Today's guest is Salvatore Sanfilippo, also known as Antirez!
Salvatore is the creator of Redis, an open source data store used by hundreds of thousands of developers across the world. And he's also a writer. He published the popular sci-fi novel called Wohpe, which anticipated a lot of what is happening today with AI.
With Salvatore, we talked about open source — what makes a project successful and how to make it successful for its maintainers. Then we discussed how Salvatore uses AI for extremely complex coding, which makes him 5x faster than without AI. And finally, I asked him about his writing work and what is the experience of writing a novel versus a software project.
🎙️ Episode
You can watch the full episode on Youtube:
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Also, here are some show notes:
🥇 Interview Summary
If you are a 🔒 paid subscriber 🔒 you will find my own summary of the interview below.
It’s the 10-minute, handcrafted takeaways of what we talked about, with timestamps to the relevant video moments, for those who don’t have time to sit through the 1-hour chat.
Here is the agenda for today:
🏠 Staying in Sicily: Life & Career Choices (05:09)
🔧 What Makes Open Source Projects Successful (12:47)
💰 Monetizing Open Source Software (19:19)
🧠 "We Are Destroying Software" — The Complexity Problem (23:19)
🤖 Using AI for Complex Coding Tasks (34:31)
📚 From Coding to Novel Writing (50:31)
Let’s dive in 👇
1) 🏠 Staying in Sicily: Life & Career Choices (05:09)
Salvatore made a deliberate choice to build his career from Sicily rather than relocating to tech hubs like Silicon Valley.
He explains that while being in tech centers might lead to greater wealth, it's not necessary for engineering excellence:
"To be a successful software engineer, you can be everywhere, but to make a lot of money, it is much better to stay in the center of things... For me, it was not a problem of performance, but how much money you want to make."
Salvatore believes that once you reach a comfortable income threshold (he mentions around €4,000/month), additional money contributes minimally to wellbeing. His decision to remain in Sicily was driven by:
🌍 Personal values — preferring Europe's balance of capitalism and social services
🏡 Community connections — maintaining important relationships in his hometown
🧠 Quality of life — prioritizing wellbeing over wealth accumulation
He notes that he's seen many young people in the US who "become rich too fast" and experience "lack of purpose" as a result, reinforcing his comfort with his choices.
2) 🔧 What Makes Open Source Projects Successful (12:47)
Salvatore identifies key ingredients that contribute to open source success in 2025, with simplicity being at the forefront:
