If you're looking for an entry level job in software development, I made a list of projects to have in your portfolio, to make you stand out to employers, and increase your chances of getting hired.
I'll be posting projects for more tech stacks regularly, so stay tuned!
Children of the VERY average Nigerian used to have birthday celebrations. The parents would rent canopies, cook and invite djs. There used to be parties and the entire neighborhood would gather to celebrate w the child. I don’t hear birthday music anymore. There’s nothing left
@lilyally98 I like the way some Black men pretend that intersectionality is not a thing. Tell me why you expect women to be on the list when men had years (if not centuries) of exclusive access to opportunities, networks, and positions of power.
I've been a backend Engineer for 12+ years. Today, I'm a Principal Engineer at Atlassian.
I've designed systems that handle millions of requests. Sat on both sides of system design interviews.
Reviewed more architecture docs than I can count.
Starting today, I'm breaking down the fundamentals of scaling for the next 25 days.
If you're learning system design bookmark this thread, you're going to get a lot of learning from this.
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.
if you put on noise cancelling headphones and listen closely, you can hear your heartbeat and the subtle tensions arising in your jaw and head that change as you think thoughts
Nigerian history deserves more than scattered Wikipedia pages. For @1000reasons9ja, I created 1800+ dated moments of Nigerian history. You can now trace Nigeria from the 1300s to 2026.
I also added 200 more reasons against T-Pain’s administration.
https://t.co/1EXFx3V47M
We just crossed 4,000 backend engineers in the backend community 🎉
To celebrate, we are doing a ₦350,000 giveaway.
Prize split:
- ₦150k
- ₦100k
- ₦50k
- ₦25k
- ₦15k
- ₦10k
This is sponsored by:
- Myself
- @_deven96 , creator of Ahnlich, an in-memory vector database for semantic search: https://t.co/BSU4IJxFYD
- @_289volts, who is giving free credits for on https://t.co/bFBE5AXX5k, a platform that accelerates your job search success rate at the speed of light
But this is not just a giveaway.
I am also using this to start building better engineering statistics, hiring insights, and a stronger talent pipeline for Nigerian/African software engineers.
To enter:
1. Follow me (important)
2. Repost this
3. Fill the engineer profile form: https://t.co/rtwPW41Vl1
The form helps with:
- engineering statistics
- hiring opportunities
- salary and stack insights
- better visibility for engineers in the community
Winners will be announced on 12th June 2026.