I first heard of Nginx from a blog post[1] by Ezra Zygmuntowicz almost 5 years ago. I suspect Ezra was the primary contributor to the success of Nginx in the western world.
On a slightly related note, I first heard about Redis from Ezra -- probably ~2 years ago. I believe he deserves some similar type of credit for the early spread of Redis.
(His latest project cloudfoundry.com just launched today, so I think it's fairly relevant to give the guy some props right now :-)
How does your conclusion follow from the first sentence? It sounds like you're using your own individual experience to draw conclusions about how Nginx took off across the entire world, without any actual evidence to prove that the two are related.
(His latest project cloudfoundry.com just launched today, so I think it's fairly relevant to give the guy some props right now :-)