Igor has been one of my programmer heroes for many years now, and I'm glad to learn more about his background through this article. The reading's a bit tough, as many verbs appear to be missing and a few Russian words remain untranslated. Some interesting takeaways:<p>* Igor wrote Nginx while working as a sysadmin for Rambler. Classic bottom-up innovation: he could see Apache's shortcomings in a very up-close and personal way. This also explains why Rambler does not hold the copyright on Nginx (see the end of the interview).<p>* He is quite modest when comparing Nginx to other web servers. This reflects well on his character, but perhaps has "slowed" the adoption of Nginx. It's clear from this article that Igor is an engineer, not a salesman. I find this to be refreshing in an era when many open-source projects seem to achieve adoption by being the loudest, rather than by being the best.<p>* Igor put off starting a company until there was just too much work for him to do alone. I liked this quote: "I rarely change my life direction: for example, [before] Rambler, I spent seven years working for a company, [and at] Rambler, I also worked for ten years. Change is hard for me. But, nevertheless, by the spring of this year, I did finally decide to found a company that would help the further development of the project."<p>* Despite having U.S. investors, Nginx's engineering team is based in Russia. One interpretation is that you don't need to be in the Valley to develop a first-rate product; you just need to be in the Valley when it's time to hustle it.<p>Anyway, an interesting read. Apparently this article is his first public interview. I know Igor doesn't like publicity, but it's inspiring to read his story.
Its interesting that nginx's ability to handle many connections was partially driven by the fact that it was developed to support sites that had dialup users. I thought it was built that way to support emerging web traffic patterns (high volume & persistent connections), but really it was to serve an existing (somewhat legacy) need.
Google-translated the original article from here: <a href="http://habrahabr.ru/company/xakep/blog/136354/" rel="nofollow">http://habrahabr.ru/company/xakep/blog/136354/</a><p><a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhabrahabr.ru%2Fcompany%2Fxakep%2Fblog%2F136354%2F" rel="nofollow">http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...</a>
This guy is like Linus T. with the ego surgically removed ...really doesn't try to "sell himself" ...he should start doing some corporate training classes to teach people this skill of his.
It's a shame that the author didn't take the oportunity to mak e the answers more readable. I read about one third of the article but found it to confusing and difficult to read :(
Kudos to Sysoev and Nginx. Whenever I write C code I find myself looking at nginx for inspiration, always keeping the source code open to see if and how they solved similar problems. It is simply one of the best pieces of software I have read.
Very good success story of a so-called nerd, or a <i>natural engineer</i> mentality, or, a mildly autistic character, if we prefer a language of a modern science.<p>It is from this mindset came out the marvels of engineering - first versions of Lisp, UNIX, C and Plan9, and Erlang and designs of hardware and processors, all the best quality engineering we could have.<p>It is picking and hiring this kind of people is what this site or whole Silicone Valley is all about.<p><a href="http://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Hiring" rel="nofollow">http://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Hiring</a>