Gabriel Wamunyu

[Gabriel Wamunyu @GWamunyu]

@paularambles Long term strategy. Gemini is fast for most people's use cases. Twitter is an echo chamber of devs.

[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.

[Wise @trikcode]

You basically need to be unemployed to keep up with all this AI stuff.

[Gabriel Wamunyu @GWamunyu]

@zuess05 The difference is understanding tradeoffs.

[☔ @Whotfismick]

the SIM ejector after it's first use

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

I’m not the only one to say this, but something was broken in society during the Covid era, and it has never fully recovered.

[TobyWrites @tobyasky]

As an IT guy, no matter the testing you do, there is no testing that beats what the business (end users) will do.

The business will discover oil where it doesn't even exist😭. Those guys

[Mosh @moshhamedani]

I miss the late 90s and early 2000s. We had the best movies, the best programming books, no social media, no endless scrolling, no online “experts”, not a million frameworks to keep up with, and no AI coding nonsense.

Our world is just filled with too much BS now.

[NZ ☄️ @CodeByNZ]

This man built VLC, turned down stupid money just to keep it ad-free, and still gave it to us for free. Absolute hero.

[Abhinav @Abhinavstwt]

i miss the version of my brain that understood this

[Gabriel Wamunyu @GWamunyu]

Watching the new Witcher season is a constant battle with turning off Siri

[Nizzy @nizzyabi]

startup roles are so pointless

everyone does everything lol

[Chris McCord @chris_mccord]

https://t.co/OoZmQToXY8 is publicly available!

I can't wait to see what folks build and where this goes!

- remote AI runtime for full-stack app building, github workflows, etc
- Full in browser IDE and xterm, with root
- Preview URLs for any port
https://t.co/ikU16rH5d5

[Janty @CFC_Janty]

Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Lebron James all got knocked out on same day

Our childhood coming to an end 🕊️

[∩ @zachpogrob]

'4000 weeks' is by far the most insane framing for how short life is.

[Gabriel Wamunyu @GWamunyu]

@GergelyOrosz My main gripe with the process is that it selects out people with performance anxiety.

[Kevin Naughton Jr. @KevinNaughtonJr]

i hate that my most productive hours are between 12am and 4am

[Crazy Codes🚀👨‍💻 @richsongocrazy]

Tech is wild… Some days, your task is to change a button color. Other days, a single bug has you questioning your career, life choices, and existence itself.

[litquidity @litcapital]

“OpenAI huh? $500B? Gimme 2 weeks and $5 million and I’ll clone it asap” - DeepSeek’s CTO