<antirez>

A few days ago, on Twitter (oh, dear Twitter: whatever happens I’ll be there as long as possible – if you care about people that put a lot of energy in creating it, think twice before leaving the platform). So, on Twitter, I was talking about a very bad implementation of linked lists written in Rust. From the tone of certain replies, I got the feeling that many people think linked lists are like a joke. A trivial data structure that is only good for coding interviews, otherwise totally useless. In a word: the bubble sort of data structures. I disagree, so I thought of writing this blog post full of all the things I love about linked lists.

(English translation of this post: http://antirez.com/news/136)

Dopo due anni di lavoro, finalmente, Wohpe, il mio primo libro di fantascienza, ma anche il mio primo scritto di prosa di questa lunghezza, è uscito nelle librerie fisiche italiane, su Amazon, e negli altri store digitali. Lo trovate qui: https://www.amazon.it/Wohpe-Salvatore-Sanfilippo/dp/B09XT6J3WX

Dicevo: il primo scritto di questa lunghezza. Ma posso considerarmi del tutto nuovo alla scrittura? Ho scritto per vent’anni in questo blog e in quelli passati che ho tenuto nel corso del tempo, e molto spesso ho usato Facebook per scrivere brevi racconti, frutto di fantasie o basati su fatti reali. Oltre a ciò, ho scritto di cose tecniche, specialmente riguardo la programmazione, per un tempo altrettanto lungo, e sono stato un lettore di racconti e di romanzi per tutto il corso della mia vita. E allora perché scrivere Wohpe è stato anche imparare a scrivere da zero?

(Traduzione italiana di questo post: http://antirez.com/news/137)

[Sorry for the form of this post. For the first time I wrote a post in two languages: Italian and English. So I went for the unusual path of writing it in Italian to start, translating it with Google Translate, and later I just scanned it to fix the biggest issues. At this point GT is so good you can get away with this process.]

After two years of work, finally, Wohpe, my first science fiction book, but also my first prose writing of this length, has been released in Italian physical bookstores, on Amazon, and in other digital stores. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.it/Wohpe-Salvatore-Sanfilippo/dp/B09XT6J3WX

One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and writing novels have many common traits and similar processes.

The most obvious parallel between the two activities is that in both of them you write something. Code is not prose written in a natural language, yet it has a set of fixed rules (a grammar), certain forms that most programmers will understand as natural and others that, while formally correct, will sound hard to grasp.

A new idea is insinuating in social networks and programming communities. It’s the proportionality between the money people give you for coding something, and the level of demand for quality they can claim to have about your work.

As somebody said, the best code is written when you are supposed to do something else [1]. Like a writer will do her best when writing that novel that, maybe, nobody will pay a single cent for, and not when doing copywriting work for a well known company, programmers are likely to spend more energies in their open source side projects than during office hours, while writing another piece of a project they feel stupid, boring, pointless. And, if the company is big enough, chances are it will be cancelled in six months anyway or retired one year after the big launch.

When I started the Redis project more than ten years ago I was in one of the most exciting moments of my career. My co-founder and I had successfully launched two of the major web 2.0 services of the Italian web. In order to make them scalable we had to invent many new concepts, that were already known in the field most of the times, but we didn’t know, nor we cared to check. Problem? Let’s figure out a solution. We wanted to solve problems but we wanted, even more, to have fun. This was the playful environment where Redis was born.

Finally Redis 6.0.0 stable is out. This time it was a relatively short cycle between the release of the first release candidate and the final release of a stable version. It took about four months, that is not a small amount of time, but is not a lot compared to our past records :)

So the big news are the ones announced before, but with some notable changes. The old stuff are: SSL, ACLs, RESP3, Client side caching, Threaded I/O, Diskless replication on replicas, Cluster support in Redis-benchmark and improved redis-cli cluster support, Disque in beta as a module of Redis, and the Redis Cluster Proxy (now at https://github.com/RedisLabs/redis-cluster-proxy).

So it happened again, a new Redis version reached the release candidate status, and in a few months it will hit the shelves of most supermarkets. I guess this is the most “enterprise” Redis version to date, and it’s funny since I took quite some time in order to understand what “enterprise” ever meant. I think it’s word I genuinely dislike, yet it has some meaning. Redis is now everywhere, and it is still considerably able to “scale down”: you can still download it, compile it in 30 seconds, and run it without any configuration to start hacking. But being everywhere also means being in environments where things like encryption and ACLs are a must, so Redis, inevitably, and more than thanks to me, I would say, in spite of my extreme drive for simplicity, adapted.

[Note: this post no longer describes the client side implementation in the final implementation of Redis 6, that changed significantly, see https://redis.io/topics/client-side-caching]

The New York Redis day was over, I get up at the hotel at 5:30, still pretty in sync with the Italian time zone and immediately went walking on the streets of Manhattan, completely in love with the landscape and the wonderful feeling of being just a number among millions of other numbers. Yet I was thinking at the Redis 6 release with the feeling that, what was probably the most important feature at all, the new version of the Redis protocol (RESP3), was going to have a very slow adoption curve, and for good reasons: wise people avoid switching tools without very good reasons. After all why I wanted to improve the protocol so badly? For two reasons mainly, to provide clients with more semantical replies, and in order to open to new features that were hard to implement with the old protocol; one feature in particular was the most important to me: client side caching.

Months ago the maintainer of an OSS project in the sphere of system software, with quite a big and active community, wrote me an email saying that he struggles to continue maintaining his project after so many years, because of how much psychologically taxing such effort is. He was looking for advices from me, I’m not sure to be in the position of giving advices, however I told him I would write a blog post about what I think about the matter. Several weeks passed, and multiple times I started writing such post and stopped, because I didn’t had the time to process the ideas for enough time. Now I think I was able to analyze myself to find answers inside my own weakness, struggles, and desire of freedom, that inevitably invades the human minds when they do some task, that also has some negative aspect, for a prolonged amount of time. Maintaining an open source project is also a lot of joy and fun and these latest ten years of my professional life are surely memorable, even if not the absolute best (I had more fun during my startup times after all). However here I’ll focus on the negative side; simply make sure you don’t get the feeling it is just that, there is also a lot of good in it.