Meet Salvatore Sanfilippo , Creator of Redis - Born in 1977 in a tiny village in Sicily, Italy - Father was an electrician, mother stayed home to raise him and his brother - Got his first computer at age 5 , a Texas Instruments his dad brought home - Started copying BASIC programs from the manual as a kid - Moved to Palermo at 17 to study architecture - Never finished university - One day he tried to buy a graphics card - The shop gave him a modem by mistake and refused a refund - So he just said "well, I guess it's a modem then" - Got online, discovered Linux, fell in love with computer security - Taught himself C from a book - Built hping, a network security tool that became widely used - Invented the idle scan technique - later adopted by Nmap - Worked in security, embedded systems, web apps - In 2009, he was running a small Italian startup called LLOOGG , a real-time web analytics tool - MySQL couldn't handle the write-heavy load - He kept thinking: why is it so hard to do a simple "get latest N items" fast? - Traditional databases weren't built for this - So he started prototyping his own in-memory database - First version was written in Tcl - Then rewrote it in C - His wife says he wrote most of the early code sitting on the toilet with a MacBook Air 11" - He admits she's right - Open-sourced it on Hacker News - Initial response? Barely anything - But the Ruby community picked it up , GitHub and Instagram were early adopters - It kept growing quietly for a year - VMware hired him to work on Redis full-time from Sicily - He never moved to Silicon Valley - Built one of the most important databases in the world from a small Italian town - Redis now powers: Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, Snapchat, Meta, Amazon, Twitch - Stack Overflow voted it the most loved database 5 years in a row - It handles millions of operations per second worldwide - He maintained Redis solo for 11 years as its BDFL - In 2020, he stepped down , said he wanted to do other things - Wrote a sci-fi novel called Wohpe - Built Kilo - a text editor in under 1000 lines of C - Hacked on Flipper Zero projects for fun - In 2024, he came back to Redis as an evangelist - Built Vector Sets - a new data structure for AI similarity search - Never chased Silicon Valley - Never finished his degree - Built one of the most used pieces of infrastructure on the internet from Sicily The guy literally bought a modem by accident and ended up changing how the internet stores data. If you're building from a small town, from a non-traditional background , this is your guy !!

Keeping up with AI updates is harder than building projects!

Meet Ryan Dahl - Creator of Node.js - Grew up in San Diego, California - Got his first computer (Apple IIc) at age 6 - Loved math and studied it at UC San Diego - Started a PhD but dropped out , abstract math wasn't applicable to real life - Left for South America and started building web apps in Ruby - While freelancing in Germany, he noticed a major problem - Web servers like Apache used one thread per connection - Servers choked under heavy traffic - Handling thousands of users at once was a nightmare - One day he uploaded an image on Flickr - Saw the progress bar repeatedly querying the server just to show upload status - That moment clicked , the web needed a better way to handle I/O - Started coding in a WiFi-less Starbucks in Cologne, Germany - 8-hour daily coding sprints for 6 months straight - Built it on Google's V8 JavaScript engine - Used non-blocking, event-driven I/O , a radical approach at the time - Presented Node.js at JSConf EU in 2009 - The crowd went wild - He said he was "in a continual state of surprise for four years" - Joined Joyent and worked on Node full-time - Designed it to be lightweight, fast, and asynchronous - JavaScript could now run outside the browser , on servers - Node.js became one of the most transformative tools in web development - Powers: Netflix, LinkedIn, PayPal, Uber, NASA dashboards - Millions of developers use it worldwide - npm became the largest package registry in history - Later gave his famous "10 Things I Regret About Node.js" talk - Then built Deno : a modern rewrite fixing his own mistakes - Literally changed how the internet works behind the scenes Set inspiration for many like me !