Story: Redis and its creator antirez
Thank you to the author of this post, and to the nice comments here :)
The story is well researched. There are a couple of errors and a few things to add maybe. I'll fill the gaps in this comment.1. After the TI99/4A, that is indeed the first machine I used, I started to write serious code in a ZX Spectrum. Then, a few years later, I received my first MS-DOS machine: make sure to Google it if you are not from Italy, it was an Olivetti PC1 Prodest, the most strange MS-DOS compatible system EVER.2. In Milan I was not fired, I quit myself to return in Sicily.3. When I posted my first message in BUGTRAQ, it was davidw (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidw) that helped me.4. It was often said that the MERZ port was for Alessia Merz stupidity. This is wrong: we liked the showgirl (I and my friend Oscar), and we liked the fact she replied lightly in the TV shows, she just tried to have fun, and for us this resonated with having fun while programming stuff without a purpose: in short HackValue. That's why the Redis port is MERZ on the phone keyboard.5. It is true that for many months I continued hacking on Redis even if I didn't receive so great feedbacks, but back then one rarely hacked on OSS software hoping for success or money as a main outcome. It was just that day-to-day jobs mostly sucked, and you wanted something better, more interesting to hack on. At least for many of us the drive was just that. So I continued hacking on Redis even when it surpassed by a lot our LLOOGG needs.6. The first design sketch of the Twitter Redis-based timeline cache was made by Rob Pointer (the author of the eggrdrop IRC bot!) and myself at Twitter HQ, on some random whiteboard.7. WOHPE turned out to be one of the most read sci-fi books in Italy, among the ones written by Italian sci-fi authors in recent years. Initially the readers were mostly programmers but now a lot of sci-fi enthusiasts are reading it. It's very strange that certain things written in the book now are becoming real fears, or even happened. For instance multiple readers of the English edition believe that this is likely the first accurate description of "prompt engineer": https://twitter.com/antirez/status/16350221166545633348. Now I'm writing a new book but also programming again. I hope to continue with both the activities in parallel.