WAIT synchronous replication for Redis Redis unstable has a new command called “WAIT”. Such a simple name, is indeed the incarnation of a simple feature consisting of less than 200 lines of code, but providing an interesting way to change the default behavior of Redis replication. The feature was extremely easy to implement because of previous

Software Economics Everything large companies do to fund software projects is wrong. Large capital investments and a misguided attempt to separate ‘software’ from ‘business’ leads to poor requirements management, information arbitrage, and a general lack of diligence around budgets.

Blog lost and recovered in 30 minutes Yesterday I lost all my blog data in a rather funny way. When I installed this new blog engine, that is basically a Lamer News slightly modified to serve as a blog, I spinned a Redis instance manually with persistence disabled just to see if it was working and test

The fight against sexism is not a free pass Today Joyent wrote a blog post in the company blog about an issue that started with this pull request in the libuv project: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538615 Basically the developer Ben Noordhuis rejected a pull request involving a change in the documentation to use gender-neutral form instead of “him”. Joyent replied with this incredible

No More Rock Stars Real rockstars can be assholes. That may be annoying but we tolerate it because we prioritise their art over their behaviour. This should not be the case with rock star developers. It’s time to say goodbye to the notion that they produce good code or help our industry in any way.

Finally Redis collections are iterable Redis API for data access is usually limited, but very direct and straightforward. It is limited because it only allows to access data in a natural way, that is, in a data structure obvious way. Sorted sets are easy to access by score ranges, while hashes by field name, and so

New Redis Cluster meta-data handling This blog post describes the new algorithm used in Redis Cluster in order to propagate and update metadata, that is hopefully significantly safer than the previous algorithm used. The Redis Cluster specification was not yet updated, as I’m rewriting it from scratch, so this blog post serves as a first

English has been my pain for 15 years Paul Graham managed to put a very important question, the one of the English language as a requirement for IT workers, in the attention zone of news sites and software developers [1]. It was a controversial matter as he referred to “foreign accents” and the internet is full of people

Twilio incident and Redis Twilio just released a post mortem about an incident that caused issues with the billing system: http://www.twilio.com/blog/2013/07/billing-incident-post-mortem.html The problem was about a Redis server, since Twilio is using Redis to store the in-flight account balances, in a master-slaves setup, with multiple slaves in different data centers for obvious availability and data safety

San Francisco Yesterday night I returned back home after a short trip in San Francisco. Before memory fades out and while my feelings are crisp enough, I’m writing a short report of the trip. The point of view is that of a south European programmer exposed for a few days to what