A few days ago, Salvatore Sanfilippo, founder of Redis, announced on his personal blog (Antirez.com/) that he was ending his Redis journey!

The full text of the blog is at antirez.com/news/133

Salvatore Sanfilippo’s exit was not due to disappointment in Redis itself, but due to fatigue and weariness caused by the day-to-day maintenance of open source. Several of his colleagues will be responsible for the follow-up maintenance of Redis, while he plans to step back and become a member of Redis lab to provide ideas and ideas for the future of Redis. Salvatore Sanfilippo says he doesn’t have any specific plans for his future, but will spend more time doing what he really wants to do, like writing tech blogs and making videos.

Salvatore Sanfilippo’s exit may not come as a surprise. A year ago, he wrote a blog post titled “The Struggle of Open Source Maintainers” (antirez.com/news/129).

In this article, he complains that while Redis is becoming popular, there is a negative side as well as a fun one. Such as these vexing questions:

  • Dealing with community feedback must take enough time, or you can only “pretend” that the project has no unresolved issues. Having a full-time staff for each subsystem of an open source project works, but is difficult to achieve.
  • After Redis became popular, more work shifted to looking at PR and issues. Some of them will do a better job than I do, but most of them are just average, solving a given problem.
  • Time pressure: Before Redis, I never had the experience of working every workday. It’s always one week, two weeks off, then another month, then two months off. Doing creative work requires recharging in order to gain new energy and ideas. But when I started receiving payments for my work at Redis, I forced myself to work on a regular schedule. It was a huge struggle for him to apply to the company to go back to his old mode of work because of the way the community worked.
  • Mental stress: Juggling a lot of work on the same project can be complicated. Where you used to change projects every six months, now you’re working on the same project for 10 years. Trying to retain creativity by deploying subprojects in Redis, Cluster, HyerLogLogs, a abandoned disk storage project, and now a fourth. Eventually, though, go back to the issue and PR page and do the same thing every day.
  • Fear: Daily fear of losing technical leadership to Redis, not because I don’t think I’ve done a good enough job designing and developing Redis, but because my approach is inconsistent with what most users want and what most IT people believe in software.
  • .

More on this article can be found in Open Source Maintainer’s Struggle

A lot of times, the creator of every open source project wants his work to be noticed, used, praised, and popular in the industry because it’s recognition of his work. But as Redis’s founders point out, the more popularity there is, the more demands there are for personalization, the more advice and enhanced PR that follow, and the friction and other problems that come with a product that can never be all people’s needs. The things I was playing with as I thought, slowly become less fun. As we write technical tutorials, some people like them and some don’t. It’s ok if you don’t like it, but with the growth of traffic, there are always some people who don’t like it will come and greet their families. Unfortunately do not know, otherwise also want to ask, foreign user also has such circumstance?

Is Redis still working when the founders stop playing?

This question is probably a lot of domestic developers will ask, so I’ll talk about it at the end. For an open source project like Redis, which has developed and developed a sound team management mechanism, the founder’s departure will not lead to his cessation of operation. This is different from many domestic open source projects. Mature open source projects like Redis have a large number of contributors, and their management and operation mode is very standardized, and the whole project will not collapse due to the departure of the founder. A prime example is the Spring community, as we know it, which has continued to thrive after the departure of its founder, Rod Johnson.

However, it is hard to say whether there will be any change in the future goal and direction of Redis. It completely depends on whether Salvatore Sanfilippo will continue to work hard in Redis Lab and whether the team will continue to support his opinions.

So what do you think of the departure of the Redis founder? If Redis were yours, would you be bored dealing with PR every day?

I write code to express myself! Please indicate the source. Welcome to pay attention to my official account: Program ape DD, for exclusive learning resources and daily dry goods push. If you are interested in my other topics, direct them to my personal blog: didispace.com.