Athi

African - . -
Money's everywhere - Take Care..Longs for SkyScrapers and City Lights..
FC BARCELONA

[Concerned Citizen @BGatesIsaPyscho]

So apparently Pineapple Skin is totally Fire Resistant. Who ever knew.

[Peché Africa 🇿🇦 @pmcafrica]

Who is this child 😳😳

[Simon Sithole @Simon_Sithole20]

South Africans 🇿🇦 please say NO to digital IDs.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE 🙏 😭

[Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy]

A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name.

He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping.

His name is Fabrice Bellard.

Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built.

Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code.

In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years.

Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it.

He was not done.

In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth.

He kept going.

In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real.

In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark.

Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory.

Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org

He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links.

A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet.

He is still shipping.

[Prajwal @0xPrajwal_]

I see many Developers still don’t know this :-

REST API vs RESTful API

[tido bling @tiido_bling]

You really gotta run a strict program or your life will be a circus

[Nick White 🇺🇸 @nick_white]

@jahirsheikh8 There is only one answer and it’s not to play a guessing game. I’d first identify the exact process consuming the CPU at exactly 3:17 AM.

[Kate @E_KLCloud_Meow9]

Jahir🙋‍♀️🙋‍♀️🙋‍♀️well… if …03:17, that exact time? No cron means there's definitely a 'hidden task' somewhere. I'd check Systemd Timers or Logrotate compressing files in the middle of the night, or maybe a memory leak triggering a Full GC and burning the CPU... Want to camp out on htop at 03:17 tonight and catch the villain together? 😉"

[Akshay Shinde @ConsciousRide]

First thing I would check:
background tasks and infrastructure events outside the application itself.

Things like:
- database maintenance
- backups
- log rotation
- indexing
- autoscaling events
- security scans
- external integrations
- hidden scheduled jobs

A lot of random prod spikes are not actually random.

[mitsuri @0xmitsurii]

Barack Obama: "Just learn how to get stuff done, and people will notice."

[L E S E D I @_Hybreed_]

God, please remove the spirit of laziness when it comes to praying, hustling & studying.

[Resko★ @Bloke_Baz]

Not to sound delusional, but please pray for grace. Life isn't really about hard work. It's more about meeting the right people, grace, mercy, and favour.

[The Best @TheBestqueenx]

Everything happens at the right time, in the right way...

[Today In History @historigins]

Everything was good until I realized this man has an IQ of 178 and a master degree in electrical engineering from Oxford University

[F.O.L.A @folaoftech]

Before buying that used laptop, remember not every spec you see tells the real story 👀

[Athi @Chezathi]

@WilkoP4P @Marcoleptik @FabrizioRomano 🥲

[Real App @realapp]

BREAKING: La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, FA Cup, and MLS are coming to Real.

[alexei @alexeixbt]

the audacity to believe in yourself with no physical evidence is literally the entire cheat code

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

South Africa remains stagnant and failing because it traded the engineer for the lawyer

Substituted the factory manager for the chartered accountant

Swapped the materials scientist for the banker

Glorified the finance manager over the artisan

Prematurely gave up the bullet for the ballot

Rewarded the office park over the industrial park

Magnified the tender consultant over the town planner

Elevated the compliance officer over the soil scientist

Worshipped glorified credentials over capability

Idolised the procurement officer over the inventor

Traded the civil engineer for the civil servant

Traded the mine surveyor for the mining indaba

Chose the consultant over the craftsman

The common thread in South Africa is the rise of the intermediary.

In a healthy industrial economy, value is created at the source, which is the factory, the farm and the mine.

In an economy like SA’s that has swapped the artisan for the accountant, the primary mechanism of wealth generation becomes the cut taken by the middle man who does not necessarily add value to the physical product, only extracting value from the transaction.

You cannot and will not develop a nation by attempting to skip the industrialisation phase and jumping head-first into a service-based global economy.

When the primary route to wealth runs through state tenders, compliance, licensing and procurement, you get rent-seeking rather than value creation where incentives point away from building things and toward positioning yourself between the builder and the buyer.

This is not about Fana Hlongwane or Ze Nxumalo, but yes, just like that.

[` @lisaawrites]

“Asking is a moment’s shame; not asking is a lifetime’s shame”

— Japanese Proverb