antirez
antirez.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez), creator of Redis, writes about systems programming, Redis design, and software development.
What HN saysCommenters recommend it as worth reading alongside other individual blogs, and note its minimalist monospaced design.
456HN people shared it
280linked it in comments
305stories submitted
35Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Tcl the Misunderstood (2006)29 people · 686 points · first shared 2007 · 108 comments on HN
- 2Writing system software: code comments22 people · 381 points · first shared 2018 · 80 comments on HN
- 3On Redis master-slave terminology17 people · 376 points · first shared 2018 · 141 comments on HN
- 4Redis new data structure: the HyperLogLog16 people · 429 points · first shared 2014 · 66 comments on HN
- 5A few things about Redis security15 people · 62 points · first shared 2015 · 30 comments on HN
- 6Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity14 people · 818 points · first shared 2017 · 312 comments on HN
- 7Redis will remain BSD licensed14 people · 511 points · first shared 2018 · 197 comments on HN
- 8The End of the Redis Adventure12 people · 2.3K points · first shared 2020 · 294 comments on HN
- 9Don't fall into the anti-AI hype11 people · 29 points · first shared 2026 · 2 comments on HN
- 10Redis persistence demystified11 people · 7 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 11English has been my pain for 15 years10 people · 914 points · first shared 2013 · 300 comments on HN
- 12An update about Redis developments in 201910 people · 376 points · first shared 2019 · 88 comments on HN
- 13Homepage10 people · first shared 2007
- 14Redis Virtual Memory: the story and the code8 people · 118 points · first shared 2010 · 24 comments on HN
- 15Writing an editor in less than 1000 lines of code, just for fun7 people · 537 points · first shared 2016 · 139 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
throwaway_pdp09 · 2020-05-08
A thing about these fast, static and minimalist websites (which I love) is that they use a monospaced font (which I don't love) instead of proportional, which I find easier to read. See http://antirez.com/ as another ecxample
It's not a criticism but an observation that giving up on so much modern junk seems to mean discarding something I consider good; better fonts.
Not intended to be provocative, just a note.
pupdogg · 2019-02-20
The good thing is that you have a direct line of communication with the developer himself, @antirez on this portal or GitHub. From what I know, @antirez calls the shots on what gets implemented in Redis core...NOT Redis Labs. After reading several technical/non-technical posts at http://antirez.com, I can confidently say that his decisions are always sound and justifiable! We love you @antirez!
a_c · 2018-06-17
Would love to learn more about Erlang. Does anyone have any recommendation on blogs about Erlang, perhaps something similar to http://antirez.com ?
forgotpwtomain · 2017-03-12
Not updated on a daily basis, but always worth reading:
http://antirez.com/
https://danluu.com/
http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/
https://rachelbythebay.com/
therepanic · 2026-07-22
I recommend reading this first to understand the author's point of view: https://antirez.com/news/169
JLO64 · 2026-06-05
Possibly, but the array type code was implemented using GPT/Claude models before DS4 was a thing. I really recommend this write up on how he used LLMs which I think is a more sane/safe way to code with them vs the YOLOing even I'm subject to unfortunately...
https://antirez.com/news/164
bdangubic · 2026-01-24
As I wrote “ The rewards are worth it.” perhaps I should have added “to me.” I would invest even more time as for me it is an insane multiplier and I have been coding for 29 years “by hand” before LLMs.
I see evidence everywhere - there are many influential people in our professional writing/showing/… (e.g. https://antirez.com/news/158) the benefits and that personally made me make a significant investment to learn/setup/… I took it as a challenge, if other people can make them into a huge multiplier I was gonna be “with them” vs naysayers
colin_jack · 2026-01-19
This might be worth a read, just as its from a trusted source and is more grounded: https://antirez.com/news/158
Okkef · 2025-12-23
Armin Ronacher's blog (of flask/jinja fame) https://lucumr.pocoo.org/
Antirez' blog (of Redis fame) https://antirez.com/
Simon Willison's blog (about AI) https://simonwillison.net/
kragen · 2025-09-05
That's great! What's a service hot core? Which agents are you finding most useful, and what's the best way to take advantage of them? I was recently surprised to see Antirez recommend copying and pasting code back and forth to a "frontier model" instead of using agents: https://antirez.com/news/154
epolanski · 2025-07-29
Apologies, but from antirez[1] to many other brilliant 1000x developers advocate for LLMs speeding up the process.
I can see the impact on my own input both in quantity and quality (LLMs can come up with ideas I would not come up to, and are very useful for tinkering and quickly testing different solutions).
As any tool it is up to the user to make the best out of it and understand the limits.
At this point it is clear that naysayers:
1) either don't understand our job
2) or haven't given AI tools the proper stress testing in different conditions
3) or are luddites being defensive about the "old" world
[1] https://www.antirez.com/news/154
square_usual · 2025-06-12
There's many examples of exactly what you're asking for, such as Kenton Varda's Cloudlfare oauth provider [1] and Simon Willison's tools [2]. I see a new blog post like this with detailed explanations of what they did pretty frequently, like Steve Klabnik's recent post [3], which while it isn't as detailed has a lot of very concrete facts. There's even more blog posts from prominent devs like antirez who talk about other things they're doing with AI like rubber ducking [4], if you're curious about how some people who say "I used Sonnet last week and it was great" are working, because not everyone uses it to write code - I personally don't because I care a lot about code style.
[1]: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/
[2]: https://tools.simonwillison.net/
[3]: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-tale-of-two-claudes/
[4]: https://antirez.com/news/153
theturtletalks · 2025-05-01
When Antirez left Redis, he wrote an amazing blog post I go back to often [0]. In there he said:
"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."
I'm glad Antirez was seeing his art losing it's beauty and now, is reclaiming it!
0. https://antirez.com/news/133
cjk · 2024-08-22
Salvatore Sanfilippo (author of Redis and Redlock) wrote a response to Martin Kleppmann's analysis that is worth a read (though it is a bit dense and hard to follow at times): http://antirez.com/news/101
I think I agree with Kleppmann's analysis, though.
e12e · 2024-01-09
The other post referred to, but not linked, as best I can make out on mobile:
http://antirez.com/news/140
bajsejohannes · 2023-09-22
I haven't read about hecto (yet), but I can thoroughly recommend the one about kilo, which is linked in the first paragraph of that article http://antirez.com/news/108 . Or even just reading the C code. It's achieving a lot with few lines and no dependencies (outside of the OS, that is)
gen220 · 2023-07-07
If you're curious to read a well-earned take on comments: http://antirez.com/news/124.
Inline comments are a reflection on the authors' abilities to write good comments. They can be kinda useless, actually-bad, or really helpful.
One canonical example of a "good comment" is explaining why a strange or not-the-least-complex approach was taken to implementing a certain solution. The code is like chesterton's fence, and the comment is a post explaining why it's there. That way, future readers can better assess for themselves whether it's worth their time trying to tear down the fence.
antirez · 2022-11-26
Many of us are programmers. Some of us are also trying to be writers. Trust me: writing is like programming. Reading code is very useful to become a better programmer, but you learn programming mostly by writing code. Similarly you mostly learn how to write prose by writing prose, tons of it. Reading is especially useful if you identify certain books that are very high in style (for me one of such books was "Vite di uomini non illustri" by Giuseppe Pontiggia), for your taste at least, for what you beleive the best writing is. You read these books many times, to understand what's going on, what are the patterns, how to do the same magic. As a casual reader you can read 200 books every year and yet remain a terrible writer.
EDIT: more about that on my blog if you care -> http://antirez.com/news/136
TheAceOfHearts · 2022-11-23
Antirez, the creator of Redis, has a few great ones in his blog. One that comes to mind is "Writing system software: code comments." [0]. Previously discussed on HN [1].
[0] http://antirez.com/news/124
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157047
wernsey · 2022-10-14
Yes, in Tcl everything is basically a string, but has Lisp-like recursive structures: An expression like `
{foo
{bar baz}}` evaluates to the string "foo
{bar baz}" at first, but then that might be split into two strings "foo" and "bar baz" by the interpreter.
I recall Tcl being described as a Lisp without the parenthesis many years ago, which I still think is somewhat apt.
Antirez' article "Tcl the Misunderstood" [0] is well worth a read if you want to know more.
He also has an interpreter, Picol [1], in 500 lines of C code that is very easy to read and to understand.
[0] http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html
[1] http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/picol.html
vishnu_ks · 2022-01-01
A couple of my favorite technical blogs
- https://openai.com/blog/
- https://ai.googleblog.com
- http://antirez.com/
- https://research.facebook.com/blog/
- https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing
- https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/
- https://jvns.ca/
- https://www.johndcook.com/blog
- http://feross.org/
- https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/
- https://blog.andrewcantino.com/
- https://nickcraver.com/blog/
- https://blog.codinghorror.com
I have been also building an engineering blog aggregator called https://diff.blog to make it super easy to disover and follow blogs. Would love if you folks can give it a try :)
codethief · 2021-12-24
My favorite article of all time about code comments: http://antirez.com/news/124
I regularly recommend it to colleagues who make the bold claim that "No one needs comments. Good source code can and should document itself". The article covers pretty much all the types of comments and rules discussed in the OP and others not mentioned there.
pmarin · 2021-11-08
My favorite implementations are partcl[1] (600 lines) and Picol[2] (500 lines by Salvatore Sanfilippo).
[1] https://github.com/zserge/partcl
[2] http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/picol.html
truetraveller · 2021-10-19
Great read by the author of Redis. Here's an excerpt:
"Many believe that comments are useless if the code is solid enough. The idea is that when everything is well designed, the code itself documents what the code is doing, hence code comments are superfluous. I disagree with that vision"
See http://antirez.com/news/124
throwdbaaway · 2021-07-18
My observations after reading https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14718:
- Shyouhei Urabe did a marvelous job of resisting pressure from several well-known developers representing multiple high profile ruby companies/projects.
- Everyone eventually came to their senses in https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14718#note-89, and concluded that the best way forward is to use glibc with MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2.
My personal feeling is that while the "Jemalloc FTW" section in http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/everything-about-redis-24.html might have been correct back in the jemalloc 3.x days, a lot has changed on both jemalloc and glibc since then. Furthermore, there is also musl in the equation these days.
throwaway81523 · 2021-07-02
Security mindset: read the book Security Engineering (it is online), less for specific technical info than for the many war stories etc. which will help you guard against vulnerabilities and unforeseen consequences.
Basics of cryptography: there are many dumb errors to avoid.
Antirez's general advice about "10x programmers" is good: http://antirez.com/news/112
Thorough (not just basic) knowledge of SQL, if you don't count that as a language. The sqlite.org "technical and design documents" about sqlite's virtual machine and its query planner are well worth reading, and apply to other databases as well. ORM's are less important than SQL, and are usually language specific as someone mentioned.
Reasonable clue about socket programming, even if you're doing everything with libraries that wrap the details.
Comfort using debugging and profiling tools.
Lots of other stuff, I'm sure.
bigiain · 2021-06-24
From antirez the guy who wrote redis's blog:
'The Redis security model is: “it’s totally insecure to let untrusted clients access the system, please protect it from the outside world yourself”.' -- http://antirez.com/news/96
That blog post also helpfully shows how to write you own key into .ssh/authorized_keys to you can log in as the redis user over ssh. From there use your favourite lunar priv escalation bug to p0wn the box completely. (Or just run your cryptominer as the redis user...)
Note: that's about 5 years old now...
giu · 2020-09-04
Just want to add and let people know that antirez (creator of Redis) writes so many insightful code comments that you almost always learn something new when you go through his projects.
He has also written an article on how he writes the code comments [0]; I've been using Design, Why, and Teacher comments a lot in my last projects and they have been very helpful, especially if you come back to the project after a long time or introduce a coworker to the code base.
[0] http://antirez.com/news/124
_wldu · 2020-06-30
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.
http://oldblog.antirez.com/post/some-math-about-the-engineyard-contest…
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.
stunt · 2020-06-30
He shared some of his struggles a while ago:
http://antirez.com/news/129
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's sensible that you don't want to make plans about the rest of your time right now.
Cheers