7 ms·

Congratulations! Fast and stable DB. In 2011 I wrote PHP client for Redis with features like tags, safe locks, map/reduce. It was heavily tested and users had

Congratulations! Fast and stable DB. In 2011 I wrote PHP client for Redis with features like tags, safe locks, map/reduce. It was heavily tested and users had no issues - and since there was no issues, it was removed from the list of clients after few years as "abandoned". Nobody even tried to contact me :) Now I don't use PHP and barely use Redis so it's all in past. But that experience taught me a lot of new things. Salvatore Sanfilippo, you are great programmer. Redis API is elegant, safe and effective. I personally had 0 data losses all years I use Redis. And this DB is always extremely fast.

akuji1993 8y ago
Funny anecdote though. No patches every few hours, no 1000 issues open? Apparently you were too good of a programmer ;)
- EugeneOZ 8y ago
  I'm still a programmer, just use Rust mostly, instead of PHP. It's not an anecdote, there was 6-7 issues on github and code was really well tested.
  - clan 8y ago
    Why not post a link to it? That would be a simple and welcome revival.
    - EugeneOZ 8y ago
      Redis evolved, clients evolved, there are better PHP clients right now I believe. And I'm here not promote my code, I'm here to congratulate Antirez and thank him for his great job and for being a good example of how to write API, stable and fast code, how to communicate with the community. His blog is a source of lessons, wise thoughts and inspiration.
- pault 8y ago
  Google says anecdote means "a short amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person." Edit: This should have been a reply to the comment from EugeneOZ saying it's not an anecdote; I replied to the wrong comment by accident.
  - akuji1993 8y ago
    Hm, I'm no native speaker. In my language, we use the same word for "stories from the past".
    - menacingly 8y ago
      I am a native speaker and this was correct usage of anecdote by any reasonable definition
  - sethgecko 8y ago
    The literal translation from Greek is “unpublished” which refers to a short incident irrelevant enough to not be part of the main story. In modern Greek anecdoto means joke.
aidos 8y ago
That must have been annoying. It’s interesting, I’ve been evaluating react css frameworks these last couple of days and one of things I’m looking at it is commit log to see what activity is like on the project. It did cross my mind that ones that had gone quiet might be very complete and bug free...but I decided that would be the exception. Anyway, kudos for writing the client and kudos to Redis. It’s a brilliant bit of software.
- disiplus 8y ago
  there should somewhere be some stats about number of downloads, clones. while npm has its fair share of problems i like that it shows how many weekly downloads it has.
  - pavlov 8y ago
    Download count is a reasonable proxy for use... But if someone is happily using the package in production, that won't tick any download numbers even though it's arguably the thing anyone considering a package would really want to know. Maybe there could be a new curated repo for packages, where users are asked to regularly vouch whether they are still using the package? The problem of course is motivating users to give those answers. Without a critical mass of users regularly vouching, the data isn't much help.
arendtio 8y ago
That is the irony of software development. In theory, good software could last forever without any maintenance. In practice though, nothing has to be replaced as often as software ;-) What does that teach us about our software development practices?
- jaabe 8y ago
  I think developers need to learn to build to last. We have medical software that hasn’t been updated for two decades that runs just fine. That’s often unobtainable with modern software development because we rely so much on things that change too often, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s a paradigm shift of course, but I think our business really needs to take maintainability more seriously than it does. This goes for proprietary software as much as Open Source, but with Open Source there is the added layer of governance. I work in the public sector and we operate quite a few Open Source projects with co-governance shared between different muniplacities, and the biggest cost is keeping up with updates to “includes”. It’s so expensive that our strategy has become to actively avoid tech stacks that change too often.
  - matlock 8y ago
    While I don't disagree that we shouldn't strive for maintainbility, things like medical software, airplane software or similar highly tested mission critical pieces are specifically built to last for that long. Nobody is going to pay us to build a WebShop to last for 20 years, thats just not a necessity when getting it out quick is so much more important from a business perspective than making it last forever. > That’s often unobtainable with modern software development because we rely so much on things that change too often, but it doesn’t have to be that way The reason we rely on things that change often is because we want to leverage them to get products out faster. Many different layers of that (as every tech stack is essentially a product by someone) and we have lots of updates to deal with. The flipside of slow moving projects is bugs might not be fixed or new helpful features might not be coming in, meaning you have to build it yourself. As a community we know and have known how to build mission critical software for decades, but we actively often decide not to do it because it isn't that important compared to other factors.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
One thing I think OSS developers / projects would benefit from is (self) certification. Let's say you write a great piece of software that has no need of updating. But Redis keeps evolving - making new releases. You could just each release of Redis run a series of checks and add a "verification" that we support version 1.0,1.1,1.2 of redis. But even better is if someone else does this - why? Because it solves a problem I have seen a lot on government circles - the "we cannot use OSS because it is not supported" But if another company says "we have reviewed, tested and used" version X of php-Redis then you suddenly have a self supporting eco-system. Webshops that care about winning tenders can say "this software is supported by dozens of providers around the globe" so if it's original user goes off line there are still people who provably have skills and experience with it. Everyone wins (note - I am in no way saying this is something you should have done or thought about or arranged - writing software is hard enough without these sort of long term, unprofitable, activities - it's just matches observations i have on getting oss into government (plug: http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto)
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  > But if another company says "we have reviewed, tested and used" version X of php-Redis then you suddenly have a self supporting eco-system. Companies using it is nowhere near the same as 'supporting' it in the sense of providing assistance if there's a problem.
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    I think if you are prepared to assign some "certificate" that says - we have tested version X of this and it's full test suite passes, and it runs against this version of redis server or it installs cleanly on RHEL 7.1 then it's a positive move If you also sign off a different certificate saying - we are a commercial entity that offers "support" (however we define that) for this software then we are into a much more interesting eco-system (yes I am looking for way more than I downloaded it and it works on my laptop :-)
    - 8y ago
pselbert 8y ago
My most popular open source library is a Redis backed cache for Ruby. It continues to accumulate stars, but I haven’t had any issues in well over a year. Sometimes software is just finished, not abandoned!
- dwild 8y ago
  Well the author himself said that Redis evolved and there's now better PHP client. It thus means that it wasn't actually finished and was abandoned. In a closed environment, sure it's just finished, but the world is much bigger, not closed at all. Even the good old Instalshield required maintenance from Microsoft over their 16 bits compatibility layer.
hartator 8y ago
Lol that’s open source marketing 101, GitHub issues are the main source of outreach.

akuji1993 8y ago

Funny anecdote though. No patches every few hours, no 1000 issues open? Apparently you were too good of a programmer ;)

EugeneOZ 8y ago
I'm still a programmer, just use Rust mostly, instead of PHP. It's not an anecdote, there was 6-7 issues on github and code was really well tested.
- clan 8y ago
  Why not post a link to it? That would be a simple and welcome revival.
  - EugeneOZ 8y ago
    Redis evolved, clients evolved, there are better PHP clients right now I believe. And I'm here not promote my code, I'm here to congratulate Antirez and thank him for his great job and for being a good example of how to write API, stable and fast code, how to communicate with the community. His blog is a source of lessons, wise thoughts and inspiration.
pault 8y ago
Google says anecdote means "a short amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person." Edit: This should have been a reply to the comment from EugeneOZ saying it's not an anecdote; I replied to the wrong comment by accident.
- akuji1993 8y ago
  Hm, I'm no native speaker. In my language, we use the same word for "stories from the past".
  - menacingly 8y ago
    I am a native speaker and this was correct usage of anecdote by any reasonable definition
- sethgecko 8y ago
  The literal translation from Greek is “unpublished” which refers to a short incident irrelevant enough to not be part of the main story. In modern Greek anecdoto means joke.

aidos 8y ago

That must have been annoying. It’s interesting, I’ve been evaluating react css frameworks these last couple of days and one of things I’m looking at it is commit log to see what activity is like on the project. It did cross my mind that ones that had gone quiet might be very complete and bug free...but I decided that would be the exception. Anyway, kudos for writing the client and kudos to Redis. It’s a brilliant bit of software.

disiplus 8y ago
there should somewhere be some stats about number of downloads, clones. while npm has its fair share of problems i like that it shows how many weekly downloads it has.
- pavlov 8y ago
  Download count is a reasonable proxy for use... But if someone is happily using the package in production, that won't tick any download numbers even though it's arguably the thing anyone considering a package would really want to know. Maybe there could be a new curated repo for packages, where users are asked to regularly vouch whether they are still using the package? The problem of course is motivating users to give those answers. Without a critical mass of users regularly vouching, the data isn't much help.

arendtio 8y ago

That is the irony of software development. In theory, good software could last forever without any maintenance. In practice though, nothing has to be replaced as often as software ;-) What does that teach us about our software development practices?

jaabe 8y ago
I think developers need to learn to build to last. We have medical software that hasn’t been updated for two decades that runs just fine. That’s often unobtainable with modern software development because we rely so much on things that change too often, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s a paradigm shift of course, but I think our business really needs to take maintainability more seriously than it does. This goes for proprietary software as much as Open Source, but with Open Source there is the added layer of governance. I work in the public sector and we operate quite a few Open Source projects with co-governance shared between different muniplacities, and the biggest cost is keeping up with updates to “includes”. It’s so expensive that our strategy has become to actively avoid tech stacks that change too often.
- matlock 8y ago
  While I don't disagree that we shouldn't strive for maintainbility, things like medical software, airplane software or similar highly tested mission critical pieces are specifically built to last for that long. Nobody is going to pay us to build a WebShop to last for 20 years, thats just not a necessity when getting it out quick is so much more important from a business perspective than making it last forever. > That’s often unobtainable with modern software development because we rely so much on things that change too often, but it doesn’t have to be that way The reason we rely on things that change often is because we want to leverage them to get products out faster. Many different layers of that (as every tech stack is essentially a product by someone) and we have lots of updates to deal with. The flipside of slow moving projects is bugs might not be fixed or new helpful features might not be coming in, meaning you have to build it yourself. As a community we know and have known how to build mission critical software for decades, but we actively often decide not to do it because it isn't that important compared to other factors.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

One thing I think OSS developers / projects would benefit from is (self) certification. Let's say you write a great piece of software that has no need of updating. But Redis keeps evolving - making new releases. You could just each release of Redis run a series of checks and add a "verification" that we support version 1.0,1.1,1.2 of redis. But even better is if someone else does this - why? Because it solves a problem I have seen a lot on government circles - the "we cannot use OSS because it is not supported" But if another company says "we have reviewed, tested and used" version X of php-Redis then you suddenly have a self supporting eco-system. Webshops that care about winning tenders can say "this software is supported by dozens of providers around the globe" so if it's original user goes off line there are still people who provably have skills and experience with it. Everyone wins (note - I am in no way saying this is something you should have done or thought about or arranged - writing software is hard enough without these sort of long term, unprofitable, activities - it's just matches observations i have on getting oss into government (plug: http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto)

mgkimsal 8y ago
> But if another company says "we have reviewed, tested and used" version X of php-Redis then you suddenly have a self supporting eco-system. Companies using it is nowhere near the same as 'supporting' it in the sense of providing assistance if there's a problem.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  I think if you are prepared to assign some "certificate" that says - we have tested version X of this and it's full test suite passes, and it runs against this version of redis server or it installs cleanly on RHEL 7.1 then it's a positive move If you also sign off a different certificate saying - we are a commercial entity that offers "support" (however we define that) for this software then we are into a much more interesting eco-system (yes I am looking for way more than I downloaded it and it works on my laptop :-)
  - 8y ago

pselbert 8y ago

My most popular open source library is a Redis backed cache for Ruby. It continues to accumulate stars, but I haven’t had any issues in well over a year. Sometimes software is just finished, not abandoned!

dwild 8y ago
Well the author himself said that Redis evolved and there's now better PHP client. It thus means that it wasn't actually finished and was abandoned. In a closed environment, sure it's just finished, but the world is much bigger, not closed at all. Even the good old Instalshield required maintenance from Microsoft over their 16 bits compatibility layer.

hartator 8y ago

Lol that’s open source marketing 101, GitHub issues are the main source of outreach.