulkow
My thought here. I'm not exactly a disinterested party because I built my own key value store company (possibly the wrong way but that's a different story).
I have a huge respect for Redis, and Antirez, but I have to say my respect doesn't include RedisLabs. They're the ones who started a commercial endevour to capitalize on Redis initially without Antirez, and then later offered him a position. They're the ones that Kyle@Jepsen says is making claims about ACID, not Antirez. I always heard that Clustering was a feature Antirez was very reluctant about.
I hope Redis is, fundamentally, taken away from RedisLabs.
Antirez, you say you want to express through code and open source, and I can't square that with your association with RedisLabs. You've been taking their money for quite a few years now to allow them to put up a billboard saying "the home of redis".
I'm going to stop right there. I've cut my own path through the wild jungle that's Open Source, and it's not yours, and I respect the years you put in to make the product with your vision. I'm sure there are some other first coders of foundational databases on this list, but it's a small club.
As an employee of RedisLabs, I don't think you are free to say what you'd like to say, I hope you follow whatever path does allow you to freely express in the future.
Good luck always.
jihadjihad
I just want to say thank you to antirez for Redis, for how simple, fast, and rock solid it remains to this day. Redis is one of those things that allows you to tilt your head a little on a problem--thinking of solutions in terms of set operations and lookups. A lot of people use it understandably for a cache but it is so much more than that...for me it's introduced an entirely new way of composing solutions to problems. Cheers for all you've done--you've shown at least one programmer that there is still a place for small, elegant design that will stand the test of time.
binarymax
HN hugged to death. Here's the snapshot on archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20200630130517/http://antirez.co...
bactisme
I think its website need a fast cache.
antirez
Actually the web site uses Redis as the only store. And Redis is using 0.1% of CPU. The problem is that Ruby sucks at doing anything scalable. It's just a Ruby/Sinatra app. If you do that in PHP, it will work out of the box with many concurrent accesses. With Ruby not the case. There are ways to deploy it better, but it should be fast as default, which is not the case.
rakoo
As a lover of Tcl (https://web.archive.org/web/20200615130120/http://antirez.co...), I'm surprised you're using ruby and not something Tcl-based with its built-in concurrency
ahmetkun
I guess it would be interesting if you re-wrote your website in PHP and wrote a blog post about it with the title 'Why I Moved From Ruby to PHP?'
izietto
That sounds like a good area on which you might work! :D
niyazpk
NGINX supports Lua scripting. Many years ago I worked on a system which ran a full website on NGINX + Lua + Redis.
entropie
I actually wonder how many request/s one gets from being on the top of HN.
tuananh
not very high
a previous post of mine got 500 points and stay #1 for a few hours.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22410448
traffic from it looks like this
https://tuananh.net/2020/03/02/traffic-from-top-post-on-hack...
Izkata
> Traffic stats on Cloudflare seems a bit inflated with the unique visitors at 36k. Maybe they do count bots as well there.
First screenshot looks like Google Analytics to me; I'd say it's more likely a lot of us have blocked it and Cloudflare's number is more accurate.
rikroots
My "Show HN" post was in the bottom half of the HN home page for less than an hour. Traffic to the site was roughly 100 times greater than its current levels (by bandwidth):
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rik-roots-50349611_in-case-an...
ignoramous
archive.is: https://archive.is/w1oCw
jrochkind1
While a very different circumstance, the pull between "I write code in order to express myself" and being an "artist" vs. "useful" and the drudgery of maintenance reminds me of famous rubyist _why and why he stopped doing stuff in the community.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/why-a-tale-of-a-pos...
https://kev.town/2013/04/30/why-did-why-the-lucky-stiff-quit...
wolco
I would love a story on
"I don’t like much what the underground programming world became in recent years"
What could he mean? What underground programming world is he talking about?
WJW
Underground as in programming for fun or as art, because you enjoy it as a hobby/subculture. Opposed to the "above ground" programming world of programming for other people (possibly also for money, but OSS is often just for recognition) where people have demands about unimportant features, terminology, coding styles, codes of conduct, etc. Sometimes they get quite aggressive about their demands, too.
dilandau
Probably the roving mobs on Twitter who occasionally brigade project issue trackers and mailing lists. Check out the master/slave post he wrote a while back.
Or just the toxic nature of some open source communities, especially on Reddīt for whatever reason.
dexen
This.
The underground in underground programming refers to maintaining low visibility, as to present low target silhouette. Additional benefit is not attracting too many participants that are in it for the clout, rather than for solving problems & good engineering.
Open Source is no longer sufficient for software freedom; the current 'battlefield' is maintaining security from activist pressure or gradual take-over.
jart
I created the Occupy Wall Street website nine years ago. Believe me when I say the lengths people will go, to try and control community projects, is downright traumatizing. I never could have imagined that same kind of nastiness would impact open source.
If you don't feel comfortable engaging with the new toxic culture, you can use my underground liferaft. My liferaft isn't an operating system, but rather an attempt to help us not depend on them as much. I have no idea who's controlling GNU/Linux these days and Occupy was enough drama for one lifetime. My code has the same focus on clarity that Antirez put into his Redis codebase. My liferaft also empowers you to build and distribute tiny native portable programs (like Kilo!) using hermetically sealed tools. See https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
dilandau
This implies that a lot of the politicization of open source projects has to do with outsiders making power plays (for in group status or just because narcissism). I think this is part of it, for sure. I also think it can also manifest when parts of the community get trapped in a purity spiral, which is somewhat related but comes from within rather than without.
Advice? I don't know. Stay underground and ignore the mobs, they will get bored and move on if you ignore them.
Ironically, I think lowering the barriers for involvement in open source has let in a mass of people who have no fucking business being there.
rewoi
This is not first time Antirez quit. 10 or 8 years ago he deleted his Twitter account with 10k followers. I think today it reached critical mass, and he does not want to be public figure anymore.
dilandau
Replying to myself to highlight antirez's own comment upthread:
>Yep it's the open source, and in general the "spontaneous" development world, that happens without big money, just for hacking. This "place" once was kinda free and not observed much. Now you can't say anything, if you don't respect a good practice (LOL) people yell at you on Twitter. Even saying that commenting is a good idea is a problem. Not cool.
So yeah, pretty much twitter.
kissgyorgy
Probably the same which was the reason Guido left Python as BDFL.
tuyguntn
I am assuming low level systems in commercial software systems, would like to hear from @antirez :)
lazyjones
Perhaps the fact that a recent (2018, but posted here recently) blog post of his got flagged on HN after 141 comments has something to do with it...
elemant
If you don't know it's because we don't want you to know ;)
antirez
Moved the blog in a more decent server :D Faster now. But DNS propagation will take some time. Yet most of the new requests will go in the new server so also the old one will be faster.
beachy
> In eleven years I hope I was able to provide a point of view that certain persons understood, about an alternative way to write software. I hope that such point of view will be taken into consideration in the evolution of Redis.
To me this epitomises what Bill Gates meant when he said "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.".
I just wish I had something to show for my last decade that had as much impact as Redis!
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
So they're moving to a new "community based", "light governance" model. [1]
There are plenty of problems with BDFL-style projects, but I think there are a lot of advantages too. Redis is unique in my experience in that it works the way you'd expect - it doesn't cause outages, it is fast, and it has a vanishingly small number of gotchas. The feature set is well curated and for the most part fits together cohesively.
The most important thing Antirez did, in my opinion, was to say "No" to things. No to new features that didn't make sense. No to PRs that didn't fit the vision. Saying no is one of the most important jobs of a project maintainer. It's a thankless task that upsets a lot of people. But it's critical for a project to stay successful and achieve the leader's vision.
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I predict after a few years of this new model we'll see weird features, more stability issues, and performance regressions as more cooks enter the kitchen. Time will tell.
[1] https://redislabs.com/blog/new-governance-for-redis/