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antirez
@antirez
Reproducible bugs are candies.
Sicily, Italyinvece.orgJoined May 2007

antirez’s Tweets

I look at the web today. Not as a programmer, but as a user of broken sites that are unable to obey the most basic rules of navigation and usability, terribly slow despite the hardware progresses. And I can only think that modern frontend development has failed.
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Flipper Zero: The Thread. I received a Flipper Zero a few days ago, and since I'm idling here at my parent's house, for the holidays, I spent a lot of time playing with it. This thread captures my impressions about the device.
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"After 20 years as a software engineer, I've started commenting heavily. I used to comment sparingly. What made me change was a combination of reading the SQLite and Redis codebases" <3 false myth: code should be auto-explaining. Comments tell you about the state, not the code.
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A few words about the coronavirus for my dear followers. I'm in Italy right now and we are closed in our homes. We reached a very critical situation because, when it was time to act, the measures required looked too restrictive from the POV of western countries culture.
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A little known story about how , writing a comment in the newborn Hacker News, inspired the creation of Redis. At some point he wrote that in certain Lisp programs he wrote there was this pattern of just storing data in memory, logging on disk what it was stored in memory.
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I'll follow example and do ten episodes about the Redis source code, with similar spirit and goals.
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Why I started the “On Writing Software Well” series. m.signalvnoise.com/on-writing-sof
“Yet somehow arguments grounded in production code are rare. Few people seem willing to lift the curtain on such codebases, which is a damn shame. Because that’s where the real wisdom is buried. That’s where people have been forced to make actual trade-offs between competing patterns and practices. It’s those trade-offs and the circumstances around them that are valuable.” from “On Writing Software Well” by DHH.
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That was an awesome little experiment with my daughter Greta (6 yo). I explained her how Netflix transmits videos to our iPad with numbers, and the run length compression. Then I sent her numbers and in the end she had the same picture in the paper. Simple and effective to learn.
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I can't believe I'm receiving so much love and nice messages :) Even if a few sound like I'm dead LOL, it's a bit like attending your own funeral. Jokes apart, see you soon with more OSS code. I'll resume writing code ASAP.
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So now Google Assistant calls by voice a shop. Later shops will see this is useful for them as well to have AI to answer! We got two AIs talking. Optimization: handshake as bots and transmit data instead of talking. And we are back at modems and APIs again.
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So, yesterday LLMs where impossible to run without a super costly GPU and the most terrible stack ever produced in software (machine learning stacks are a terrible dependency hell). Then some hacker turns the (conceptually simple!) tensor operations in C: make; ./chat
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You should read latest book ASAP. Even because like most of the best books it is a short book, where every sentence counts. This book is radicalizing me in certain approaches I've.
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Github changing UI style is like when you are a small child and your father, that always used to have a beard, one day returns home fully shaven.
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Twitter is in desperate decline. And social media, in general, is in terrible shape. That's our fault, dear friends. To exchange messages and pictures is a trivial internet function, not unicorn worth: we killed IRC and NNTP, dismissed RSS, and now that's the world we get.
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Technologies like Copilot tell us two things: 1. How good AI is getting at reproducing and, in some way, abstracting patterns from a big corpus. GPT-3 and Copilot are stunning examples. 2. How much repetitive and empty of creativity most programming tasks are.
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News about the replacement of "slave" with "master" in Redis. First, together with other developers we agreed to pick "master-replica". This may not be the most exact terminology, but is surely very understandable by Redis users because such terminology was already used.
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I followed the initial parts of the golang online tutorial, and probably it’s one of the best languages for a newbie to approach programming. Low level enough to understand what’s really going on, high level enough to start without fighting with machine-level concepts.
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I believe that in 50 years from now, the complexity to all the levels of the tech stack that Google brought, in contraposition to the beauty and simplicity of the original Internet and web protocols, will be marked as one of the lowest points of technological design.
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I said that 's book (manning.com/books/deep-lea) is good. However I've to refine my opinion: it is outstanding, one of those rare gems where you can hear the author's voice. It's not just notions, it's a dump of fundamental ideas learned over years. That's how it went:
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Found a major design problem in Redis client side caching protocol (while writing the docs for it). Desperation. Walked 20 minutes thinking at it. Found the perfect design solution. Total Happiness. Will implement Monday.
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My father after taking a coffee: "Ok, I'm going to give Ubuntu a try". My mother: "Hey, isn't that a dating site?". Me: "No mom, it's all fine, it's a Linux distribution".
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Github sponsor program is the first thing that is actually working in this direction. If this will become mainstream, fixing OSS development economics could be the *most important* thing that Github have done for the world. My fingers are crossed.
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"For the third year in a row, Redis is the most loved database, meaning that proportionally more developers want to continue working with it than any other database." <3 Thanks StackOverflow users, very appreciated. Btw it's really great that we get this cool report every year.
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Ok I think I'm starting to seriously like this Twitch thing. 1. It's cool to stay with people while coding in some way, I felt less alone. 2. People see how fallible I'm, and it's great to put things in context. 3. I raise my standards because there is folks watching me. 4. Cool.
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I big thank you to all my Chinese followers for the big help their country is providing to Italy during such complex days.
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Replying to
Thanks to the monument to human intelligence that the Internet is, we fortunately have a chance to stay at home while not being alone. Have fun in your collective chats, create new things, write programs, read about stuff you don't know, chat with your family. We can do it ;-)
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Replying to
However I quickly forgot about this idea and continued with my stuff. At some point a year or so later I was facing with a very write heavy application, and at that point it made sense to try doing exactly that. Ideas exchange is a key part of building things.
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After years of Redis, reasoning in terms of SQL tables is not exactly funny for certain use cases. I'm using SQLite for my Telegram bot, great API, but the Redis data model is a lot more natural for many things. (Maybe I just happen to be like minded with the Redis author?)
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Today I took a pause from coding in order to blog. And in order to blog about Redis internals, I was reading code, and found two bugs because what I was writing in the blog post forced me to see things from a given POV.
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Hi friends! After 2 years of work my sci-fi novel (Italian version) is available on Amazon and in all the best Italians bookshops. The name of the novel is "Wohpe", and you can find it here: Amazon paperback: amzn.to/3ysX1X2 Kindle edition:
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I just merged SSL support into Redis unstable. This feature has an interesting story that I want to tell you. It was kinda of a "process" to reach the right solution, or at least a solution that looks a lot better than the alternatives.
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Replying to
After three decades of working with software, I'm also seeing myself learning faster using ChatGPT. So apparently it works even for us more seasoned programmers.
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Most people that will claim that for a matter of productivity sleep 4 hours at night have something in common: they don't *produce* anything like a programmer, a writer or a designer does for instance. They jump between meetings all day.
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Think at this: despite very limited reasoning capabilities, LLMs can pass various schools exams. This mainly means that those exams are very poorly conceived. They test a lot for memorisation and very little for reasoning and problem solving abilities.
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40h per week are already a lot. Add to them the overhead like commute and the fact you need to sleep 7/8 hours to stay healthy, and the time to do any other activity is gone. Advocating for more than that does not make any sense and is something already obvious in Europe.
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What’s so bizarre about this whole overwork debate is how utterly unambitious and banal my advocacy is! The fact that calling for a 40h work week counts as some sort of radicalism shows just how insane and extreme the entrepreneurial ideology has become.
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I started the “writing system software” video series thinking that nobody would care, so it’s very nice to see that there is interesting, and pushes me to continue. Thanks folks.
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More or less 18 years ago, a very big American company, having large operations in Rome because of deals with the Italian government, was in need for a service: they asked certain folks that decided to call me. The task at hand was to implement BGP on a system that lacked it.
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Please note that the Redis license remains BSD. A few people misunderstood the blog post. It applies only to modules developed at Redis Labs such as RediSearch. Modules developed by myself will be AGPL (that is, Disque). Redis core BSD as usually.
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Abstractions are a mean do dominate complexity, not a way to write code that is different and more convoluted to show you are smart. Every abstractions that does not pay itself the same weight in gold, is bad. This is a crucial concept that who came before left to us.
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Tempted to: join Google, gmail team. Fix the fact empty emails generate a draft. Leave the company the next day. Enjoy Gmail.
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It's a bit confusing to see IT workers changing position every 12 months to reach incredibly high salaries, now playing the role of victims of the layoffs. Both things are totally nuts: to jump from one place to another continuously and to be fired in the matter of hours.
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Redis Labs changes company name to just "Redis" and restates, in times when everybody is moving away even from AGPL, that the Redis OSS Project will remain BSD licensed. A personal thank you to the company for showing with facts what to be committed to OSS means.
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Redis Labs is now Redis (@Redisinc ), we are dropping the “Labs” from our company name, and making one #redis for any real-time data, anywhere!
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My experience: your kids become your main project and your work your side project. The rest is some sleep if you are lucky (like me, sleeping babies both of them). t.co/zWgZ06rBVd
This Tweet is unavailable.
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In programming there is always one point where the community splits in two, in one side people that appreciate very simple languages, and in the other people that are fascinated with the powerful languages full of abstractions.
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Replying to
First: the Flipper should put many hardware companies to shame. The user experience is *so* good. Everything works well at the first try. The Android app immediately connects with the device and updates the firmware. It can stream the screen in real time, access the file system.
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One of the simplest abstractions in programming is also the one that still shocks me, because of it's beauty, purity, composability: the function. With functions you start with simple things, and layer after layer the end result can be a world of any complexity.
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If you were on Twitter during their first years, you surely remember the server error page with the whale. Now the three FB properties are down, Telegram is lagged because everybody is chatting there and, incredibly, Twitter is here rocking. Things change.
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There is some hope for me, at 40 I write definitely better code I used to write a few years ago. IT ageism is probably not a very wise thing
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Replying to
There is memcached, a few Redis protocol-compatible clones and so forth. But it depends on what you use Redis for. For instance if your usage are queues there are a set of replacements, if you do caching others. Certain usages are hard to replace.
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If I had just a single request I could make to folks being sure to be listened, I would say: before each PR "merge" button, tell me "Merging this PR will make PR x, y, z no longer mergeable".
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Have you ever thought that remote work, or instead the contrary of working closely every day, are two equally legitimate ways of doing things and you should just do whatever you want and stop criticizing people that don't think alike?
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Hacker News 2021 edition: yes, it has flaws, but it remains one of the few places on the internet where I continue to read intelligent and informative content, where many arguments are not made by precooked concepts and ideas, but actually thought.
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Good Saturday! A crash course on IT marketing, because apparently very few people understand developers. We are gentle creatures mostly, and products should be advertised to us in a completely different way.
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Oh, and another thing about how biased IT is towards itself. People say "learn to write code, it's a superpower." You know what? Being able to write much better Italian prose *is* also a superpower. Programming is important, but in no way more important than other skills.
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11 years ago I was already worrying that Redis was too much complex. Being so worried saved the project from becoming something I would be ashamed of today.
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fixes memory leaks in Redis... the support for Sets is not for free, it is a bit more complex then other data types
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Security in 2018: a top kernel hacker posts a very informative update on the Meltdown/Spectre fixes status in the Linux kernel, and the HN thread has people complaining about the blog not being served via HTTPS.
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Yesterday I left my MacBook open on the table and my 4yo daughter was trying a new Redis command (translation) "RICEWITHOIL"
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Replying to
Don't believe that this is just a flu that is a bit more severe. In Italy 8% of people in intense care units are between 20 and 49 years old. In certain hospitals the ICUs are already too busy and doctors are left having to choose who will survive based on the chances they have.
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The worst thing that happened once Twitter became this shithole, is that whole communities formed over decades were destroyed in the process. Such communities were vital to certain processes (software development is one, but there are many).
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LOL it's always awesome when it happens: a guy in my Airbnb in Catania happens to be a full stack developer. Talking about Whatsapp end-to-end encryption and the sending of their IDs he told me that, and I told him I'm the Redis guy, and the reaction was very nice and fun.
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In other news next MacOS version codename will be “remind me tomorrow” so when you click that button it will actually install the selected update.
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Ok, with these numbers I think I'll proceed with the change, regardless of the problems it may create and my personal opinion. If it is a problem for half the Redis community, is a problem for me, regardless of all the other considerations.
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I'm a user of Redis, and I understand that. 1) Twitter pools are anonymous. 2) Changing the API / internals may create issues/compatibility problems for some time. I think that you should:
Show this poll
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I'm enrolling in the GitHub Sponsor program for my side projects (everything but Redis). I'll just donate what I receive back to other OSS because I'm sponsored by RedisLabs now, but I want to understand what effort is worth my work for users, and if this is a sustainable model.
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Replying to
Every task Copilot can do for you is a task that should NOT be part of modern programming, and a signal that our industry is broken and that programmers are the new blue collars.
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I'm stuck in this limbo: "MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015)". Don't want to upgrade to a super pricey macbook with terrible ports and faulty keyboards. At the same time don't have the guts to switch desktop OS right now. Fortunately this one still kinda works.
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Replying to
The battery is already charged when you get the device. The animations are great, the applications well designed and it never crashes despite the fact it is still beta code. A few selected coders and designers shows how much big companies suck at designing hardware and software.
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What a shame that the right post mortem FB should publish should be philosophical: what is the concentration limit of services under the same architecture? How much automation is too much? And instead we'll just read useless details about DNS and routing protocols.
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A serious note about this "open source software is broken because of cloud providers" thing. First and obvious: open source is not broken because the goal of OSS, historically, was not to make money, but to bring humanity forward.
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Wow, Redis supported the streaming of 70% of the live broadcast in China during the World Cup!
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During the opening match of the #WorldCup2018 , it is estimated that 70% of the live broadcast traffic in China went through #AlibabaCloud . Learn how Redis made this & countless interactive World Cup viewing experiences that emerged in China possible at int.alibabacloud.com/m/1000011326/
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