Fresh Reads

For quite some time I’ve wanted to record a new video talking about code comments for my "writing system software" series on YouTube. However, after giving it some thought, I realized that the topic was better suited for a blog post, so here we are. In this post I analyze Redis…

The last few days have been quite intense. One of the arguments, about the dispute related to replacing or not the words used in Redis replication with different ones, was the following: is it worthwhile to do work that does not produce any technological result? As I was…

Today it happened again. A developer, that we’ll call Mark to avoid exposing his real name, read the Redis 5.0 RC5 change log, and was disappointed to see that Redis still uses the “master” and “slave” terminology in order to identify different roles in Redis replication. I said…

Human beings have a strong tendency to put new facts into pre-existing categories. This is useful to mentally and culturally classify similar events under the same logical umbrella, so when two days ago I clarified that the Redis core was still released under the vanilla BSD…

Today a page about the new Common Clause license in the Redis Labs web site was interpreted as if Redis itself switched license. This is not the case, Redis is, and will remain, BSD licensed. However in the era of [edit] uncontrollable spreading of information, my attempts to…

A bit more than one month ago I received an email from the Apple Information Security team. During an auditing the Apple team found a security issue in the Redis Lua subsystem, specifically in the cmsgpack library. The library is not part of Lua itself, it is an implementation…

A few days ago I started my day with my Twitter feed full of articles saying something like: “75% of Redis servers infected by malware”. The obvious misquote referred to a research by Incapsula where they found that 75% of the Redis instances left open on the internet, without…

[This blog post is also experimentally available on Medium: https://medium.com/antirez/a-short-tale-of-a-read-overflow-b9210d339cff] When a long running process crashes, it is pretty uncool. More so if the process happens to take a lot of state in memory. This is why I love web…

I saw multiple users asking me what is happening with Streams, when they’ll be ready for production uses, and in general what’s the ETA and the plan of the feature. This post will attempt to clarify a bit what comes next. To start, in this moment Streams are my main priority: I…

Four days ago a user posted a critical issue in the Redis Github repository. The problem was related to the new Redis 4.0 PSYNC2 replication protocol, and was very critical. PSYNC2 brings a number of good things to Redis replication, including the ability to resynchronize just…

Until a few months ago, for me streams were no more than an interesting and relatively straightforward concept in the context of messaging. After Kafka popularized the concept, I mostly investigated their usefulness in the case of Disque, a message queue that is now headed to be…

Today I read an interesting article about how the Wolfenstein 3D game implemented a fade effect using a Linear Feedback Shift Register. Every pixel of the screen is set red in a pseudo random way, till all the screen turns red (or other colors depending on the event happening in…

A 10x programmer is, in the mythology of programming, a programmer that can do ten times the work of another normal programmer, where for normal programmer we can imagine one good at doing its work, but without the magical abilities of the 10x programmer. Actually to better…

After 10 million of units sold, and practically an endless set of different applications and auxiliary devices, like sensors and displays, I think it’s deserved to say that the Raspberry Pi is not just a success, it also became one of the preferred platforms for programmers to…

It’s not yet stable but it’s soon to become, and comes with a long list of things that will make Redis more useful for we users: finally Redis 4.0 Release Candidate 1 is here, and is bold enough to call itself 4.0 instead of 3.4. For me semantic versioning is not a thing, what I…

Redis is often used for caching, in a setup where a fixed maximum memory to use is specified. When new data arrives, we need to make space by removing old data. The efficiency of Redis as a cache is related to how good decisions it makes about what data to evict: deleting data…

WARNING: Long pretty useless blog post. TLDR is that I wrote, just for fun, a text editor in less than 1000 lines of code that does not depend on ncurses and has support for syntax highlight and search feature. The code is here: http://github.com/antirez/kilo. Screencast here:…

I’m spending days trying to get a couple of APIs right. New APIs about modules, and a new Redis data type. I really mean it when I say *days*, just for the API. Writing drafts, starting the implementation shaping data structures and calls, and then restarting from scratch to…

It was a matter of time but it eventually happened. In the Redis 1.0 release notes, 7 years ago, I mentioned that one of the interesting features for the future was “loadable modules”. I was really interested in such a feature back then, but over the years I became more and more…

I’m aboard of a flight bringing me to San Francisco. Eventually I purchased the slowest internet connection of my life (well at least for a good reason), but for several hours I was without internet, as usually when I fly. I don’t mind staying disconnected for some time usually.…

It took more than expected, but finally we have it, Redis 3.2.0 stable is out with changes that may be useful to a big number of Redis users. At this point I covered the changes multiple time, but the big ones are: * The GEO API. Index whatever you want by latitude and…

Today Redis is 7 years old, so to commemorate the event a bit I passed the latest couple of days doing a fun coding marathon to implement a new crazy command called BITFIELD. The essence of this command is not new, it was proposed in the past by me and others, but never in a…

Yesterday night I was re-reading Redlock analysis Martin Kleppmann wrote (http://martin.kleppmann.com/2016/02/08/how-to-do-distributed-locking.html). At some point Martin wonders if there is some good way to generate monotonically increasing IDs with Redis. This apparently…

Martin Kleppmann, a distributed systems researcher, yesterday published an analysis of Redlock (http://redis.io/topics/distlock), that you can find here: http://martin.kleppmann.com/2016/02/08/how-to-do-distributed-locking.html Redlock is a client side distributed locking…