About
Salvatore Sanfilippo (known online as antirez) is an Italian software developer, open-source pioneer, and writer based near Mount Etna in Sicily.
He is the creator and original author of Redis, the open-source in-memory data structure store that powers much of the modern web. Beginning in 2009, he built and led Redis development for over a decade. He also invented the Idle Scan port scanning technique and created the network security tool hping, with a career spanning systems programming, network protocols, and distributed computing.
After stepping down from Redis in 2020 to focus on writing fiction (publishing the sci-fi novel Wohpe), he returned to the Redis project in late 2024 to help guide its community governance and AGPL licensing transition. He also actively explores vector search (Vector Sets / HNSW) and local LLM inference with projects like DwarfStar. On his blog antirez.com, he regularly shares deep, poetic reflections on AI assisted coding, software complexity, system design, and open-source stewardship.
You can also find Salvatore Sanfilippo on:
- Website: https://antirez.com
- Twitter: @antirez
- GitHub: antirez
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@antirez
Articles
- The real AI risk is inside the labs
- Being Linux Torvalds
- Not just development, distribution of software may change as well
- Control the ideas, not the code
- A new era for software testing
- Distributing LLM inference in DwarfStar
- Alternatives for the EDIT tool of LLM agents
- A few words on DS4
- Redis array type: short story of a long development
- AI cybersecurity is not proof of work
- GNU and the AI reimplementations
- Redis patterns for coding
- Implementing a clear room Z80 / ZX Spectrum emulator with Claude Code
- Automatic programming
- Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
- Reflections on AI at the end of 2025
- Scaling HNSWs
- AI is different
- Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update)
- Human coders are still better than LLMs
- What I learned during the license switch
- Redis is open source again
- Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
- Vector Sets are part of Redis
- AI is useless, but it is our best bet for the future
- Big LLMs weights are a piece of history
- Reasoning models are just LLMs
- We are destroying software
- From where I left
- Playing audio files in a Pi Pico without a DAC
- First Token Cutoff LLM sampling
- Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear
- LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024
- The origins of the Idle Scan
- In defense of linked lists
- Scrivendo Wohpe
- Writing Wohpe
- Programming and Writing
- The open source paradox
- The end of the Redis adventure
- Redis 6.0.0 GA is out!
- Redis 6 RC1 is out today
- Client side caching in Redis 6
- The struggles of an open source maintainer
- Redis streams as a pure data structure
- Gopher: a present for Redis
- An update about Redis developments in 2019
- Why RESP3 will be the only protocol supported by Redis 6
- Writing system software: code comments.
- LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command
- On Redis master-slave terminology
- Redis is not "open core"
- Redis will remain BSD licensed
- Redis Lua scripting: several security vulnerabilities fixed
- Clarifications on the Incapsula Redis security report
- A short tale of a read overflow
- An update on Redis Streams development
- Redis PSYNC2 bug post mortem
- Streams: a new general purpose data structure in Redis.
- Doing the FizzleFade effect using a Feistel network
- The mythical 10x programmer
- Redis on the Raspberry Pi: adventures in unaligned lands
- The first release candidate of Redis 4.0 is out
- Random notes on improving the Redis LRU algorithm
- Writing an editor in less than 1000 lines of code, just for fun
- Programmers are not different, they need simple UIs.
- Redis Loadable Modules System
- Three ideas about text messages
- Redis 3.2.0 is out!
- 100 more of those BITFIELDs
- The binary search of distributed programming
- Is Redlock safe?
- Disque 1.0 RC1 is out!
- Generating unique IDs: an easy and reliable way
- 6 years of commit visualized
- Recent improvements to Redis Lua scripting
- A few things about Redis security
- Moving the Redis community on Reddit
- Clarifications about Redis and Memcached
- Lazy Redis is better Redis
- About Redis Sets memory efficiency
- Thanks Pivotal, Hello Redis Labs
- Commit messages are not titles
- Plans for Redis 3.2
- Adventures in message queues
- Redis Conference 2015
- Side projects
- Why we don’t have benchmarks comparing Redis with other DBs
- Redis latency spikes and the Linux kernel: a few more details
- Redis latency spikes and the 99th percentile
- This is why I can’t have conversations using Twitter
- Diskless replication: a few design notes.
- A few arguments about Redis Sentinel properties and fail scenarios.
- Redis cluster, no longer vaporware.
- Queues and databases
- A proposal for more reliable locks using Redis
- Using Heartbleed as a starting point
- Redis new data structure: the HyperLogLog
- Fascinating little programs
- What is performance?