Story: Redis and its creator antirez
blog.brachiosoft.com
blog.brachiosoft.com
1. After the TI99/4A, that is indeed the first machine I used, I started to write serious code in a ZX Spectrum. Then, a few years later, I received my first MS-DOS machine: make sure to Google it if you are not from Italy, it was an Olivetti PC1 Prodest, the most strange MS-DOS compatible system EVER.
2. In Milan I was not fired, I quit myself to return in Sicily.
3. When I posted my first message in BUGTRAQ, it was davidw (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidw) that helped me.
4. It was often said that the MERZ port was for Alessia Merz stupidity. This is wrong: we liked the showgirl (I and my friend Oscar), and we liked the fact she replied lightly in the TV shows, she just tried to have fun, and for us this resonated with having fun while programming stuff without a purpose: in short HackValue. That's why the Redis port is MERZ on the phone keyboard.
5. It is true that for many months I continued hacking on Redis even if I didn't receive so great feedbacks, but back then one rarely hacked on OSS software hoping for success or money as a main outcome. It was just that day-to-day jobs mostly sucked, and you wanted something better, more interesting to hack on. At least for many of us the drive was just that. So I continued hacking on Redis even when it surpassed by a lot our LLOOGG needs.
6. The first design sketch of the Twitter Redis-based timeline cache was made by Rob Pointer (the author of the eggrdrop IRC bot!) and myself at Twitter HQ, on some random whiteboard.
7. WOHPE turned out to be one of the most read sci-fi books in Italy, among the ones written by Italian sci-fi authors in recent years. Initially the readers were mostly programmers but now a lot of sci-fi enthusiasts are reading it. It's very strange that certain things written in the book now are becoming real fears, or even happened. For instance multiple readers of the English edition believe that this is likely the first accurate description of "prompt engineer": https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1635022116654563334
8. Now I'm writing a new book but also programming again. I hope to continue with both the activities in parallel.
I've since launched 3 long-running apps on Redis. Five-nines and Fast. Much indebted to your work.
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First off, I work in the web hosting industry- WordPress specifically- and Redis is used along with https://objectcache.pro and https://relay.so/ to make WordPress faster. Thank you for that.
Second, I just read the first chapter of WOHPE on Amazon. Wow. I have wanted to write Hard SciFi for a long time, but I've realized that I'm just not a fiction writer. You on the other hand are, sir. I'm going to see if I can get a print-on-demand version of the book.
And for others here:
https://www.amazon.com/Wohpe-English-Rimmel-Salvatore-Sanfil...
Read the first chapter. Then buy the book. Seriously.
I never saw a sample of the print on demand version of the English translation of Wohpe. I hope they print it properly. With the Italian version, we tried hard to provide a physical book that was of high quality, but shipping to US was impossibile from Italy.
Otherwise drop me an email at antirez - gmail dot com if you have troubles finding it.
I still haven't quite forgiven them for that.
Sorry about those errors. I've fixed them in the story.
A follow-up question about Twitter if you don't mind: did you actually fly to Twitter HQ in California and design the timeline cache with Rob Pointer, who was a Twitter employee at the time? How did that happen?
There’s more to say of course, but we appreciated having these sorts of conversations with upstream authors of software we adopted at Twitter whenever possible.
Before I moved on to working on our Ruby VM, I was doing the work on our Redis fork for Haplo. Robey was working on the routing middleware in Scala.
Yao would have taken over from me when the cache team sprang into existence around that same time, with the emergence of twemproxy and twemcache. Most anything written in C would eventually land on her team.
Thanks for Redis and all your other contributions.
It’s amazing and thank you to the author of the post for this history.
I’ll check out the English translation of your book. All the best!
They have it in the Centre for computing history in Cambridge. Well worth the visit. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/15452/Olivetti-PC1-P...
> In February 2009, antirez's friend David Welton helped him share Redis to the world on Hacker News. The response was pretty muted; apart from David, only four people responded. Three of them said there were already similar projects out there, and only one person responded positively and offered to help.
So don't worry if you don't immediately get traction.
> Redis - 23 points by davidw on Feb 25, 2009 | 11 comments
Luckily, thanks to Dan, maybe someone will be able to time machine your new project once it gets mega popular. :)
It's still pretty useful, as an outsider, as then the creator can hopefully explain the difference, if it's not already outlined in whatever gets submitted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-02-25
It was also still on the frontpage, so not sure I'd say muted. I'm sure it led to many people trying it out, some giving feedback, others eventually contributing. The effect can be bigger than just comments in the submission itself.
There's so much truth to this. I've got a wacky project that is a crazy platform ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ ), and I've started to test my thesis by hiring a few contractors via upwork.
I found this great kid that just got to work and made a game! It feels fantastic just to see someone use something that I made as a creative tool.
I've got a lot to work on, but I'm keeping the faith going strong.
> I've got a wacky project that is a crazy platform ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ ),
I don't think you realise just how many of your posts link to this project. It doesn't seem like you are able to respond to a HN comment/post without linking your project.
IOW, you aren't able to hold a conversation without reference to your project. This is probably not healthy - I mean, surely you have opinions that aren't colored by your project, and you have interests that aren't linked to your project?
I do realize because I'm a shameless self promoter looking for like minds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about his promotion.
Look at almost every regular poster on HN - they all have more than one type of comment. GP has only one type of comment (his project).
I dunno if it is really healthy to obsess over only a single thing, especially (IIRC) GP made a HN post some time back about burnout.
The word is "focused", and the burnout I was speaking diluting my focus too much and stalling out which I foresaw (as this isn't my first rodeo).
I could talk more about the month long RV trip through the southwest where my wife and I saw the Grand Canyon? But, is that relevant? :shrug:
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee
I just complained about it in a different thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35905529
I still think it's healthy to have multiple interests that you engage others with, but I also accept that in some contexts focus can appear as obsession.
I'm going to be revamping the marketing as I'm on-boarding a customer since I'm transitioning towards "concierge engineering company/studio". I've got a thesis that I can beat the averages (in the pg sense: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ) with the platform, but the strategy is hush-hush right now.
Just watch 20m of the video will finish off later. Some thoughts:
* Sounds like it has some good qualities of Elm (domain specific language that reduces complexity) and Phoenix (in the channels etc.)
* I work somewhere where they do a OS process mirroring the front end and there is a bunch of issues you don’t have to worry about. I have not looked at a single SQL query plan since working there, whereas it is regular elsewhere. It does come with challenges for “big data” though as RAM is costly vs. disk space. But maybe you have ideas for that.
* Your system would probably add some ops challenges around load balancing processes and RAM but that could be offloaded to the cloud. Maybe Kubernetes could help here?
* But for most apps it is probably not an issue!
* After thinking Firebase makes web dev simple and realizing no it makes it way more complex I sympathise with a lot of points. Firebase makes the atoms so small that you are constantly worrying about 2, 3, 4 phase commits and how to tell the user that you partially fucked up!
* Seems very promising!
* I have questions but i’ll watch more see if they get answered
On the note about load balancing, it's exceptionally hard. However, I have the ability to migrate traffic (poorly tested) and re-balance. In general, stream load balancing is a challenge on many fronts. However, I consider myself an expert as I was the architect of https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483572 at Facebook. On this topic, my only regret is that I have to outdo myself since I (foolishly) patented an awesome protocol ( https://patents.google.com/patent/US11228626B1/en ).
Feel free to reach out!
In the PLC world there is a notion of "tags". These are values pushed or poked by PLCs with some kind of external (networked) access. They are essentially network-wide global variables. If you think about it for a little while this looks like key+value store. There are some common operations with tags: on/off, counters, bit fields, along with static/updating values. There is a notion that if a tag hasn't been updated in a while it is "stale" or unreliable.
Although my POC deployment of RKVDNS (DNS Proxy for Redis https://github.com/m3047/rkvdns/) revolves around SecOps / DevOps / DevSecOps, my horizon is SCADA and rationalizing the federation (edge) vs centralization (cloud) dilemma for observables, leveraging the reality that these days even (Purdue) Level 1 has DNS.
Now I understand that the people that are passionate about creating OSS are often less passionate about business and vice versa - and that some of the most successful tech companies have the Jobs/Wozniak dynamic - but it still feels like an imbalance worth addressing.
But maybe I'm just cynical and lacking idealism. How's everyone else feeling about this?
Generations of people who have come up with ideas for institutions have had them sold off to the highest bidder and not seen but a fraction of the value their idea has created.
It's the nature of having the money to start, run, develop a business. Having enough capital to make a very big risk less risky.
> Artificial Intelligence will completely reshape our society very soon. If a universal income is not provided in a timely fashion (as AI makes many workers no longer relevant) we are going to be in big trouble.
I think about that very often these days. Governments worldwide must act on that now. Because even if they'll start a legislative process to implement it, it will take a long time and we are running out of time.
Leaps in productivity never lead to increased unemployment or reduced standards of living.
Which people are you thinking of? The 22yo who just got out of college? Or the 50yo whose entire career and experience are getting automated away? Is the idea that they'd all pick up Python in a couple weeks in some bootcamp if their expected careers didn't work out?
- Bertrand Russell
As we do away with the easy dumb jobs, we condemn more people to poverty. We surely need to figure something out, specially if we are going to keep raising the bar.
But seriously. It's just change, it's always happening.
I dunno, we seem to be struggling with a lot of kids who don't fit into an academic school run, and who no longer have lots of options in the form of practical jobs they can do instead when they're 16 and fed up with school.
I talked to someone running a warehouse a couple of years ago. They got containers packed with cans from abroad. The cans had to be put on pallets so the warehouse robots could store them.
So they had one guy who's sole job was to pack the individual cans from the containers and pack them on pallets. The guy doing it loved it. He put on his music and packed those cans, not having to interact with anyone for most of the day. The mindless job left him free to ponder (he read lots of academic articles at home). So, great for him that he found that job.
However, the warehouse robot means there's like 10 people working that giant warehouse instead of several dozen...
Back when I discovered it (probably through Resque), my mantra was "NoSQL is fraud" as I was yet to find a NoSQL database that I trusted with my data (yes, I know Redis isn't strictly a NoSQL database - or at least wasn't at the time).
But reading the docs and looking at how it worked, it shone through how carefully thought out and well-crafted it was. And this was without even looking at the source code (I haven't done any C for years and doubt I would understand it anyway).
It's amazing how that excellence shines through beyond the code and it's still one of my go-to tools (I mainly work with Rails, so can't avoid it to be fair) - so thank you again Salvatore.
> LoRa (from "long range") is a physical proprietary radio communication technique.
Imagine we have a network of LOAD81 users who share Lua bytecode instead of HTML .. hmm ..
[0] http://antirez.com/news/108 [1] https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/
And obviously, antirez and redis rock!
[1] https://twitter.com/nutanc/status/1656533992785723392?s=20
As a linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
If you can't deliver the value of what you described to normal people, it just doesn't matter. That's why Dropbox is a $7B+ company today - because they were able to commercialize something that previously was only accessible to a few people who knew weird computer commands.
To the normal person none of this is "quite trivial".
EDIT: I missed the joke. I get it now. Well-played OP.
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