Preface

In March of 2010 I began working in Beverly Hills with Chris Testa, a friend I’d met while at Google in Santa Monica. He had hired me to be the architect of a small startup that he was team lead/director for; I was to be the research branch.

While talking one afternoon about how to solve an unrelated problem, Chris mentioned Redis as a database that I might find interesting (given my education in theoretical computer science). Several weeks later, after using and patching Redis for our purposes, I started participating on the mailing list, offering advice and a patch or two.

As time went on, I used Redis for a wider variety of projects at our startup: searching, an ad targeting engine, a Twitter analytics engine, and many pieces to connect the different parts of our infrastructure. Each project forced me to learn more about Redis. And as I saw others on the mailing list using Redis, asking questions, I couldn’t help but offer more and more advice (my all-time favorite was actually a job-search problem, which became section 7.4), becoming one of the most prolific posters on the Redis mailing list.

In late September 2011, while on my honeymoon in Paris, I received a call from a Manning Publications acquisitions editor named Michael Stephens. I didn’t receive the call immediately, because my phone doesn’t work outside the United States. And due to bugs in my phone’s firmware, I didn’t even receive the message until the second week of October.