Engineers are notorious for reinventing the wheel. Sometimes there's a legitimate need for custom functionality. Sometimes we believe we can improve on what's already available. And sometimes we're just curious how things work under the hood.

Curiosity was the motivation behind Radish, a simplified Redis clone written in Python. I'll walk through why I decided to build it and share the key lessons, challenges, and insights I gained from the experience.

What Attendees Will Learn
The core concepts behind in-memory key-value stores
How systems like Redis manage data and performance
Design tradeoffs involved in building infrastructure software
Common challenges encountered when implementing data structures, persistence, and networking
Practical lessons learned from developing a Redis-inspired system from scratch
When building something yourself is worth the effort, and when it's better to leverage existing solutions