Doing the FizzleFade effect using a Feistel network 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

The mythical 10x programmer 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 characterize the “normal

Redis on the Raspberry Pi adventures in unaligned lands 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 experiment in the

The first release candidate of Redis 40 is out 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

Scaling With Agility

Random notes on improving the Redis LRU algorithm 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

Writing an editor in less than 1000 lines of code just for fun 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: https://asciinema.org/a/90r2i9bq8po03nazhqtsifksb For the sentimentalists, keep reading… A

Is Agile Killing the Architect Has the rise of agile delvery killed off the role of the sofware architect in businesses, or is it still as relevent as it ever was?

Programmers are not different they need simple UIs 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 iterate again

Redis Loadable Modules System 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