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Story: Redis and its creator antirez
- micheles 3y agoPity that I never met antirez in all this time. I first heard of him from David Welton who was a coworker of mine in 2004, well before the existence of Redis. But hope is not lost. For the moment, I think I will buy his book ;-)
- boffinAudio 3y agoI love Redis and what its done for the world but my favourite antirez project is LOAD81, which I think is just a few core modules away from being an amazing new platform for content sharing .. ;) Imagine we have a network of LOAD81 users who share Lua bytecode instead of HTML .. hmm .. https://github.com/antirez/load81.git https://github.com/antirez/load81.git
- gruturo 3y agoOh, love the name, nice homage to the commodore 64 era ( LOAD "*",8,1 ). The editor screenshot also has a strong C64 vibe.
- m3047 3y ago> his father started working with programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and his interest in these controllers led him to purchase a Z80 processor board and start programming on it 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/ 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.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoA legendary hacker. > 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.
- samwillis 3y agoHere's that first thread: > Redis - 23 points by davidw on Feb 25, 2009 | 11 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494649
- cortesoft 3y agoI love the comment with the ruby implementation, which became the official ruby lib I am still using today!
- 1024core 3y agoUpvoted! ;-)
- revskill 3y agoToo late.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoThat thread went really well. Whoever said it went badly was way off. Fantastic work.
- gus_massa 3y agoI agree. 2009 was really a long time ago. 23 points was enough to be the #22 most upvoted article of that day https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-02-25 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-02-25
- ftxbro 3y agoguys he is still here as user name antirez and he's working on freakwan https://github.com/antirez/freakwan https://github.com/antirez/freakwan
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago> FreakWAN is an effort to create a LoRa-based open WAN network, completely independent from Internet and the cellular phones networks. > LoRa (from "long range") is a physical proprietary radio communication technique.
- capableweb 3y agoFreakwan: A MicroPython driver for the SX1276 LoRa chip - 113 points - 18 hours ago - 42 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35882967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35882967
- shaky-carrousel 3y agoThe Hacker News response to Dropbox is probably the funniest ever.
- ethbr0 3y agoI think people unfairly poke fun at the Dropbox skepticism on HN. 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.
- weird-eye-issue 3y agoIs this a joke...? God I hope so. Absolutely clueless
- vlunkr 3y agoYes, it's a reference to the original HN thread.
- dharmab 3y agoYou and I have very different definitions of trivial
- askafriend 3y agoNobody cares about linux users. 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- codegeek 3y ago"CVS". That gave it away :).
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- doh 3y ago> three of them said there were already similar projects out there Quintessential Hacker News
- jsty 3y agoAdd in a dash of complaining about name clashes
- willcipriano 3y agoThese are the sort of people whom you invite over for a nice dinner and they ask why didn't we all go to The French Laundry instead.
- scottlamb 3y agoI have a different perspective. Looking at the original post, [1] it wasn't labeled "Show HN" or posted by the project's author (antirez). So my first read on seeing it in the HN front page would be "hey, I found this cool project". And these people commented with links to similar projects, which I take as something like "if you liked that project, you might like this one, too", or "I wonder how these compare". I find that sort of comment helpful and curiosity-inspiring. Very different from "you shouldn't have bothered writing this when some other project exists". I can't tell from the date-resolution timestamps but they might well have been posted before the author showed up in the thread. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494649
- soneca 3y agoTo be fair, I think ”one person responded positively and offered to help” is also quintessential HN.
- doh 3y agoYes. HN is an absolutely fantastic community. That's why we are here. As every community it has its own idiosyncrasies. Recognizing them and poking fun into ourselves strengthens rather than weakens then community.
- pastacacioepepe 3y agoantirez is the pride of Italy
- racl101 3y ago[flagged]
- pastacacioepepe 3y agoMore like him and Pier Giorgio Perotto, but if you prefer cheesy stereotypes go ahead.
- jacquesm 3y agoAnd outside of Italy as well.
- bosky101 3y agoWow, we'll researched story.
- antirez 3y agoThank you to the author of this post, and to the nice comments here :) The story is well researched. There are a couple of errors and a few things to add maybe. I'll fill the gaps in this comment. 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 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 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.
- matchagaucho 3y agoIndeed, great article. My first startup had a Telecom-Italia web project (via HP) around 2005. We possibly overlapped. I've since launched 3 long-running apps on Redis. Five-nines and Fast. Much indebted to your work. [̲̅T̲̅][̲̅h̲̅][̲̅a̲̅][̲̅n̲̅][̲̅k̲̅][̲̅ ̲̅][̲̅Y̲̅][̲̅o̲̅][̲̅u̲̅]
- frankwiles 3y agoHalf of the things I do to improve performance for clients involve Redis. If you haven’t played with it be sure to give it a chance.
- throwaway1777 3y agoCaching is cool.
- dbeley 3y agoGreat write-up! I feel those stories of open source developers are really lacking in the space given the importance of their work.
- lagrange77 3y agoFrom his website http://invece.org/ http://invece.org/: > 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.
- frant-hartm 3y agoWhat a pile of nonsense. Yes some dumb jobs will go away, but more will be created and people will quickly adapt. Leaps in productivity never lead to increased unemployment or reduced standards of living.
- dataflow 3y ago> people will quickly adapt 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?
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- stevenhuang 3y agoThe man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken - Bertrand Russell
- pepelotas 3y agoDumb people exist -just as ugly people do- that already have employment problems. And education can't fix it, because there is only so much they are capable of learning. 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.
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- cheerioty 3y agoI smiled all the way through reading this. Thanks to the author and of course antirez for his amazing work.
- ipaddr 3y agoAn open source success story. Many got rich from using the product and the author gets some fame
- shubhamharnal 3y agoWhat are the names of those 10 books!?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago[dead]
- nutanc 3y agoThe funny thing is that Google Bard already knows about this story and can perform generative AI tasks on this like summarizing etc[1] [1] https://twitter.com/nutanc/status/1656533992785723392?s=20 https://twitter.com/nutanc/status/1656533992785723392?s=20
- phreq 3y agoIt was great to read about you on HN! I once met you on AzzurraNet IRC, cool moments. Keep up the work that's funny for you.
- wolframhempel 3y agoI feel the story of Redis is also a somewhat cautionary tale of the decoupling of value creation and value capture in open source - having a company monetize a product by someone else and ultimately employing its creator. 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?
- jongjong 3y agoTotally agree but the tech industry is extremely capital and relationship-oriented so I don't see a way out of that. I just wish this fact would be better advertised so that people wouldn't waste their lives in this industry.
- Affric 3y agoIt's not just in tech/open source though. 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.
- rahoulb 3y agoI just want to add my voice to the many thanking antirez for Redis. 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.
- ushakov 3y agoWhy didn't antirez start his own Redis Labs? Seems like they're exploiting his technical genius for their own good
- supergram 3y ago[dead]
- chucke 3y agoIt's actually funny to see mentioned again, just like recently in a linus torvalds interview about git, how the "ruby people" contributed yet again to the massive popularity surge of an otherwise unrelated piece of software. It was definitely a special time, the ascension of that community. And obviously, antirez and redis rock!
- mlry 3y agoI can't help but to mention kilo [0], antirez's exercise on writing a tiny editor. It's presentation as a beginners project [1] into C and terminal programming helped me a lot in my understanding. Thanks a lot, antirez and Paige! [0] http://antirez.com/news/108 http://antirez.com/news/108 [1] https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/ https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/