“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” - Yogi Berra
Three months ago, our wildest dream was to reach a thousand stars by the end of this year. Even then, people around us were skeptical this could be achieved. When we reached 5K stars in June, we immediately updated our goals to 10K stars by the end of the year. By now we understand that we lack the ability to predict the future, but at least we can try to explain what we think is the reason behind this surge.
Good market fit
We innovated in the field of in-memory stores, which are tremendously popular. Any innovation in this field sparkles significant interest from the community. You can see how vibrant the Hacker News discussion was on the first day of our launch.
But this alone is not enough to explain the star trend. We have seen projects with incremental improvement that did not see similar growth. This brings us to the second major factor:
State-of-the-art engineering
We redesigned the engine using novel algorithms and data structures, innovating around lockless multithreading, memory structures, caching algorithms, and snapshotting. Our goal of providing a simple, cost-efficient, and reliable in-memory store strongly resonated with the engineering community. And yes, we read and learn from all your public posts and comments, sometimes with the help of Google translate.
What’s next?
So first of all, we want to thank you for your comments, your interest, and your enthusiasm. 10K is just a round number, and we thought it deserves a post. But really nothing changed with regard to our plans. We are focused on building the best in-memory store in the universe. Our eyes are on maturing Dragonfly and extending its APIs. We know that stars are just an initial metric, and it’s our responsibility to live up to the expectations you set for us.
Thank you for your support!
Oded and Roman
