July 2017 – Edition # 71

Redis 4.0 GA is out! – Google Groups

What do you make of that number? What do you feel when I say four-dot-naught? Do you laugh? Do get into a screaming tantrum? None? Other? Wharevs. You’re probably as right/wrong about it as anyone else, me included first and foremost. But in the context of the Redis-verse and what has been happening in it during the last 18 (very powerful number by itself, Hai and much more) or so months, 4.0 has a very special meaning to everyone and me and you too, perhaps. To each his own though really (personally, I want 4.2 ;)).

A more obscure number, such as 59 for example, requires a meaning to make any sense. Meaning requires context, which in this case is still the Redis-verse and in place very close to 4.0 believe it or not. Strangely enough, with enough numbers you can actually provide a contextual meaning. There were 202 closed issues in the last 30 or so days, many thanks to the creator (60) squashing any and every critical threat while clearing the way for the his most imperfectly perfect newest born yet. But there’s also a new force to be reckoned with, a solid 59. Well, not exactly new, after all he’s been here from as far as anyone can remember, but definitely upgraded. I see this as a blessing.

There many more interesting numbers we can pick on, but let’s agree that these are just ideas and as such are subject to everyone’s personal and unique interpretation and focus on some real Redis stuff. Here’s 1 with everything that I didn’t get and got from someone who wrote a module that does a full text in Redis, but get this: it is multi-threaded (provided you use 4.0 and 0.19.1, naturally and respectively). It comes with a default of a 100 (a boring number, unless you choose read that as 4) threads in the pool, but everything’s deliciously tweekable. OSS, much like numbers, is what you choose to make out of it, meaning- and context-wise. To me it sounds like you can serious damage with that baby #BFG9000.

Numbers, and other frameworks such as version numbers and issues clodes, deadlines, likes/favorites/karma/stars, productivity metrics, my score on that dashboard and so forth, are very powerful and useful. Adopting a successful and proven one is if anything just plain common sense. But falling into a routine can be sloppery slip and a little change can go a long way, at least IMHO, just to make sure that you’re not a frog in a pot of boiling water. Take this newsletter for example and as an example this specific edition that you are reading now. I’ve gotten very positive feedback about the newsletter in the past, and the one common thing I had managed to distill from all the praise (thank you very much :)) is that it is my perspective, not the actual numbers/headers/content in it, that made it into what it was. It is the curator, not the curat-ee? I tried brushing this off, but after hearing it enough times (4 is a great number!) I started doubting myself and worrying whether I’m becoming a victim of my own huge rockstar-like success. So here’s personality, with contexts and content, in a different format and hopefully useful.

I don’t want to count the number of tweets/posts/gh issues/SO questions/press releases/HN discussions/you-name-it that I’ve processed to prepare this edition (or too scared to share that number anyway). But it is definitely more than 4 and way over 6379, for sure. Twitter, whatever you think of it, is just another thing, though it really makes me happy, seriously and honestly, to see stuff like

OH Amir Bitaraf Haghigh @amir_bitaraf

In love more with #redis 3.2 Geo API is awesome in matter of #performance

OH Ezra Edwards @ChaosChanges

Wow Redis is so useful…store what you need to store

OH Arian van Putten @ProgrammerDude

Redis has been the lowest maintenance piece of data storage in our infra… What troubles did you run in?

Alarm! Alarm! Alarm!

<- Matt Olson @carnivorous8008

Redis is great, it’s the machine it’s running on that’s the typical infrastructure rot story

False alarm.

There’s much more of that going on, and naturally a lot of other things. Some is just random noise, foreign languages, “#RedIs my nails are long http://instagram.foo/bar”. Sometimes these are trolls and mauds, other times you meet new friends. If you think master/slave is offending, it is you who’s thinking and that’s great and all but don’t assume I agree with you. Say what you want, I’ll listen, but let’s agree we can potentially disagree respectfully-like.

Oh, and I also overhead this one that I love too/two:

OH Matthew Vita @MatthewVita

In Redis’ Makefile “# Top level makefile, the real shit is at src/Makefile”

Gotta love comment gems like these

There’s a lot of comfort in that good ol’ template. Let’s try it again:

Four things to consider when using Redis in production (2 minutes to read)

Michael Herold @mherold said 4, perhaps for the first time, but quite possibly before.

Is the above just enough, too little or not even close? Should I make the description longer/shorter/add a poll? Is it a good/meh/wtf link?

Therefore I find these strangely calming. I really like them and keep coming back to them.

OH Katherine Bailey @katherinebailey

I’m using Redis for something for the first time in ages. I find it strangely calming.

OH Roman Peshkov @rpeshkov

Finally I’ve tried #redis. It’s awesome!

OH Steve Faulkner @southpolesteve

Where is your favorite place to store data and why is it redis?

Ok, enough of the rumors, here’s something I just heard. There another OSS Redis module that you should know of, called ReBloom, who’s quality and usefulness is only matched by its accompanying post. Because it is, after all a probabilistic data structure, there are a lot of numbers or not involved with it. If you react to it, give it a star/tweet/HN/open an issue/etc.

Otherly and deliciously related because 4 and modules (MODULES!) is also:

OH Marco Cecconi @sklivvz

Got inspired by @antirez this morning and I embedded a JavaScript interpreter in Redis because Cthulhu fhtagn

OH Marco Cecconi @sklivvz

Cthulhu, my #JavaScript module for #Redis is coming out fine! As a demo, I built a RPN calculator command: https://github.com/sklivvz/cthulhu

So Cthulhu and ReBloom are here, is that the future we’re already far into? Tends to jump on you, time and progress and all. Only the Godfather of Gloom could sing about the Future, but in my universe I know of several interesting futures that you can/don’t want to partake. There’s a new meetup in Barcelona (where they speak Spanish, like a the wife of a new/old someone that I knew/know), and two in Seattle that I know of. Definitely good times. Perhaps the best of times, maybe also the worst. Someone said something like that once, it isn’t mine, I just copy-paste. Dickens? Shakespeare? Were there any monkeys typing on MacBooks/typewriters involved? I have a MacBook, so I must be a monkey too, copy-pasting this randomly-generated here adding my own errors to the code while at, just like everyone else 🙂

You can probably smell a closure here, at the very least that of this edition. I hope for many more closures in the near/medium/long-term futures – more issues closed in the repo (only 1377 to go!), new modules released, more features maturing and being moved from experimental to defaults, new/not new people leaving/joining the community – I like it interesting, and numbers can keep it that way.

Last, but not by far the least, I’d like to mention the one true master of numbers, who rose from his long slumber (goddamn you stupid stupid script! Why does software break?) and continues to inspire us all with two sharp fangs dripping of wicked pangs, and is at the very least is and have long been in my top N alter egos list:

OH Count von Count @CountVonCount

One thousand three hundred thirty!

No numbers were harmed in the making of v4 in general and edition #71 in particular, which ends like this: