Salvatore Sanfilippo aka antirez

Hi, I'm Salvatore Sanfilippo, also known as antirez, an Italian computer programmer based in Catania. I was born on March 7h, 1977 in Campobello di Licata. In 2020 I stopped writing code to start writing fiction full time.



My email address is
I receive many emails: I'm not able to reply to every single email. I understand this sounds rough, but otherwise I would not work. If you don't get a reply the first time please try to resend your message if it is truly important.

My social channels

I regularly write on my blog at antirez.com.
I use Twitter a lot, my account is @antirez.
I also have an Instagram account.
I post very often on Facebook, especially regarding my life and my activity as a writer.

Writing

My first sci-fi novel, WOHPE, was published on July 15th, 2022 by Laurana Editore.

The main themes are AI, climate change, programmers, the interaction between humanity and technology. I wrote it in Italian (I can read and write English, but nowhere near litterary prose level) but it was translated in English by Bridget Pupillo. The English version will be released in winter 2022. I'm currently looking for a literary agent that would represent me in the US market.

This is the book cover, designed by Simone.

Code

I mainly write open source code. You can find most of my code on Github.

The most notable piece of code I wrote is, likely, the Redis database, caching, whatever it is system. My wife claims I wrote it mostly while sitting on the WC for the first years, on a MacBook Air 11. Would be nice to tell she is wrong, but she happens to be perfectly right about the matter. Yet, regardless of its not noble origins, Redis managed to become one of the most used system software in recent times. I designed, implemented and handled its community for 11 years, then I resigned to do other stuff.

Other software projects I'm happy I wrote:

• Dump1090, a Mode-S decoder.
• The Linenoise line editing library.
• Kilo, a very simple text editor that became a well known C programming example.
• Load81, a programming environment for children.
• The Disque message queue. I abandoned it later, but its design is one of the things I'm most proud of.
• The Jim Tcl interpreter. Writing it I understood vital things that later I used in Redis design.
• Hping was cool in 1998.

Security

Starting from 1988, for a few years I was active in the field of computer security, invented a scanning technique called idle scan (implemented by nmap) and wrote the Hping network security utiltiy.

Fundamental things I believe about society and life

• Fixing (if still possible) the climate change issues should be the main goal of humanity right now. We don't have enough information, so we should move as if the worst forecasts will become true.
• Redistribution of wealth is one of the main goals of society. People in economical struggle should be helped using money from taxes and other public resources.
• There is a systematic bias against women, even in very developed countries.
• Life is too short to work like crazy for most of its part.
• Intelligence is positively correlated with being nice to others.
• God likely does not exist, but there is no way to prove it.
• Arts are one of the few things worth life's best efforts. Programming is art, if done in certain ways.
• Modern programming is becoming complex, uninteresting, full of layers that just need to be glued. It is losing most of its beauty. In that sense, most programming is no longer art nor high engineering (most programs written at big and small corporations are trivial: coders just need to understand certain ad-hoc abstractions, and write some logic and glue code). Only very few programmers are facing the artistic face of programming. Only very few programmers are facing high engineering in programming.
• Artificial Intelligence will completely reshape our society very soon. If a universal income is not provided in a timely fashion (as AI makes many workers no longer relevant) we are going to be in big trouble.

EOF