Redis 生涯就此结束

Posted 2021-04-07 码洞

最近 Redis 之父 antirez 退休了，以下是他的临别赠言，我抽空翻译了一下，原文在某些地方语言组织的比较晦涩，翻译的可能不是很到位。

The end of Redis Adventure「Redis 生涯就此结束」

When I started the Redis project more than ten years ago I was in one of the most exciting moments of my career. My co-founder and I had successfully launched two of the major web 2.0 services of the Italian web. In order to make them scalable we had to invent many new concepts, that were already known in the field most of the times, but we didn’t know, nor we cared to check. Problem? Let’s figure out a solution. We wanted to solve problems but we wanted, even more, to have fun. This was the playful environment where Redis was born.

回忆十年前 Redis 项目刚刚开始的时候，那应该是我职业生涯最激动人心的时刻。Redis 的联合创始人和我启动了两个重要的意大利互联网 web 2.0 项目。为了持续扩容服务，我们创造了很多新概念。这些概念其实已经在技术领域流行很多年了，但是在当时我们并不了解也不曾验证过是否可行。不过没关系，我们喜欢解决问题，并从中发现很多乐趣。Redis 刚刚诞生的时候真的是非常有意思的(让人难忘的)。

But now Redis is, incredibly, one of the main parts of so many things. And year after year my work changed from building this thing to making sure that it was also as useful as possible, as reliable as possible. And in recent years, what I do every day changed so much that most of my attention is spent in checking what other developers tell me about the Redis code, how to improve it, the changes it requires to be more correct or faster or more secure. However I never wanted to be a software maintainer.

但是如今 Redis 不一样了，它难以置信的在非常非常多的项目中扮演者至关重要的角色。经过了这么多年的打磨，我的工作性质也发生了变化。我不只是要让它变更加有用（更多新鲜的功能），还要让它尽可能的稳定（少出 bug）。尤其最近这几年，我的工作内容变化太大了，我主要的精力都花在了 Redis 代码的维护上，主要就是看看其它的开发者告诉我关于 Redis 的代码该如何改进才能让它变的更快更好。其实我根本就不想做一个软件维护者（修 bug、优化代码的工作实在太无聊了）。

I write code in order to express myself, and I consider what I code an artifact, rather than just something useful to get things done. I would say that what I write is useful just as a side effect, but my first goal is to make something that is, in some way, beautiful. In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer. Now I’m asked more and more, by the circumstances created by a project that became so important, to express myself less and to maintain the project more. And this is indeed exactly what Redis needs right now. But this is not what I want to do, and I stretched myself enough during the past years.

我写代码是为了更好的表达自我，这是艺术创作（乐趣），而不单单是为了把事情搞定（挣钱）。我的目标更多的是为了追求美感，而最终能不能起到作用仅仅是附带的结果而已。我宁可大家认为我是一个糟糕的艺术家，也不希望只被看成一个优秀的程序员。但是现在我被要求这要求那，就因为这个项目变得如此重要。我不能随意表达自己（艺术创作，大刀阔斧的改代码），而只能在现有的代码基础上维护（小打小闹）。我并不是说这样不对，这只是现阶段的 Redis 必须要接受的方式。但是我个人有点受不了，最近几年我感到很憋屈（Linus 也会是这种感觉么？）。

So, dear Redis community, today I’m stepping back as the Redis maintainer. My new position will be, on one side, an “ideas” person at Redis Labs, in order to provide inputs for new Redis possibilities: I’ll continue to be part of the Redis Labs advisory board. On the other hand however my hands will be free, and I’ll do something else, that could be writing code or not, who knows, I don’t want to make plans for now. However I’m very skeptical about me not writing more code in the future. It’s just too much fun :D

所以呢，社区里面的同志们啊，我告诉你们我要退居幕后了。我未来只是作为 Redis 的顾问来给 Redis 实验室提供一些新奇的想法（维护 Redis 代码我就不干了）。如此呢，我就可以把自己释放出来做点其它的事。至于做什么还没有想好，会不会继续写代码也不确定。我比较怀疑自己是否能够完全放弃写代码，只是因为写代码实在是太好玩了（此处有个调皮的表情）。

I leave Redis in the hands of the Redis community. I asked my colleagues Yossi Gottlieb and Oran Agra to continue to maintain the project starting from today: these are the people that helped me the most in recent years, and that tried hard, even when it was not “linear” to follow me in my very subjective point of views, to understand what my vision on Redis was. Since I don’t want to be part of how the new Redis development setup will be shaped (that is the most meta of the maintenance tasks, exactly what I want to avoid), I’ll just leave Yossi and Oran the task of understanding how to interface with the rest of the Redis developers to find a sustainable development model, you can hear directly from Yossi and Oran in this blog post: https://redislabs.com/blog/new-governance-for-redis/

从今天开始，我要把 Redis 留给了 Redis 社区，让我的老战友 Yossi Gottlieb 和 Oran Agra 来继续维护它。这两个人在过去这几年对我帮助非常大，在关于 Redis 愿景（未来）的理解上，他们并不会被我个人的主观想法所左右。因为我不太想参与 Redis 开发模型的治理工作（这是 Redis 维护工作中最重要的元工作，而我不是想继续搞维护了），所以后面跟其它 Redis 开发者交流「可持续的开发模型」一事就完全托付给他们两了，你们可以从这边文章 https://redislabs.com/blog/new-governance-for-redis/ 中直接了解这个事。

I believe I’m not just leaving Redis in the hands of a community of expert programmers, but also in the hands of people who care about the legacy of the community spirit of Redis. In eleven years I hope I was able to provide a point of view that certain persons understood, about an alternative way to write software. I hope that such point of view will be taken into consideration in the evolution of Redis.

我相信我不只是把 Redis 留给了社区里的一堆专家级程序员，还应该包括社区中所有对 Redis 精神遗产感兴趣的朋友们。十一年来，我希望让大家看到开发软件还有这样的一种特别的方式（我的方式），这种方式只有个别人可以理解。我希望在 Redis 未来的变化中，这种方式还是可以继续被适度采用。（是不是 antirez 独裁（不可持续）的方式和 他老战友的「可持续开发模型」冲突了，闹的很不愉快，不是很确定）。

Redis was the most stressful thing I did in my career, and probably also the most important. I don’t like much what the underground programming world became in recent years, but even if it was not an easy journey, I had the privilege to work and interact with many great individuals. Thank you for your humanity and your help, and for what you taught me. You know who you are! I want to also say thank you to the companies and individuals inside such companies that allowed me to write open source every day for so many years, with the freedom to do what I believed to be correct for the user base. Redis Labs, VMware and Pivotal, thank you for your great help and generosity.

Redis 是我职业生涯中压力最大的项目，可能也是最重要的项目。最近这些年编程世界的变化我并不是特别喜欢（不知道说的是哪方面的变化），虽然这段旅程非常艰辛，能够有机会和很多特别的人一起工作交流也让我感觉非常知足。谢谢你们的理解和帮助，这让我成长了很多。我需要特别感谢无私赞助我的公司和个人让我可以持续这么多年持续每天为开源世界共享代码，让我可以自由地做自己认为是正确的事。还有 Redis Labs、VMWare 和 Pivotal，非常感谢你们的帮助和宽容（是不是 antirez 摸鱼了）。

As I said, I don’t really know what there is for me in my future, other than the involvement with the Redis advisory board. I guess that for some time, just look around is a good idea, without doing too many things. I would like to explore more a few hobbies of mine. Writing blog posts is also a major thing that I wanted to do but did less and less because of time concerns. Recently I published videos in Italian language explaining technological concepts to the general public, I had fun doing that and received good feedbacks, maybe I’ll do more of that as well. Anyway I guess some of you know that I’m active on Twitter as @antirez. If you are interested in what an old, strange programmer will do next, see you there.

前面说到，除了继续 Redis 的顾问工作之外，我也不知道未来的路该怎么走。也许走一步看一步也挺好，不用干太多事。我还想发展一下个人的一些兴趣爱好，比如写写博客就挺好，以前我一直想写但是一直没有太多时间。最近我还发了一些意大利语的技术视频，这很好玩，还收到了读者大量的反馈，我未来应该还会发更多的视频。你们大概也知道我的 Twitter 账号 @antirez 一直很活跃 ，如果你们还对我这样一个又老又怪的程序员感兴趣，那就去 Twitter 上围观我吧。