Redis backslides into open source community

Disclaimer I am not a significant member of the Redis community. I have not used Redis on a regular basis. I’ve discussed Redis more in interviews than during regular work. My few work encounters with Redis have been using Elasticache. These facts would discourage me and should discourage you from having me as your next redis admin. Despite all of that — I have been part of the free software and open source communities for many years. With all of the tumult around licensing with prominent open source companies in recent years I am well positioned to talk about companies and their relationships to their communities. ...

May 16, 2025 · 6 min · 1195 words · Christopher Hicks

Scheduled Send in Slack

Overview Slack and other services include a Scheduled Send feature which allows you to send a message at some point in the future, without further effort on your part. Initially Slack limited this feature to channels, but recently it was also expanded to work in threads. So now seems like a good time to consider why you might want to take advantage of this feature. Generally we’re happy to send our Slack messages in real time and we hope for an answer within moments. The asynchronous nature of Slack lends itself to sending messages regardless of what time of day it may be for any of the parties involved. But there are occasions when asynchronous has downsides and for those times, Scheduled Send is your friend. ...

May 2, 2025 · 5 min · 1059 words · Christopher Hicks

Review of Microservices Pros and Cons

Eventually this blog post is going to work around to being a review of “Microservices Pros and Cons” by Curtis Poe. It is going to meander a bit before it gets to the review, but I haven’t found a way to leave out this “preamble”. In some sense it is beside the point, but in other senses it is the whole point. YMMV. Presumption of bias I would guess that most innocent bystanders reading a title like “Pros and Cons” would assume that the author intended to present a balanced view of the topic at hand. Having been in the computer business for the last thirty years I presume every author has some ax to grind. ...

March 10, 2025 · 7 min · 1425 words · Christopher Hicks