Salvatore Sanfilippo

Last updated

Salvatore Sanfilippo
Salvatore Sanfilippo.png
Sanfilippo at dotScale 2015
Born
Salvatore Sanfilippo

(1977-03-07) March 7, 1977 (age 48) [1]
Campobello di Licata, Sicily, Italy [1]
Other namesantirez
OccupationsComputer programmer, author [1]
Known forCreator of Redis, hping, Idle scan [2]
Website invece.org

Salvatore Sanfilippo (born 7 March 1977), [1] known online as "antirez", is an Italian computer programmer and author. [1] He is best known as the creator of the Redis in-memory database, which he developed and led for over a decade. [2] [3]

Contents

Sanfilippo is also the author of several other open-source projects, including the network security tools hping and the Idle scan discovery method. [2] In addition to his work in software, he has also published a science fiction novel. [4] [5] He has an active YouTube channel in English and Italian. [6]

Early Life and Career

Sanfilippo was born in Campobello di Licata, Sicily, on March 7, 1977. [1] He developed an early interest in programming and became active in the computer security field in the late 1990s. [7]

Career

Computer Security

While working in computer security, Sanfilippo developed and released several influential tools under the alias "antirez".

Redis

Sanfilippo began development on Redis in 2009. [9] The project's creation was motivated by his attempt to improve the scalability of his Italian startup, LLOOGG, a real-time web log analyzer. [9] After encountering issues with traditional database systems, he began prototyping an in-memory database that would become Redis. [7]

He open-sourced the project and served as its primary developer and Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) for 11 years. [3] [10] During this time, the project's development was sponsored by VMware (2010–2013), Pivotal Software (2013–2015), [9] and later Redis (formerly Redis Labs) (2015–2020). [3] Redis grew to become one of the most popular databases in the world, widely used for caching, message brokering, and as a primary database. [3]

On June 30, 2020, Sanfilippo announced he was stepping down as the maintainer of the Redis project, [11] citing a desire to pursue other projects and a dislike for the maintenance-focused phase of the project's life. [12] He passed leadership to Yossi Gottlieb and Oran Agra. [3]

In December 2024, Sanfilippo announced he was returning to Redis (the company) in the role of a "Redis evangelist". [13] [14] Following his return, he developed and implemented a new data structure for the database, the Vector Set, designed for vector similarity search. [15] [16]

Other Notable Projects

Sanfilippo is a prolific open-source developer. Some of his other well-known projects include:

Writing and Media

Sanfilippo is also a fiction author. His first science fiction novel, Wohpe, was published in Italy in 2022. An official English translation exists. [4] [5] [1]

Since 2024, he has maintained an active YouTube channel, where he publishes videos in Italian and English about programming, technology, retrocomputing, finance, and his projects. [6] This includes a complete course on programming in the C language. [22]

See Also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Salvatore Sanfilippo aka antirez". invece.org. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Salvatore Sanfilippo - O'Reilly". O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Thank You, Salvatore Sanfilippo". Redis. 30 June 2020. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  4. 1 2 "Wohpe - Salvatore Sanfilippo". Laurana Editore. Retrieved 10 November 2025.
  5. 1 2 "Wohpe by Salvatore Sanfilippo". Goodreads. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  6. 1 2 "Salvatore Sanfilippo - YouTube". YouTube. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  7. 1 2 "Salvatore Sanfilippo, the author of Redis: from Sicily with talent and passion". francofolini.com. 22 December 2014. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  8. ↑ Sanfilippo, Salvatore (18 December 1998). "new tcp scan method (announcement of idle scan)". Bugtraq mailing list. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  9. 1 2 3 "Documentation: History". Valkey.io. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  10. ↑ "Redis database creator Sanfilippo: Why I'm stepping down from the open-source project". ZDNET. 2 July 2020. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  11. ↑ Sanfilippo, Salvatore (30 June 2020). "The end of the Redis adventure". antirez.com (personal blog). Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  12. ↑ "Redis Founder Steps Back". I Programmer. 8 July 2020. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  13. ↑ "Redis Creator 'antirez' Returns: Can He Shift Momentum away from Valkey?". InfoQ. 21 December 2024. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  14. ↑ Sanfilippo, Salvatore (2 December 2024). "Redis, I'm back". antirez.com (personal blog). Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  15. ↑ Clark, Lindsay (10 April 2025). "Return of Redis creator bears fruit with vector set data type". The Register. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  16. ↑ Sanfilippo, Salvatore (14 April 2025). "Vector Sets are part of Redis". antirez.com (personal blog). Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  17. ↑ "antirez/kilo: A text editor in less than 1000 LOC". GitHub. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  18. ↑ "antirez/dump1090: Dump1090 is a simple Mode S decoder for RTLSDR devices". GitHub. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  19. ↑ "antirez/linenoise: A small self-contained alternative to readline and libedit". GitHub. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  20. ↑ "antirez/disque: Disque is a distributed message broker". GitHub. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  21. ↑ "Pivotal People—Salvatore Sanfilippo, Inventor of Redis". Tanzu - VMware Blogs. 17 July 2013. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  22. ↑ "C programming language course". YouTube. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.