Salvatore Sanfilippo, who writes online as antirez, is the Italian programmer who created Redis. He announced the project himself in March 2009 with the post “Redis, my new open source project,” promising that “Redis will be the target of my hacking sessions for the next years, I hope.” He kept that promise, leading Redis development for roughly a decade.
His own blog at antirez.com is a primary record of how he thinks about software. In posts such as his 2019 development update he explains design decisions in plain terms, for example why he chose not to add general I/O multithreading and why he favors “opportunistic development” guided by community feedback over rigid roadmaps.
Sanfilippo is known for a deliberately readable C codebase. He treated clarity of the source as a feature in its own right, arguing that simple, legible code is what lets a small project stay maintainable as it grows. That style, applied to Redis, helped many programmers learn how a real database is built by reading it.
Before Redis he was already known in systems and networking circles for the hping tool, a command-line TCP/IP packet assembler and analyzer used for network testing. The blend of low-level networking and a taste for small, sharp tools carried directly into the design of Redis.