Dhravya Shah was barely 16 when he started programming and game development. At 18, he is working towards building Radish, an open source alternative to Redis.

“Redis is basically an in-memory database, which is a dictionary. Similarly, I started with a normal dictionary, then I made a couple of commands like get and set, then started to figure out how to do the Redis protocol,” Shah told AIM in an exclusive interview. He explained how Radish, the alternative he is building, is different from others such as Valkey, which is basically a fork of Redis. 

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The most popular database in the world, Redis, decided to change its licence terms a few weeks ago. The earlier completely open source platform is now under ‘source available’ licence, which means that it is publicly available, but with certain restrictions for using the code commercially. 

Being a fan of Redis, Shah narrates in his blog that he was devastated by the news. He was learning GoLang that time, and he got deep into how Redis actually used to work, figuring out all the commands, data structures, and algorithms. And in just a few hours, he had a working Redis server. 

Along with Radish, he is currently also working on Super Memory, which he explains, is like a ChatGPT for bookmarks, which can be used to take notes on the browser based on user history as well for context. “It can basically be a second brain for you, which was the idea,” he added. The repository now has around 2k stars on GitHub.

A lot of traction, but still a lot to be done

Many people reached out to Shah about wanting to use Radish for production. In fact, Redis reached out to him asking to change the name from Godis to something else. He changed it to Radish. 

Even though the project works well, it still has a lot to be done including the streams, bitmaps, hyperlog, clustering, and more. “It is battle tested. But should you use it for production? Probably not,” Shah said. 

Shah said that for 10001 MB requests, Radish can do the get and set in 10 seconds, whereas Redis can do the same in about four seconds. “It’s not bad but that’s only because of a design flaw in mine that I can fix,” he added.

Further, he explained how the most important and difficult features that need to be added to Radish would require him to change the architecture a lot. “Redis is a very complicated project in itself, and me building this alone is not really efficient as well,” said Shah. Other features that he is determined to add are similar to Redis’ Pub Sub, Persistence, and Transactions, which would require a lot more time as well. 

A lot more than Radish

“I basically work in sprints. I am working on different types of projects right now and cannot put my concentration on a single project,” he added. 

Shah claims to have built over 60 products already, which include social media platforms and image sharing websites. One of the projects that got a traction of around 5 million users was his Twitter bot, Tweets.beauty, which was an image generation server behind the Twitter bot. Shah had to shut it down because he was not able to keep the server free because of the traffic and it was also computationally expensive for a 17-year-old student. 

He decided to sell the technology to HypeFury, which is a similar platform and started working at the company, through which he was able to afford his education at Arizona State University all by himself and was able to convince his parents for it.

“When I started programming at 16, I did not know that programming is actually a high value skill. I just used to make games,” he added. Then just three months later, Shah got into Python and got the conviction he needed to learn coding seriously. He mentioned that he once made an app within 24 hours which helped his mom with her small business. 

At the university, he is working with his professor on a music recognition project, which would understand the core music on apps like Spotify and suggest the best modes for listening to that type of music. “There are still a lot of weird problems to be solved,” Shah concluded.