Simon Willison’s Weblog

What new tools and technologies you learnt recently are worth it?

27th September 2010

My answer to What new tools and technologies you learnt recently are worth it? on Quora

Redis: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Oc... and http://simonwillison.net/static/...

It’s an in-memory datastructure server—like memcached, but with persistence and with extremely fast atomic operations against sets, lists and hashes. You can use it to build things on a cheap VPS that you couldn’t build before.

Node.js: http://simonwillison.net/2009/No...

There are lots of async networking frameworks (Twisted for Python, EventMachine for Ruby etc) but Node.js uses V8 JavaScript and offers a completely clean slate in terms of libraries. The community around it is fascinating, and it’s brilliant for things like Comet, WebSocket, consuming the Twitter Streaming API, proxies, WebHooks... it’s a scalable HTTP and IO toolkit and there are a ton of things I can build with it that would have been a lot harder to build without it.