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The End of the Redis Adventure

antirez.com

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Re: The End of the Redis Adventure

#191

Post by albertzeyer »

eric_b wrote: post #50

So they're moving to a new "community based", "light governance" 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'd expect - it doesn'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. T…

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 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life) only lists Django as an example with 2 BDFLs.

I was active in a smaller open source project (http://www.openlierox.net) 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.

Re: The End of the Redis Adventure

#192

Post by calpaterson »

derefr wrote: post #100
calpaterson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most important thing Antirez did, in my opinion, was to say "No" to things. No to new features that didn't make sense. Redis has had tremendous mission creep over the years. It started of course mostly as a volatile cache but I've now seen it also used as a message bus (in three different ways: BLPOP, PUB/SUB and Streams), for service discovery and as a general purpose database - something that Redis Labs (in m…

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. An…

Memcache also is about saying no to changing the architecture. That chosen architecture is similar to Redis Cluster -which is a change of architecture Redis did undertake.

I personally have not enjoyed all the strange and wonderful ways people have found to use Redis. Most of them are pretty fragile and (most dangerously) they often put all Redis uses in the same instance...with eviction turned on.

Re: The End of the Redis Adventure

#193

Post by alexchamberlain »

sph wrote: post #69
eric_b wrote: post #50

So they're moving to a new "community based", "light governance" 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'd expect - it doesn'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. T…

> 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's a dictator at the top that enforces a direction, a long term goal, and most importantly, says NO. Community base…

I think it's _just_ underrated; I think it'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.

Re: The End of the Redis Adventure

#194

Post by jp_sc »

starkruzr wrote: post #161
jp_sc wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is, but it's the kind of bigotry nowadays some people evangelize as good (by redefining racism), and what the twitter mob encourages.

"Racism" against white people in the US is completely devoid of systemic material consequence. Understanding definitions isn't about "mobs" or even ideology, it's about identifying what happens in incidents of racial bias and why those things happen.

What? We are not ants. Even if being racist to a person doesn't affect the "colony" still is being racist to that person.

And redefining a word so is "bad for everyone but X" doesn't make X innocent of doing it, it makes X guilty and a bully.

Also, the world is much bigger than the US.

Re: The End of the Redis Adventure

#195

Post by rglover »

antirez wrote: post #78

Ok, so many thank you here, thanks! It'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'll just do whatever every morning I want to do for a long time. Then maybe I'll find a new long term interest.

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

Re: The End of the Redis Adventure

#196

Post by samgranieri »

antirez wrote: post #78

Ok, so many thank you here, thanks! It'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'll just do whatever every morning I want to do for a long time. Then maybe I'll find a new long term interest.

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

Re: The End of the Redis Adventure

#197

Post by moomin »

1_player wrote: post #101
sitkack wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does FreeBSD have a BDFL? We don'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 C…

A (software) dictator is not necessarily good. But let me double down and say that a community cannot create a product as good as a single head at the top can do, for the single reason that people care only about their own garden, and integration needs someone to oversee and be responsible for all parts. There is no Steve Jobs in a democratic committee.

Here’s the thing: you need both. You need breadth AND focus. Breadth tends to come from the community and focus from a small number of individuals. But both are important.

Keeping both of those balls in the air at once is why being a software coordinator like this is such an exhausting job.

Re: The End of the Redis Adventure

#198

Post by rakoo »

antirez wrote: post #74
bactisme wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its website need a fast cache.

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's just a Ruby/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.

As a lover of Tcl (https://web.archive.org/web/20200615130120/http://antirez.co...), I'm surprised you're using ruby and not something Tcl-based with its built-in concurrency

Re: The End of the Redis Adventure

#199

Post by reggieband »

There are only a few pieces of infrastructure that I haven'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.

Re: The End of the Redis Adventure

#200

Post by akrain »

avmich wrote: post #152

It's long past due that we should move to software which isn't maintained - because there's nothing to do. Adding features could be done either by writing a new one - because the requests don'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't yet know how to write a completed software well - the one wh…

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