When You Have to Fork a Project: All About Valkey

In this episode, Madelyn Olson, a maintainer of the Valkey project and an AWS engineer, joins us to discuss the life of an open source maintainer and the experiences surrounding the launch of the Valkey project. We cover the pivotal moments that led to the creation of Valkey, a Redis fork, following the Redis license change. Madelyn also shares insights on the challenges and pressures of being a maintainer, strategies to manage burnout, and the significance of creating a community-driven, open source project. The episode highlights the technical advancements and future directions for Valkey, working to leverage modern hardware, manage large clusters, and expand the extension ecosystem.   00:00 Introduction 00:48 Redis License Change and Birth of Valkey 06:17 Maintainer Life and Burnout 14:54 Forking a Repository: When and Why 19:30 Community-Driven Open Source Projects 21:32 Future of Valkey and Closing Remarks   Guest: Madelyn Olson is a co-creator and maintainer of Valkey, a high-performance key-value datastore, and Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She focuses on building secure and highly reliable features, with a passion in working with open-source communities.