Let’s get the hard part over right away: I will be leaving Redis Labs next week, which means I will also be leaving the RediSearch project, and moving on to new adventures.
I started RediSearch over two years ago as sort of a demo project, with the intent to try out and demonstrate the capabilities of Redis’ new Modules API. It wasn’t much at first — a simple inverted index implemented on top of Redis strings, because the API didn’t include custom data types yet.
Over these past two years it has grown into a real product with a budding community: client libraries in many languages, commercial users, meaningful code contributions, hundreds of bug reports and feature requests,
and all in all what seems to be a growing attention and impact.
We are now a team three full-time engineers working on it, with other people at Redis Labs supporting us with QA, support, marketing, content, etc. And RediSearch itself has evolved to contain complex structured queries, distributed indexes, aggregations, concurrent queries and many other insane things I’ve had the best time ever designing and implementing. And the way I see it, it’s only just the first iteration of it. There is so much more we have planned for it.
It’s been very exciting to watch something started almost on a whim, grow like that. And while I’ll be moving to a different company and stop working on it — RediSearch will continue in its trajectory and I’m sure this community will continue to grow with it.
The engineering side of RediSearch will be handled as of next week by Mark Nunberg, who’s been working with me on it for almost a year now, and Meir Shpilraien who recently joined the team. Kyle Davis and Tague Griffith will be helping with community and content, and more people will join our ranks soon.
I would like to thank everyone who took a chance and used RediSearch in their app; Everyone who contributed code, bug reports, feature requests, or even a kind word along the past two years. I would also like to thank Redis Labs, namely our CTO Yiftach Shulman, for allowing me to work on such a crazy project, and my colleagues who helped me take my stupid demo project and turn it into a real product.
Lastly, I would like to thank Salvatore Sanfilippo, for creating the Redis modules system (and Redis in general, of course), and for all his help along the way.
It’s been a blast, and I hope to continue being involved in the RediSearch and Redis communities.
Thanks again and goodbye.
Dvir