Salvatore Sanfilippo
The Italian programmer who created Redis, known online as antirez and for writing small, fast systems code by hand.
Salvatore Sanfilippo, who goes by antirez, wrote Redis, the in-memory database that ended up inside a very large share of the world’s web infrastructure. His reputation rests less on any one product than on a style: small, readable C code, written carefully, doing one thing very fast. He stepped away from Redis for a while and returned to the project in 2024.
More recently he has turned that habit toward AI models. In August 2026 he published h3.c, an engine that runs the Chinese video model MiniMax H3 natively on Apple Silicon in C and Metal, under an MIT licence. It is a good illustration of why open weights matter in practice: a lab publishes files, and someone entirely outside the company makes them run on hardware the lab never targeted.