VII · Modern builders
Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez)
1977–
Independent · Redis Ltd. (until 2020) · now back to Redis
Gave us
Redis (2009). The argument that a single-threaded in-memory data structure server, written in C, would beat sharded clusters at most things people actually wanted from a key-value store. He was right.
The story
Wrote Redis in his spare time to power a real-time analytics product nobody used. Open-sourced it because the analytics product wasn't working. Stepped down in 2020 to focus on writing fiction; came back to Redis in 2024 because no one else was going to keep adding the data types.
"Programming is the closest thing we have to magic. Don't ruin it with too many threads."
One more thing
Writes science fiction in his off-hours and once published a Game-of-Life implementation in 700 bytes for fun.