Salvatore Sanfilippo (or antirez) is stepping back as the Redis maintainer.
While I haven’t used Redis professionally, I do like the Redis Manifest. It was originally posted on his blog in 2011.
The half of the manifest is about Redis. Amazon people may see that as Redis’ tenets. But another half is, for me, it really sounds like his own manifesto.
5 - Code is like a poem; it’s not just something we write to reach some practical result. Sometimes people that are far from the Redis philosophy suggest using other code written by other authors (frequently in other languages) in order to implement something Redis currently lacks. But to us this is like if Shakespeare decided to end Enrico IV using the Paradiso from the Divina Commedia. Is using any external code a bad idea? Not at all. Like in “One Thousand and One Nights” smaller self contained stories are embedded in a bigger story, we’ll be happy to use beautiful self contained libraries when needed. At the same time, when writing the Redis story we’re trying to write smaller stories that will fit in to other code.
6 - We’re against complexity. We believe designing systems is a fight against complexity. We’ll accept to fight the complexity when it’s worthwhile but we’ll try hard to recognize when a small feature is not worth 1000s of lines of code. Most of the time the best way to fight complexity is by not creating it at all. Complexity is also a form of lock-in: code that is very hard to understand cannot be modified by users in an independent way regardless of the license. One of the main Redis goals is to remain understandable, enough for a single programmer to have a clear idea of how it works in detail just reading the source code for a couple of weeks.
Do you have your own manifesto? I don’t have. Maybe I should.