Interview with creator of Nginx, Igor Sysoev
webhostingskills.com
webhostingskills.com
* Igor wrote Nginx while working as a sysadmin for Rambler. Classic bottom-up innovation: he could see Apache's shortcomings in a very up-close and personal way. This also explains why Rambler does not hold the copyright on Nginx (see the end of the interview).
* He is quite modest when comparing Nginx to other web servers. This reflects well on his character, but perhaps has "slowed" the adoption of Nginx. It's clear from this article that Igor is an engineer, not a salesman. I find this to be refreshing in an era when many open-source projects seem to achieve adoption by being the loudest, rather than by being the best.
* Igor put off starting a company until there was just too much work for him to do alone. I liked this quote: "I rarely change my life direction: for example, [before] Rambler, I spent seven years working for a company, [and at] Rambler, I also worked for ten years. Change is hard for me. But, nevertheless, by the spring of this year, I did finally decide to found a company that would help the further development of the project."
* Despite having U.S. investors, Nginx's engineering team is based in Russia. One interpretation is that you don't need to be in the Valley to develop a first-rate product; you just need to be in the Valley when it's time to hustle it.
Anyway, an interesting read. Apparently this article is his first public interview. I know Igor doesn't like publicity, but it's inspiring to read his story.
"I do not know how to lead people"
"[Company] will remain small - to grow the company of several hundred people, we do not want."
Compare that to the typical Silicon Valley swagger of all the productless please-sign-up-launching-soon startups; different mentality indeed.
Good for business? Who knows... but I have to wonder what the reaction of the US investors to all this was :)
Not only is it based in Russia, it is 100% Russian. If that doesn't scare the shit out of you, then I already know that you're not Russian =)
> One interpretation is that you don't need to be in the Valley to develop a first-rate product
I'll stick with Apache HTTPD and the Apache Foundation, despite its alleged shortcomings.
The web server is front and center in pretty much every business. I'll pass on an outfit that sticks communist imagery into its logo.
For example, in Poland we sometimes joke about how russian/soviet technology came only in two kinds - if a device won't fall apart immediately after start, it will last forever. It's mostly meant to be whining about "planned obsolescence" and other business attitudes that came from west, that ultimately is about short term money gain for producers on the expense of consumers' money, happiness and natural resources.
I am not disputing that it's a well-engineered piece of technology. It may even be superior.
That's irrelevant.
I expect a level of professionalism and ethical behavior from an open-source project, especially if I rely on it pretty heavily. Placing communist imagery in the logo isn't amusing. And no Russian would find it amusing. I certainly don't. I prefer that my software not make any political statements. Especially if the system it purports to support is responsible for the death of millions of people.
Old one was better, IMO. "Communist imagery" had some style.
That one from "wiki.nginx.org" is made by Cliff Wells, creator of the wiki: http://www.enemyofthestatement.com/page/view/about
btw, it's funny, @maratd who wrote "Placing communist imagery in the logo isn't amusing" doesn't even imagine that it actually was done by US citizen.
Perform a simple whois on nginx.org and you will see that Igor Sysoev is the registrant.
That logo appears on his website over which he has complete control, even now.
I was always taught to assume the best about people.
I will assume that you are correct, that another gentleman who is either ignorant or has a poor sense of humor created and used the logo. I will assume that Mr. Sysoev is far too nice to tell Mr. Wells to take it down.
I retract what I previously said.
EDIT:
I have read the comment which you posted below, in Russian. Mr. Sysoev said that he didn't make it and doesn't like it, for the same reasons I gave earlier. It seems he is too nice to tell the gentleman to take it down.
I apologize for what I said.
Its google-translated result does look very similar to the submitted article, however.
http://mindend.com/index.php/interview-with-the-creator-of-n...
I was somewhat dismayed to find all these new fangled protections like ASLR and Stack Protection that made executing simple buffer overflows much more difficult! I realize that these are good things but as a student of security it did raise the bar of difficulty for writing real-world exploits.
You need to compile your programs with the necessary flags to turn off these protections or if that isn't an option you need to try and use various counter measures like NOP slides, heap sprays, stack cookie replacement etc. I wish I had been around to enjoy what seems like must have been the golden era of the 90's when writing buffer overflows was relatively easy.
There are a lot of more primitive computing devices which don't have such protections. For example, ASLR was added to android as late as version 4.0 (2011).
I've linked the google quick view, so you don't have to trust the PDF link: https://docs.google.com/a/continuum.io/viewer?a=v&q=cach...
It is from this mindset came out the marvels of engineering - first versions of Lisp, UNIX, C and Plan9, and Erlang and designs of hardware and processors, all the best quality engineering we could have.
It is picking and hiring this kind of people is what this site or whole Silicone Valley is all about.
"you can play with yourself in an accident"
Had me a gig-a-lin.