This.The underground in underground programming refers to maintaining low visibility, as to present low target silhouette. Additional benefit is not attracting too many participants that are in it for the clout, rather than for solving problems &amp; good engineering.Open Source is no longer sufficient for software freedom; the current &#x27;battlefield&#x27; is maintaining security from activist pressure or gradual take-over.

This is not first time Antirez quit. 10 or 8 years ago he deleted his Twitter account with 10k followers. I think today it  reached critical mass, and he does not want to be public figure anymore.

Replying to myself to highlight antirez&#x27;s own comment upthread:&gt;Yep it&#x27;s the open source, and in general the &quot;spontaneous&quot; development world, that happens without big money, just for hacking. This &quot;place&quot; once was kinda free and not observed much. Now you can&#x27;t say anything, if you don&#x27;t respect a good practice (LOL) people yell at you on Twitter. Even saying that commenting is a good idea is a problem. Not cool.So yeah, pretty much twitter.

Probably the roving mobs on Twitter who occasionally brigade project issue trackers and mailing lists. Check out the master&#x2F;slave post he wrote a while back.Or just the toxic nature of some open source communities, especially on Reddīt for whatever reason.

If you don&#x27;t know it&#x27;s because we don&#x27;t want you to know ;)

Probably the same which was the reason Guido left Python as BDFL.

I am assuming low level systems in commercial software systems, would like to hear from @antirez :)

Perhaps the fact that a recent (2018, but posted here recently) blog post of his got flagged on HN after 141 comments has something to do with it...

Underground as in programming for fun or as art, because you enjoy it  as a hobby&#x2F;subculture. Opposed to the &quot;above ground&quot; programming world of programming for other people (possibly also for money, but OSS is often just for recognition) where people have demands about unimportant features, terminology, coding styles, codes of conduct, etc. Sometimes they get quite aggressive about their demands, too.

I would love a story on&quot;I don’t like much what the underground programming world became in recent years&quot;What could he mean? What underground programming world is he talking about?

We&#x27;re all violating the first and second rules of  &quot;underground programming world&quot;

Sorry to be that guy but, why are you posting comments that lead to topic derailing that add nothing to the discussion?

&gt; What is &quot;underground programming world&quot;?If you have to ask... ;)

&gt; &quot;underground programming world&quot;it&#x27;s where you program in a basement.

Yep it&#x27;s the open source, and in general the &quot;spontaneous&quot; development world, that happens without big money, just for hacking. This &quot;place&quot; once was kinda free and not observed much. Now you can&#x27;t say anything, if you don&#x27;t respect a good practice (LOL) people yell at you on Twitter. Even saying that commenting is a good idea is a problem. Not cool.

I was also intrigued by that sentence. I expect it means (open source) programming that happens outside of of big corps.But I&#x27;m unsure.

&gt; What is &quot;underground programming world&quot;?The programming world that nobody else sees.Everybody uses shiny FOSS tools, and some even make big $ using them, but nobody wonders where they come from and how much pain went into building them.

&gt; NOBODY wants to be a software maintainer.I think everybody wants it on their resume, but the practical day to day work tends to be more filtering poorly written GitHub issues than writing any interesting code. For a job that doesn&#x27;t pay much (often at all), that&#x27;s not something I would want to spend my time doing.

The problem is that people don&#x27;t recognize the efforts of the ones who do it. Antirez did it for years. Do people expect someone to have the same very high-profile job with constant overtime and the same project for their entire lives? His efforts to stay on that project were heroic.There are lots of other people who want to maintain it. Let them, and if they screw it up that is not his fault. He finished his project. Give him a break.

There&#x27;s absolutely nothing wrong with him not wanting to be a software maintainer. I don&#x27;t want to be either, and I&#x27;m not even a programmer.But there is DEFINITELY something wrong with the fact that, seemingly, NOBODY wants to be a software maintainer.

@antirez - Thank you for Redis! It&#x27;s been a joy to use across so many projects.&gt; However I never wanted to be a software maintainer.And nothing say that you have to be. There&#x27;s this perverted view that anytime someone creates a popular FOSS project, they need to dedicate every waking minute to maintaining it. That&#x27;s neither economically feasible nor psychologically reasonable.&gt; Redis was the most stressful thing I did in my career, and probably also the most important. I don’t like much what the underground programming world became in recent years, but even if it was not an easy journey, I had the privilege to work and interact with many great individuals.What is &quot;underground programming world&quot;?

Sounds like a bit of Italian culture leaking into that phraseBut don&#x27;t worry Antirez, Redis is far from a bad work of art, quite the contrary.

Personally I think it&#x27;s mainly the result of having people constantly being hypercritical of your code.And I think he&#x27;s proven himself to be a superior programmer. In that in almost every category of engineering skill and knowledge, he is better than 90% of the people criticizing him. If he didn&#x27;t start out that way, over the years his knowledge and skills grew to make it so.But also maybe it reflects a bit that there is always some new &quot;best practice&quot; or something that some months ago no one heard about, but now many people are unfortunately using the adoption of as a proxy for programming skill because they are unwilling or unable to actually judge something or someone on actual merit.

When I read that line my heart broke a little.I think he&#x27;s done a great job with Redis. It goes to show sometimes that you need to let go of the thing you created for the good of the community. If I were in his position, I would have made the same move

I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmerTakes a rare person to say this, made me smile :)

Thanks for Redis! I never built anything that successful but can relate that being a software maintainer is really hard and many great software developers who build great software, have a hard time with it and not finding it very enjoyable.

Looks like they’re already well covered with community contributions and two new (or pre-existing) maintainers?

Guess we&#x27;ll all sleep with the fishes now. Good that you&#x27;re going to guide them somewhat, I hope they carry the project forwards; good luck Salvatore! &lt;3 We love you man

Hey! I&#x27;m not part of how the new setup will be. I don&#x27;t liked to maintain, and selecting a new development setup is the most mantainer-ing thing ever :D

First and foremost thanks and good luck @antirez, your comments and pointers here have been nothing less than amazing.On a more selfish note, how is this going to affect Redis development?

I absolutely love Redis! I really wish more software worked as well and was as easy to use - thank you for creating this absolute gem!

Actually the web site uses Redis as the only store. And Redis is using 0.1% of CPU. The problem is that Ruby sucks at doing anything scalable. It&#x27;s just a Ruby&#x2F;Sinatra app. If you do that in PHP, it will work out of the box with many concurrent accesses. With Ruby not the case. There are ways to deploy it better, but it should be fast as default, which is not the case.

not very higha previous post of mine got 500 points and stay #1 for a few hours.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22410448" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22410448</a>traffic from it looks like this<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tuananh.net&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;02&#x2F;traffic-from-top-post-on-hacker-news&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tuananh.net&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;02&#x2F;traffic-from-top-post-on-hack...</a>

&quot;antirez 2 hours ago. 52347 views. &quot;

My &quot;Show HN&quot; post was in the bottom half of the HN home page for less than an hour. Traffic to the site was roughly 100 times greater than its current levels (by bandwidth):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;rik-roots-50349611_in-case-anyone-ever-wondered-what-effects-activity-6679451662999986176-UdZK&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;rik-roots-50349611_in-case-an...</a>

I actually wonder how many request&#x2F;s one gets from being on the top of HN.

archive.is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;w1oCw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;w1oCw</a>

HN hugged to death. Here&#x27;s the snapshot on archive: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20200630130517&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;133" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20200630130517&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.co...</a>

I just want to say thank you to antirez for Redis, for how simple, fast, and rock solid it remains to this day. Redis is one of those things that allows you to tilt your head a little on a problem--thinking of solutions in terms of set operations and lookups. A lot of people use it understandably for a cache but it is so much more than that...for me it&#x27;s introduced an entirely new way of composing solutions to problems. Cheers for all you&#x27;ve done--you&#x27;ve shown at least one programmer that there is still a place for small, elegant design that will stand the test of time.

@antirez, thank you for Redis. It is my favorite database and I often refer to it as one of the most successful OS projects that I know of.

I know exactly what you mean when you say you wanna be a software developer, not a software maintainer

&gt; Is extremely expensive as a hosted service (orders of magnitude in some cases, eg. azure).That seems to me an argument that should be pointed at cloud providers rather than Redis itself ;)

Redis works well until the point it doesn&#x27;t - like a lot of other tools.A half-ton pickup truck works well until you need to haul bigger loads. At some point, you either need to haul smaller loads or change to a different, bigger truck.

Redis is extremely simple to scale. Treat each instance in a cluster as wholly independent from other instances, and build a thin layer on top to implement whatever sharding and availability requirements your use case requires. I&#x27;ve done it many times and it&#x27;s always been simple and worked brilliantly. Redis&#x27;s predictability makes it a joy to operate.

I only used it once, but it&#x27;s clustering story was bad, and I never really understood the niche it filled between Memcache and databases.

I think you are using it wrong. It is not meant to be run in a K8S cluster woth dynamic IPs in multiple instances. You are supposed to deploy VM mesh of fixed IPs as database store. Moreover, it is design-dependent. You can live with just multiple master-slave pairs and have your data implicitly sharded by something, e.g. by user country or continent. It&#x27;s sad that some people still think &quot;perfect db&quot; exists: partition-tolerant, high-available, durable, horizontal-scalable, low-latency, acid-compiant, open-source database dosn&#x27;t exist and never will (see the CAP theorem, see the broken guarantees found by Jepsen[1]). Live with it and design your architecture appropriately.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jepsen.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jepsen.io&#x2F;</a>

Extremely hard to scale in what sense? A single redis server running on fairly commodity hardware can serve some pretty intense loads (10s of thousands of ops&#x2F;sec). Once &quot;scale&quot; bigger than that is an issue, companies should already have in place the development staff that will ensure scaling up is done in a sane way, i.e., that have enough sense and&#x2F;or experience to choose the correct tools for the job.Redis is one such tool--its clustering &quot;story&quot; may not be ideal but even a small, minimal cluster will be more than sufficient for any use-case that a distributed memory cache is fit for at a scale that will cover 99% of business&#x27; needs.

Redis is simple. Good. Has a nice api. Has good libraries. Single threadsed. Extremely hard to scale. Impossibly difficult to cluster in containers because it uses hard coded ips to address nodes. Performs poorly with large payloads. Doesn&#x27;t run on windows properly. Is extremely expensive as a hosted service (orders of magnitude in some cases, eg. azure).You&#x27;ll love it until you don&#x27;t.The scaling and clustering story is not nearly as nice as the quick start.It&#x27;s definitely worth recommending... with caveats.

Dang is a word here, not a handle:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.urbandictionary.com&#x2F;define.php?term=Dang" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.urbandictionary.com&#x2F;define.php?term=Dang</a>

I read it twice trying to figure out why you were invoking @dang.In any case, I&#x27;ve had the same experience with only two programs - CouchDB and Redis.

Dang.I say this frequently both online and when discussing system design with newer devs, but will repeat here: of all the production issues I&#x27;ve debugged, the culprit has has never been redis. In fact, redis has been a critical piece of achieving cost-effective scaling. It is one of only two pieces of software (along with postgres) that I blindly recommend without any caveats. From following along here and on your blog about how you approach things and think about the software, I think its clear that you and your vision for the project are a large factor of why it has been so reliable.Thank you antirez!

&gt; ... what I write is useful just as a side effect, but my first goal is to make something that is, in some way, beautiful ...I love beautiful code too, however if it&#x27;s not useful, then the beauty fades quickly for me. What&#x27;s the point?

As a redis user for more than 8 years, i just want to say thank you. I had embedded redis 2.8 on small IoT system with 200mhz&#x2F;64Mb of ram to huge cluster as a message bus (redis-as-kafka pattern).
Want a shared memory with a type system? Use redis. Want a queue? Use redis. Want something easy to mock, with an API in all major ecosystems? Use redis.Thanks for your work :)

Antirez is an inspiration, for me at least.
Not only because of what he achieved, Redis is a very nice piece of tech, but also because of his programming style.

I can think of few other programmers who have contributed so much, and ever fewer who have signed off in a way that was so filled with dignity. What a guy.

Thank you for such a great piece of software, Antirez. Redis has been an integral piece of my stack for years now.I, too, am leaving the company I founded soon and have mixed emotions about it. I certainly don’t enjoy the monotonous nature of maintaining software and yearn for those early creative days.Best of luck to you in the future! Looking forward to seeing what you create next.

Thank you. Redis has been the nervous system of my main project for the last eight years.

Redis has given me more than the occasional headache when it comes to its lax security defaults and how since it&#x27;s going to be local then why bother changing them? But there&#x27;s no denying that when it works, it works damnably well. So for that, I give you my thanks and good luck in whatever endeavors you find yourself involved in!

@antirez - thank you so much for your work, and for your patience with dealing with us all over the years. I have benefited greatly from your willingness to share your engineering skills, and you are one of the most respected programmers in my list of people to follow online.So, onwards and upwards to new things. Perhaps now you have time for my favourite of your projects, LOAD81? :)

Just be an Italian dude, or Sicilliano, Antirezzzzano, whatever, you&#x27;re great, thanks for RedisDon&#x27;t need to do much more. Just be You man. Live on. You are beautiful. We thank you for Redis

Thank you!  In building Redis you’ve contributed some wonderful software to the world.  In addition, I’ve always found your blogs to be interesting reads.  I’ve also learned by the examples you set both from a coding perspective (reading your wcode), and engineering perspective.  Thank you again, looking forward to whatever is next!

I am struck by how beautifully expressed this letter is. @antirez, thank you so much.It&#x27;s really great to see when someone who is totally honest with themselves and what sparks joy in their life&#x2F;career, and is also respectful to all the people who depend on the work&#x2F;artifact. So much respect.Thanks again.

The word that always comes to mind reading these posts is bittersweet.On one hand, it’s sad that they’re leaving, and&#x2F;or that circumstances made the job less enjoyable than it would otherwise be.But on the other hand, I cannot help but be happy for one who has thrown off the chains and is now free to pursue their dreams again.Best of luck wherever life may take you!

If you flip that around, it&#x27;s possible that being driven by one man was a contributing factor to redis&#x27; success.Design by committee and all that.

The fact that one person can (mostly on their own) create a tool as widely-used and respected as Redis is very inspirational to me. Good luck for the future!

Over the last decade, Redis has been my go-to example of beautifully written code. Thank you for such an amazing creation @antirez, and best of luck for whatever you do next.

Yeah, I don’t see how maintaining a project like that has any long-term appeal. You’re not the upstart anymore, you’re the government. You stand to lose more by mistakes that affect reliability than you stand to gain by changing or adding things.I’m at a similar point in my life, though of course I’m much less influential than him. I’m getting to the end of the most stressful and most important part of my career, with no desire to do something similar again, without a clear idea of what’s next.

Does FreeBSD have a BDFL?We don&#x27;t have enough data points to determine if what you are saying is correct. I have also seen lots of BDFL projects smoke out.Is the lesson that actual dictatorships only survive long term if 1) the dictator is a nice person and 2) they eventually get managed by an open democratic process?I think you are actually describing the two clocks problem. Lots of BDFL projects have their own Cascade of Attention-Deficit issues, the project only goes in the direction the BDFL actually cares about.

I think it&#x27;s _just_ underrated; I think it&#x27;s underrated in the business and government worlds too. A good leader should take different points of view into account, but should also be able to make a decision when needed.

&gt; I will argue that Linux is successful because there&#x27;s a dictator at the top that enforces a direction, a long term goal, and most importantly, says NO.Linux is made because of many people all over the world, but it is successful because of the BDFL at the top. A consistent sense of mission absolutely benefits a project in the long term. There just isn&#x27;t anyone that&#x27;s going to get your idea better than you, when you&#x27;re doing something that you know enough about to seriously get started on.

Underrated in the open source world — whilst at the same time, feels obvious in the writing world?Imagine an author has gotten started writing volumes 1 and 2, and those volumes became popular — maybe the Harry Potter books as an example. Now, adding more authors with equal &quot;story-line decision making power&quot;, or a committee, for volumes 3, 4, 5, is a weird idea, right.

&gt; There are plenty of problems with BDFL-style projects, but I think there are a lot of advantages too.BDFL governance is extremely underrated in the opensource world. People attribute the success of the Linux kernel to its open contribution style, but I will argue that Linux is successful because there&#x27;s a dictator at the top that enforces a direction, a long term goal, and most importantly, says NO.Community based governance is a direct cause of that jwz&#x27;s Cascade of Attention-Deficit problem one can find all over the open source world, especially Linux desktop related.

Well, kinda. Feature list does look like basically random assortment of vaguely related things (or &quot;toolbox&quot; if you want to be nice).But... things that are also just useful often and for what you&#x27;d need to spin off a separate service for, or make suboptimally in whatever (No)SQL you use to store your data.So it is perfect if you just want to prototype whether given approach is viable, and &quot;good enough&quot; for many apps.

Memcache is what saying no to changing the use-case looks like. Redis is what saying no to changing the architecture in order to implement features looks like.Redis has stayed the same, architecturally, from the beginning: it’s a keyspace where the values are arbitrary in-memory objects owned by their keys, and where commands resolve to synchronous function-calls against the objects (or ref-cells) at those keys.Anything that can be done without changing that architecture, is in-scope for Redis. (Though if a data structure doesn’t have wide use outside of a domain, it’s best left to a module.) Anything that cannot be done without changing the architecture, won’t be done.Much of the “fun” I’ve personally had in watching Redis evolve, has been seeing how Antirez has managed to solve the puzzles of getting features that intuitively wouldn’t be a good fit for this architecture, to fit into it anyway: changing technologies that are implemented one way everywhere else, into something else for Redis, that still work, are still performant, and still solve isomorphic use-cases—if not with the same steps you’d use to solve them in other systems. (E.g. using Streams vs. using a regular MQ; using Redis Cluster vs. using regular RDBMS replication; etc.)

It didn&#x27;t really start as a volatile cache, it started as an in memory data structures server. It&#x27;s useful for all kinds of stuff memcached isn&#x27;t (and has been since day 1).

&gt; but I&#x27;ve now seen it also used as a message busIt works excellent as a message bus, though. And you can add HSET&#x2F;HDEL to your list as the fourth way.

&gt; The most important thing Antirez did, in my opinion, was to say &quot;No&quot; to things. No to new features that didn&#x27;t make sense.Redis has had tremendous mission creep over the years. It started of course mostly as a volatile cache but I&#x27;ve now seen it also used as a message bus (in three different ways: BLPOP, PUB&#x2F;SUB and Streams), for service discovery and as a general purpose database - something that Redis Labs (in my opinion: wrongly) encourages.Memcache existed in 2009 when Redis was first released, also as a volatile cache...and still is just a volatile cache. Memcache is what &quot;saying no&quot; looks like. Redis is what &quot;saying yes&quot; looks like - and there are a lot of gotchas.

I feel like Antirez has already done everything needed to ensure this doesn’t happen, by 1. building the module system into Redis, and then 2. working with companies like Redis Labs to establish that Redis is enhanced through these modules, and to ensure that modules offer everything required to enhance Redis in all the ways that matter.In essence, Antirez has protected the core of Redis from needing to bloat, by making it possible for anyone who wants to build on top of Redis to literally do so—build on top, rather than inside. As such, I expect future PRs to Redis Core to look much like current PRs to Redis Core: just fixing bugs, adding stability, and resolving infrastructure-level interoperability concerns.

BDFL: Benevolent dictator for life
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Benevolent_dictator_for_life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Benevolent_dictator_for_life</a>(This is also referenced and linked in the article.)

I 100% agree with you and I think it explains why most OSS UI projects are, well, terrible. Questionable features, inconsistent UX, millions of &quot;options&quot;... these are the hallmarks of a community model lacking strong leadership and a coherent vision.As for the future of Redis I choose to be more optimistic. I think the Redis philosophy (thanks to Antirez) has become ingrained. The benefits of a minimal feature set are hopefully well-established.In the very least I suspect this will last much longer than many expect before the bureaucrats take over.

Thats something a have regarding PR and code reviews: much frustration can be avoided by discussing what to do and how to do it before showing the work done (avoiding also infinite bikeshedding). Often code review talk about the strategy to do X and not the way to do X

And some people take the &#x27;No&#x27; badly. It&#x27;s frustrating having to explain that the code in a PR needs to be maintained forever, and it&#x27;s the repo maintainer that will have to do it, not the contributor. A simple proposal upfront makes all the difference, and saves human effort and feelings.

&gt; The most important thing Antirez did, in my opinion, was to say &quot;No&quot; to things.This is hard. It makes you feel bad inside to tell people &quot;No&quot;, especially when they open PR and clearly did a lot of work adding some feature.

The one drawback of the BDFL model is that you need a person, and a very specific kind of person at that, which tends to be irreplaceable - to sustain it.Redis has succeeded because of antirez. I really wish it can continue doing so for the long run without him. More than anything it reminds me of Steve Jobs&#x27; death (although gladly this is in much happier circumstances and I wish antirez many more decades of hacking). It&#x27;s true that a decade later Apple is still doing great, but you just know things would have been different if he was still around.

&gt;Saying no is one of the most important jobs of a project maintainer. It&#x27;s a thankless task that upsets a lot of people. But it&#x27;s critical for a project to stay successful and achieve the leader&#x27;s vision.Reminds me of Brian Goetz: &quot;We have to say no to almost anything. If we didn&#x27;t, things would pretty quickly degenerate to the point where the system collapses on its own weight (...) if we did this, which of these eighteen possible features might we foreclose on, and might we want to leave those possibilities open, at the cost of saying no to this thing here.&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;java-history-present-future" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;java-history-present-fut...</a>, 24m+)

I think the mixed historical record of consul republics might be relevant to why a single leader is often a better idea than 2-3.

Instead of a single BDFL, you could also have a board of e.g. 3 BDFLs. Those 3 people would have the final word, but they rank equal, and have to come to a common conclusion, e.g. by discussing internally. That only works if the board is not too big, and the people are somewhat compatible to each other. But in that case, I think it works much better, because there is less pressure on a single person, also less work (they can distribute it somewhat), and probably more reasonable and consistent conclusions.It seems that this model is not so common? At least the list on Wikipedia (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Benevolent_dictator_for_life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Benevolent_dictator_for_life</a>) only lists Django as an example with 2 BDFLs.I was active in a smaller open source project (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openlierox.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openlierox.net</a>) where it mostly was like that, i.e. we were 3 main developers, and all major design questions were discussed among us. But this example is probably not so representative, as there rarely were further contributions by other people. But anyway, I was very happy with this model, that there is not a single leader, but 3 people.

Do you have any tips for explaining to stakeholders that things in a Redis cache expire on async schedules?

So they&#x27;re moving to a new &quot;community based&quot;, &quot;light governance&quot; model. [1]There are plenty of problems with BDFL-style projects, but I think there are a lot of advantages too. Redis is unique in my experience in that it works the way you&#x27;d expect - it doesn&#x27;t cause outages, it is fast, and it has a vanishingly small number of gotchas. The feature set is well curated and for the most part fits together cohesively.The most important thing Antirez did, in my opinion, was to say &quot;No&quot; to things. No to new features that didn&#x27;t make sense. No to PRs that didn&#x27;t fit the vision. Saying no is one of the most important jobs of a project maintainer. It&#x27;s a thankless task that upsets a lot of people. But it&#x27;s critical for a project to stay successful and achieve the leader&#x27;s vision.Maybe I&#x27;m a pessimist, but I predict after a few years of this new model we&#x27;ll see weird features, more stability issues, and performance regressions as more cooks enter the kitchen. Time will tell.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redislabs.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;new-governance-for-redis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redislabs.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;new-governance-for-redis&#x2F;</a>

He shared some of his struggles a while ago: 
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;129" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;129</a>Great work @antirez! Thanks for your dedication. Stepping back as maintainer and giving your support from the Redis Labs advisory board is nothing less than what you did so far.It&#x27;s sensible that you don&#x27;t want to make plans about the rest of your time right now.Cheers

Redis is an astonishingly good piece of software. I&#x27;ve always found its beauty to be the reflection of your philosophies, @antirez. Thank you. Here&#x27;s to you finding joy in your pursuits!

Is it possible to build software without maintenance ? I think we need a new model for software ... where original build is self-sufficient but you have any number of remixes.Right to implement a basic feature to an existing software there is too much code that touches way too many files.

&quot;In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer.&quot;Of course an Italian programmer would say this.

Hi,Antirez thanks for the Redis.. even though I have not used redis in real time.. some what I got attracted into redis and when I have attended redis conference in Bangalore got to know much about redis and got a chance to see and listen your talk.. all the best for your future hopefully you will come back with new thing where I can learn more from you.. partially missing you from github mail nofications which I didn&#x27;t thought....all the best

Thank you for all your work on Redis. As you already know, it powers so much of the internet.Wishing you the best in whatever you do next.

You&#x27;ve got at least one eagerly awaiting reader right here!Staying tuned :)

Thank you for your dedication. You will not be forgotten

Thanks so much!I did have a post that basically said &quot;I relate,&quot; but it wasn&#x27;t popular (I guess it came across as self-promoting. My apologies).In any case, I can relate, and completely support you in your future endeavors. I am not a redis user, but I have seen nothing but good said about it.

Thank you! As people have commented, your ability to stick to your convictions, even under fire, is admirable. I look forward to your blog posts.

You are a unique kind of hero of a unique age.

Thank you, and kudos for keeping at it for so long!

You are a hero sir and thanks for all the effort that you have contributed for redis. Someday, I too hope to create a project that would touch at least a fraction of as many people as redis did. You are a big inspiration. All the best for whatever you want to do next.

Thank you! And this is a very good idea:&gt; I&#x27;ll just do whatever every morning I want to do for a long time.

Thank you for all your work these years. Your blog was&#x2F;is inspirational and I especially learnt a lot from your &quot;writing an editor in 1000 lines&quot; article, when every other example on the net used to use a library.

Ciao Salvatore!! Hope to see you again soon in San Francisco! Onward and upward.I am glad to read that you made a choice, as difficult as it might have been, and I hope it will make you happy (or happier).

I want you to know that your code is a real inspiration to me. Redis is a beautiful C artifact and an excellent reminder of how joyful it can be to create and read code.Also, congratulations to moving off of Redis. In open source, there is a thing where people look at retiring from a project as some sort of failure of either the project or the maintainer, but I think the opposite is true.We all have a finite amount of time on Earth, and everything has its natural beginning and end. Moving on to something else means creating the opportunity for yourself to find the next big project for you. And for the project itself, it means bringing in new eyes and perspectives.Change is scary, but healthy.

Thank you Salvatore! You have been an inspiration to me as a young programmer and have opened my eyes to the wonders of OSS. Excited to see whatever you do next!

@antirez Thanks man! Maximum respect for everything so far, and for your honesty over the years. I rarely login or post on HN but I have just for this post.I&#x27;ve been using redis since I think 2.2 and have learned so much from your posts over the years! More than just about redis. Are you able to post links on your site to the videos you&#x27;re making? I don&#x27;t speak Italian but I&#x27;d love to learn from subtitles.I&#x27;m really excited for you and look forward to whatever fun things you decide to do next!
Greets from NZ

Thank you so much for your contributions!!!!! I might have not used Redis, but I learned a lot from your text editor tutorial.

As someone who was in ops, I really disagree with MySQL in that category.Saw it multiple times at multiple jobs just break on its own.Most memorable one was a bug where certain pattern of data caused mysql think data is encrypted, crash and refused to start until data was restored from backup. It took quite time to fix it because it happened randomly and initially we assumed it was broken hardware.

Hello Salvatore,I normally don&#x27;t write about what I come across during my work, but in aggregate I can tell you that Redis, Linux and MySQL are the most common recurring elements across 150+ jobs looking at different companies, and using it rarely if ever leads to trouble.So even if I don&#x27;t use it myself directly quite a few of the companies we have invested in do, and an indirect &#x27;thank you so much&#x27; is well deserved. I am very curious what it is that you will do next besides blogging. Linus had &#x27;git&#x27; as his second major project, arguably it has had just as much effect on the world of free software as Linux did, you&#x27;ve definitely raised the bar for yourself :)Much good luck!

Thank You so much for Redis. Looking forward to your next project or hacking around existing OSS project. May be CRuby or Lua given you like both languages?

Huge thanks!Redis is simple and straightforward and a joy to use. Best of luck :)

Thank you so much antirez for all your work!
Looking forward to those blog posts!

Thank you antirez!I started using Redis around 2010 and I learned to appreciate so many things from you along the way:* Data structures are fun.* In-memory is fast and can be safe!* Append-only logs are awesome.* Databases can be more than MySQL.* Complexity analysis is worth making clear in the documentation.* Hybrid L1 cache-friendly data structures beat complexity analysis for small data.* There are only so many hours you can work in a day.* It&#x27;s cool to sit by the pool.* It&#x27;s cool to have a screen name.* Above all, code is poetry, not dependencies.

Your initial post about Redis is one of the first things I remember seeing when I started reading Hacker News. The great thing about Redis to me was that it was extremely clear what it did and what the use cases were, and I always appreciated how you talked about it in such a simple, practical way.Thank you for Redis, and I hope you can relax and have some fun with whatever is next!

I really hope you take time to do some non-software projects. Just like we rest and rotate crop fields, we must rest and rotate our minds!

Massive hat tip for all your work over the years. Redis is a lovely bit of work.I first used it as the datastore for a flash sale about 8 years ago now. Even though close to 130k people were trying to book rooms at the same time, it performed just as I hoped it would.I was going to say that I haven’t used it in a few years, but really I’ve just forgotten that it’s running a critical part of our system day in day out because it never causes me any trouble.Good luck with your next adventure, here’s hoping it’s as fruitful for the community as your last one.

Thank you for Redis and some of the other stuff too! I had great fun reading through the small string compression code and learned a lot! Hope you have many decades of happy hacking ahead of you.

Thank you for creating Redis :) Best wishes with whatever comes next.

Thank you very much for creating Redis! It&#x27;s an outstanding piece of software that I&#x27;ve enjoyed using over the past decade.

Thank you so much for all that you have done. Redis is a fantastic piece of work. It is everything software is supposed to be: it&#x27;s simple and it just works :)Good luck exploring your other options

I&#x27;ve always admired your work, and read your source code to learn how to structure a great project.Looking forward to reading whatever you do next!

&gt; I write code in order to express myself, and I consider what I code an artifact, rather than just something useful to get things done. I would say that what I write is useful just as a side effect, but my first goal is to make something that is, in some way, beautiful. In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer.This entered my list of favorite quotes! For this, if not for your huge contribution to OSS, grazie!

Wow I guess I don&#x27;t have nearly the knowledge of redis as many others here, but either way redis has been one of my favorite coding experiences! It works well, it&#x27;s reliable, and it&#x27;s very easy. Thanks so much for your efforts man!

+1s are frowned upon at HN, but I can&#x27;t think of a more warranted post than this one for offering up an underlined &quot;thank you&quot;

@antirez Thank you for all your amazing work! Redis and your overall approach has changed the way I approach _my_ work daily.

Congratulations on completing such a very successful project!Also, good decision, and happy to see that you now can finally take a real vacation if you want.Also, it is good news for everyone, because it means you will be able to concentrate your energy on new creative pursuits if you want. Which, for example, leads to beneficial things like video tutorials, etc.It feels like people may still kind of be on your back a little bit but this time they may be asking you what the next big project is. I hope you can shake them off and just follow your passion without needing to make a commitment to something new 
(especially not anytime soon). This will be best for everyone in my opinion.

Thanks for everything you have given the community. And I look forward to more blog posts, they are always fun to read.I also want to thank you for making this decision while you were still active, Redis didn&#x27;t skip a beat. Right up to announcing this you made sure that the community made progress. As we at GitLab detail in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;scaling-our-use-of-sidekiq&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;scaling-our-use-of-...</a> in April you personally responded to an issue <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;antirez&#x2F;redis&#x2F;issues&#x2F;7071" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;antirez&#x2F;redis&#x2F;issues&#x2F;7071</a> within an hour.I glad you are choosing for what makes you happy, you more than earned it.

Basically you changed the world, in your own way. Redis is here to stay now. Nothing short of sheer brilliance.

Thanks so much for everything, Salvatore. Working with Redis, working on Redis and working with you have all been a blast.

I haven&#x27;t used Redis before, but I have been considering it for a project I&#x27;m working on so I&#x27;ve been having a look.Just wanted to offer you my thanks. I&#x27;ve seen the project a bit from the sidelines over the years out of interest, and I think you should be proud of it.Hope you will do something that excites you next. My only tip is : don&#x27;t worry about what other people think is exciting - follow your gut.

Thank you! Redis is what brought back the spark of fun in developing in me.

Hey antirez,Your work that’s had the most impact on me isn’t Redis but kilo! It taught me how to have fun hacking on C back in university. Me and a couple friends cloned the repo and started adding fun features.Here’s to more 1000 line whatevers! &lt;3

Hey man, like a lot of people here, I wanna say &quot;Thanks fort Redis, it&#x27;s solved a bunch for problems for me at work&quot;, but also &quot;Thanks for dump1090, I&#x27;ve had heaps of fun with that, and learned a lot from digging into your code there.&quot;Best wishes for whatever it is you choose to do next.

Thanks for putting so much effort into Redis! The software itself is awesome (I&#x27;ve been using it one way or another over the span of nearly a decade now), and in my opinion anyway you&#x27;ve handled the project and yourself in an exemplary way. You&#x27;re the only programmer I can really say I think of as a personal hero. Best of luck in the future!

I became a sponsor of yours on Github today just to say, &quot;thanks.&quot; I know it&#x27;s not much, but I really do appreciate your work. Hopefully, my small donation will add up some worthwhile coffee overtime!

Thank you antirez! I&#x27;ve used your remote dictionary server from the earliest days and it has been a staple of my tool chest ever since. Three cheers and enjoy your time doing whatever it is you want to do!

Beautifully written end to a personal journey. I wish you the best!

I really enjoyed your Youtube &quot;Writing System Software&quot; episodes. Would be awesome to see some more of that in the future too ... !

Ok, so many thank you here, thanks! It&#x27;s very nice to read the comments here. But I hope to interact more on HN, since basically the idea is to write more blog posts, write more OSS software too. Just totally random :D I&#x27;ll just do whatever every morning I want to do for a long time. Then maybe I&#x27;ll find a new long term interest.

thanks and congrats. i always admired your approach to language, whether computer or human intended. good luck.

I&#x27;m grateful to Antirez for inventing Redis in the first place and putting in all the great work he&#x27;s done since. However I&#x27;m worried about the implications of this change for the continued existence of Redis as open-source in the public-goods sense.What does it mean that Yossi and Oran are taking over as maintainers - are they doing so in their personal capacity or as employees of Redis Labs ?How are potential conflicts between the business interests of Redis Labs and the interests of the community to be identified and resolved ?Who will own the copyright over the newly submitted code and are there any safeguards against future versions of Redis being released under licenses more restrictive than the current one ?

redis complexity has been increasing a lot lately (module, stream, multi-thread,...)not that i don&#x27;t like it but antirez has been hesitated about adding those before.

Antirez, I look forward to seeing what you do next. I especially look forward to there being more software in the world that’s architected with your unique mindset—whether it be “useful” software or not. :)

Simon Wardley “system of theft” comes to mind. This is probably a good move. Keep on creating!

Thank you for writing this antirez, I think I&#x27;ll remember it as a statement of some principles that I like to think I aspire to also: like many people here I guess, I would describe myself as someone who loves writing software, and in my own small way I&#x27;ve also tried to avoid being dragged into team&#x2F;project management because that is not what I seek out of a lifetime involved with code. And, yes, I do like to think of writing code as a creative activity &#x2F; form of expression. I also need to study your C code more! Perhaps I&#x27;ll look at the early redis commits.

Thanks Antirez, Redis powers my startup and we could not have done it without you ! You and your beautiful release notes essays will be missed.

While a very different circumstance, the pull between &quot;I write code in order to express myself&quot; and being an &quot;artist&quot; vs. &quot;useful&quot; and the drudgery of maintenance reminds me of famous rubyist _why and why he stopped doing stuff in the community.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashingmagazine.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;05&#x2F;why-a-tale-of-a-post-modern-genius&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smashingmagazine.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;05&#x2F;why-a-tale-of-a-pos...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kev.town&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;30&#x2F;why-did-why-the-lucky-stiff-quit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kev.town&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;30&#x2F;why-did-why-the-lucky-stiff-quit...</a>

nevermind : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCDDG9vOcmgwlslJJpCWjqOg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCDDG9vOcmgwlslJJpCWjqOg</a>

<pre><code> Recently I published videos in Italian language explaining technological concepts to the general public
</code></pre>
where are the videos ? I can&#x27;t find them

I think you&#x27;ve been a role model in how to build and maintain a popular software project while keeping the spirit of FOSS and promoting a positive community around it. I look forward to seeing what you get up to next.

Honestly this change is great for Salvatore. Hope they find another bright idea and inspire the programming community! All the best!

Moved the blog in a more decent server :D Faster now. But DNS propagation will take some time. Yet most of the new requests will go in the new server so also the old one will be faster.

Building a thing is fun, maintain not. Especially if it is a tool, a tool for a specific problem and it solved it. But people want more and more functionality. Then you work on things you never wanted to do.You take the exit, i can fully understand it.

redis is really a joy to work with. truly, thank you.

&gt; In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer.

“I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer.”

Thank you very much for all your time and effort in starting and shepherding this very important project (and also in finding a great home to continue the legacy).Redis was (and continues to be a very integral) part of my startup&#x27;s stack. We&#x27;ve also extended the redis protocol for all sorts of custom hacks.I will miss your humility and patience in communicating the roadmap, technicalities and all around community work. 
A great all-round example for all of us to follow.Thanks so much - and eagerly looking forward to your next set of projects!

thanks to @antirez, for the elegant data structures in redis. literally, cs concepts transferred to practicality, when I learned redis

I know at least one software that was complete - hasn&#x27;tbeen updated in a long time and I still useit. It&#x27;s Winamp.

I think video games fit in the area of &#x27;completed software&#x27;. Most video games today rarely see updates a few years after they&#x27;re released. And older video games were on read only mediums, so you would hope whatever you release is very stable and feature complete.

It&#x27;s long past due that we should move to software which isn&#x27;t maintained - because there&#x27;s nothing to do. Adding features could be done either by writing a new one - because the requests don&#x27;t really fit the meaning of old one, the creators saw that and rejected; fixing bugs - yes, fixing bugs may remain, but are there many bugs in, say, TEX code?We don&#x27;t yet know how to write a completed software well - the one which isn&#x27;t updated on Github for years yet nobody calls it stale or outdated.

Absolutely love your work @antirez. Also appreciate your blog.Using Redis to handle greylisting on a custom Node.js backed email forwarding service:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;forwardemail&#x2F;free-email-forwarding&#x2F;blob&#x2F;08a6278f866a441e4906af249650d86b54fb9ed6&#x2F;index.js#L588-L592" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;forwardemail&#x2F;free-email-forwarding&#x2F;blob&#x2F;0...</a>Also using it for job scheduling (with clustering support on top of Bull):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;forwardemail&#x2F;forwardemail.net&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;bull.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;forwardemail&#x2F;forwardemail.net&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master...</a>So many things you can do with Redis :tada:

I first met antirez during the Engine Yard Hamming Distance contest. Does anyone else remember that? DJB, and his team, won it. It was a lot of fun to participate.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oldblog.antirez.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;some-math-about-the-engineyard-contest.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oldblog.antirez.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;some-math-about-the-engineya...</a>I wish companies would have contests such as this more often. I think it would be a great way to find and hire really good people.

Redis is one of the best pieces of software of the last 10 years, thank you so much for creating it and maintaining it! It has been incredibly useful for me and thousands (millions?) of developers.

When some software I was responsible for started melting down under a load 10x bigger than it could handle, I was able to fix it by doing an emergency rewrite of the data storage part using Redis with Lua scripting. This was back when that feature was still experimental, so I was using unstable tarballs in production -- and yet everything worked perfectly! The emergency was fixed in a single long day. It was a miracle.Thanks for all the great things you&#x27;ve done with Redis! &quot;Beautiful&quot; describes it well.

There are only a few pieces of infrastructure that I haven&#x27;t found myself cursing at, redis and haproxy are among them. They both are the closest to set-it-and-forget-it I have worked with. No doubt the leadership of Antirez played some part in that. I hope the project can continue to reach the bar he set.

As someone who loves programming and dreads most of project management (and being anywhere close to a limelight nowadays), I understand.Redis is an awesome piece of software and who knows, maybe this&#x27;ll free antirez to create another awesome tool.

I&#x27;ve made a little bit of money thanks to Redis [0]. All I did was build integration for Redis on cPanel. So that speaks to the great quality brand of Redis.Thank you and Godspeed![0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unixy.net&#x2F;redis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unixy.net&#x2F;redis</a>

&gt; In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer.words of wisdom right there

One of them was LLOOGG: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;antirez&#x2F;lloogg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;antirez&#x2F;lloogg</a>, which used to be at lloogg.com but it seems like the domain was not renewed.I remember using it on my personal website long before I had even heard of Redis, it was a nice analytics tool for small sites with little traffic.

Segnalo and Oknotizie. Segnalo was similar to delicious, Oknotizie similar to Reddit&#x2F;Digg. Later in order to create the first service, LLOOGG, I had to write Redis.

My co-founder and I had successfully launched two of the major web 2.0 services of the Italian web.What are these services?

&gt; I don’t like much what the underground programming world became in recent years,I find this to be a provocative statement. Does anyone know what he means?

&gt; In eleven years I hope I was able to provide a point of view that certain persons understood, about an alternative way to write software. I hope that such point of view will be taken into consideration in the evolution of Redis.To me this epitomises what Bill Gates meant when he said &quot;Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.&quot;.I just wish I had something to show for my last decade that had as much impact as Redis!

Coincidentally was reading an old discussion, few days ago, of Salvatore joining Redis labs fulltime from Pivotal labs. The discussion can be found here [0][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9890824" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9890824</a>

It&#x27;s been pretty cool to see that grow. I recall chatting with antirez about it on IRC ages ago when he was still working on the initial idea.

Congrats and thank you, Salvatore (@antirez), for producing such a beautiful, powerful, useful and important piece of software... and for articulating and demonstrating such passionate commitment to a personal vision that is so very rare, valuable, and inspiring... and for your responsible stewardship of its maintainance even when it came at the cost of your personal preferences. You&#x27;re a class act, and I have no doubt you&#x27;ll be successful with whatever comes next. Hats off for doing it right! Bravo!

My thought here. I&#x27;m not exactly a disinterested party because I built my own key value store company (possibly the wrong way but that&#x27;s a different story).I have a huge respect for Redis, and Antirez, but I have to say my respect doesn&#x27;t include RedisLabs. They&#x27;re the ones who started a commercial endevour to capitalize on Redis initially without Antirez, and then later offered him a position. They&#x27;re the ones that Kyle@Jepsen says is making claims about ACID, not Antirez. I always heard that Clustering was a feature Antirez was very reluctant about.I hope Redis is, fundamentally, taken away from RedisLabs.Antirez, you say you want to express through code and open source, and I can&#x27;t square that with your association with RedisLabs. You&#x27;ve been taking their money for quite a few years now to allow them to put up a billboard saying &quot;the home of redis&quot;.I&#x27;m going to stop right there. I&#x27;ve cut my own path through the wild jungle that&#x27;s Open Source, and it&#x27;s not yours, and I respect the years you put in to make the product with your vision. I&#x27;m sure there are some other first coders of foundational databases on this list, but it&#x27;s a small club.As an employee of RedisLabs, I don&#x27;t think you are free to say what you&#x27;d like to say, I hope you follow whatever path does allow you to freely express in the future.Good luck always.

What a beautiful conclusion for him on such a beautiful project. This man clearly loves the art of programming... so much, that he would give up power, just to pursue it again.Thanks for the wonderful blog posts (over the years) and products.

Thank you for your amazing work. Redis has been by far the most dependable component of my tech stack and it&#x27;s opened up a whole new way of thinking about data.Best of luck in your future endeavors!

Thank you, @antirez! I have a live stock market site that heavily relies on redis for streaming data, tracking leaderboards, and message passing. It would have been difficult without Redis. You really affected my life. Big hug to you, Salvatore! I hope you find your next inspiration, and bless us with your next masterpiece. :)

We love redis. Thanks for the creating and contributing so long. Good luck @antirez.

a very nice interview (in Italian) published last May:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GgT6rXytKds" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GgT6rXytKds</a>Towards the end he anticipates what is now public.

The End of the Redis Adventure