The Road to Redis
Years ago, I was enrolled at Södertörns högskola (which roughly translates as “Southern Rocky Beach University College” in Swedish). I was an undergrad attending as part of an exchange program and, through a comedic series of mix-ups, I was placed in graduate level linguistics classes. Before that, I had never set foot in a linguistics class. Needless to say, these particular courses needed a little extra study. However, they were thrilling. I learned about things I had never considered, and while my classmates were breezing through everything, I was learning for the first time. It did feel as though a hose of theory was being pumped directly into my brain at high-pressure. Regardless, I find myself thinking back to these classes quite frequently. More on that later.
I owe an explanation on why the name of this series has shifted to “The Road to Redis.” I had originally conceived this series of articles as a way of exploring data modeling and data types in Redis by bridging the divide between developers who “think” in SQL and those that “think” in Redis. The title was pretty simple “From SQL to Redis.”
I had conceived the structure of the pieces to be “Do something in SQL” then “Do it better in Redis.” I think this article structure was a distraction from what my original aim of the series was attempting: data modeling and data types. Indeed, I got a mix of feedback on these pieces. Some liked them, some didn’t. In the “didn’t” camp was some important conversations about how you can’t just slide from one to another, or rather, that’s maybe not the best way to learn nor get the best results.
In one of those linguistics classes, I learned about the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativity. It’s a big, messy topic, but to sum it up — the language you speak informs the way you think. Someone who speaks in, say Estonian, might think about peeling a potato differently than someone from Papua New Guinea. While I’m not a linguist, I think that even the languages in which we create software inform how we think. From X to Y isn’t the best format because you’re thinking about Redis as SQL. Just as our Estonian and Papua New Guinean friends wouldn’t think about the potato peeling the same way, nor should you for SQL and Redis.
I picked the “Road to Redis” as a new title as I think it accurately portrays what I wanted to do. I wanted to give people a point from which to progress and build skills in Redis iteratively while exploring the different data options with practical examples. So, let’s get off this detour and back on the Road to Redis.
