Introducing Redis: a fast key-value database

One of the many advantages of having remarkable friends is learning quite early on about their most ambitious and interesting projects. Today, I’m going to talk about Redis, one such project that my friend Salvatore “antirez” Sanfilippo started. Redis (REmote DIctionary Server) is a key-value database written in C. It can be used like memcached, in front of a traditional database, or on its own...

The Rise of the Functional Paradigm

In yesterday’s address to the Ruby community, Dave Thomas invited Rubyists to fork Ruby, to freely research and experiment with new and interesting features. If this process is successful, many of these features will inevitably see their way back into Ruby’s core, thus improving the language in leaps and bounds. And I feel he couldn’t have been any more right. In fact, the whole industry is...

Review of the screencast series The Ruby Object Model and Metaprogramming (episodes 1-3)

Even if you’re new to the Ruby community, you are unlikely not to have heard about the Pragmatic Programmers, who are well reputed for publishing great programming books. You may not have noticed that lately though, they’ve also been releasing several series of screencasts. Each episode lasts about half an hour and sells for a mere $5. This strategy will work well in their favor because screencasts are a...

Welcome to IBM, Damien Katz

It looks like the new year has started off on the right foot. I just learned that Damien Katz, the mastermind behind CouchDB, is now an IBM employee. Not only that, but he’s being hired specifically to work on CouchDB full time. This is great news, in his own words: All the code will be Apache licensed and donated to the Apache Software Foundation, with the plan CouchDB will eventually become an official...