I think it's just meant to demonstrate a novel use case for Redis. This will often be performant enough, in which case using out-of-the-box Redis will be favor

I think it's just meant to demonstrate a novel use case for Redis. This will often be performant enough, in which case using out-of-the-box Redis will be favorable over writing and testing custom software. However I'd also be interested to see that code, if it's open source. I've been spending lots of time with Go lately. :)