Maurizio Boriani

Il cielo stellato sopra di me, la legge morale dentro di me.

[Deep @DeepStarts]

- be Linus Torvalds
- build Linux because you don't like your operating system
- give it away for free
- accidentally create the world's
biggest open-source project
- power most of the internet without most people knowing your name
- write Git because existing tools annoyed you
- refuse to become a billionaire CEO
- keep reviewing code 30+ years later
- still care more about clean code than hype
- change computing forever by solving your own problems

maybe the biggest impact comes from building, not branding

[Hariprasad @Har1prasad]

- Created the C programming language.
- Co-created Unix, the foundation of modern operating systems.
- Wrote the book on C (K&R) that is still the gold standard for technical writing.
- His work shaped Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, and countless embedded systems.
– Never chased fame or built a tech empire around it.
– Just changed computing forever.

He didn't just build a kernel. He built the language to build the kernel, the operating system to run it, and then quietly walked away.

Dennis Ritchie.

absolute 🐐. Rest in power

[Dom Italian Builder @dom_gag_96]

>Be Salvatore Sanfilippo.
>Born in Campobello di Licata, Sicily, in 1977.
>Start hacking on Unix systems and networks.
>Become known online as @antirez.
>Build hping, a tool used by security researchers around the world.
>Invent the idle scan, later implemented in Nmap.
>Build two Italian web products with your co-founder.
>Hit a scaling problem.
>Instead of complaining, create a new database.
>Redis.
>Open-source it in 2009 from Sicily.
>Lead it for more than a decade.
>Watch it become one of the invisible engines of the modern internet.
>Caches. Queues. Real-time apps. AI systems. Infrastructure everywhere.
>Step back in 2020.
>Come back years later because open source still matters.
>Be one of the reasons the internet is fast.
>Be Italian.

----

Join @italianbldrs and help build the next Renaissance.

[Association for Computing Machinery @TheOfficialACM]

Happy Birthday, Adi Shamir! Shamir received the 2002 #ACMTuringAward with Leonard M. Adleman and Ronald Rivest, for their ingenious contribution to making public-key cryptography useful in practice.

In 1977, Adi Shamir, Rivest and Adleman created a system that made it possible to encrypt messages using a public key, freely shared with anyone, and decrypt them using a separate, private key known only to the recipient. Their method, called the RSA Method, allowed confidential information to be exchanged without requiring the sender and receiver to share a secret key in advance.

The RSA Method still underpins internet transactions today. https://t.co/G040q98FrT

[Dire Straits 🎸 @DireStraits77]

“❤️” this icon is the only way to describe this masterpiece

Sultans of Swing (Alchemy Live)

[Ayaan 🐧 @twtayaan]

Microsoft finally lets you install WSL Containers.

It just went live in public preview today.

Developers are already celebrating in the comments. One wrote: "The days of Docker Desktop are numbered, I hope."

Here is what actually shipped:

→ A new CLI called wslc.exe ships directly with WSL. Same commands you already know. Just type wslc instead of docker.
→ A full developer API lets Windows apps run Linux containers as part of their own code in C, C++ and C#.
→ File access on the new virtiofs filesystem is 2x faster than before.
→ Works with VS Code Dev Containers, Microsoft Defender and Intune out of the box.
→ Install today with one command: wsl --update --pre-release

Docker Desktop costs $9 to $24 per user per month for commercial use. WSL Containers is built into Windows and free.

General availability lands this fall.

Full announcement here: https://t.co/ns7AWUjMBf

[Daniel J. Bernstein @hashbreaker]

Unhappy with NSA's SIGINT Enabling Project sabotaging cryptographic standards? This week you can take action to register an objection with IETF regarding an NSA-funded project to standardize ietf-tls-mlkem, a weakened version of ietf-tls-ecdhe-mlkem: https://t.co/iXbcAZ13xo

[Agenzia ANSA @Agenzia_Ansa]

Ogni anno 150mila studenti delle superiori vengono bocciati. È a loro che Federico Mello, anche lui bocciato in terzo superiore, dedica il libro, “Elogio della bocciatura - Perché la tua più grande paura può diventare la tua più grande opportunità”. #ANSA https://t.co/GR8gsVuZsA

[Ayaan 🐧 @twtayaan]

The database running inside every phone, every browser & every plane was built on a US Navy destroyer by a man who had never studied databases in his life.

His name is D. Richard Hipp. In 2000 he was a contractor working on software for the USS Oscar Austin, a guided missile destroyer. The ship used a database called Informix. Whenever Informix went offline, his program crashed and he got the blame.

He got tired of it.

"I just needed a database that worked without a server. So I thought, why don't I just talk directly to the disk?"

He built SQLite during a government contract shutdown when he was briefly out of work. He was not a database person. He had never studied databases formally. He figured it out from first principles.

Then he open sourced it. And everything that happened next he did not predict.

Motorola called. They wanted to license SQLite for mobile phones. Hipp had never licensed software before. He gave them the biggest number he could think of to sound serious.

$80,000.

Motorola paid it without blinking.

Then Symbian called. They tested 10 database engines, two open source and seven proprietary. They gave every other vendor time to tune and optimize. SQLite won anyway.

Then Google called before Android existed. Then Apple put it inside every iPhone.

Today SQLite runs on every iPhone, every Android, every Mac, every browser, every Boeing 787 and every Airbus A350. Inside WhatsApp, iMessage, Spotify, Firefox and Chrome.

It is the most widely deployed database engine on earth.

The entire project is maintained by three people.

No company owns it. No VC funded it. It started on a battleship and ended up on everything.

He charged Motorola $80,000 for something that now runs on a trillion devices.

That is SQLite.

[Ayaan 🐧 @twtayaan]

Epic Games got tired of Git. So they built their own version control system. Then gave it away for free.

This is Lore. Announced at State of Unreal 2026. Open source under MIT. Available right now.

Git was never built for game development. When you are working on a project like Unreal Engine or Fortnite you are mixing source code with massive binary files. 3D models. Textures. Audio. Build outputs. Files that are gigabytes in size.

Git handles large binary files through a bolted-on add-on called Git LFS. Perforce handles them better but it needs a live server connection for everything and nobody outside your company can build tools on top of it.

Epic said none of the existing systems solved all three problems together. Large binary handling, offline work and an open specification. So they spent years building one themselves.

Here is what Lore actually does differently:

→ Works completely offline. Commits, branches, switching — all happen on your machine without touching a server.
→ Every file gets a unique fingerprint. Identical data is never stored twice across files or branches.
→ Large files are broken into chunks. Edit one part of a multi-gigabyte file and only that chunk gets re-uploaded.
→ Your machine only holds files you are actually using. Everything else gets pulled down on demand.
→ Built in Rust. Core library, server and CLI all use the same interface. No special privileged commands.
→ Official SDKs for JavaScript, Python, C# and Go ship with it.

Perforce licenses cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Git LFS is a workaround that was never meant to be a solution.

Lore is free. Written in Rust. MIT licensed. And Epic just put it on the internet for anyone to use.

Repo here:
https://t.co/WelEpip8Ln

[Dire Straits 🎸 @DireStraits77]

Goosebumps every time. Best song ever.

[Harman @itsharmanjot]

In 2005, a Finnish developer named Linus Torvalds got a letter he didn’t expect.

The company behind BitKeeper, the tool his entire team used to manage Linux’s source code, had revoked their free license.

Thousands of developers.
Millions of lines of code.
No backup plan.

So he did what he always does when something doesn’t exist.

He built it himself.

In days.

He called it Git.

Almost nobody took it seriously.

What makes Git different is that it solves the hardest invisible problem in software.

When thousands of developers work on the same codebase at the same time, things collapse.

Someone overwrites someone else’s work.
A bug appears and nobody knows when it was introduced.
A new feature breaks everything and there’s no way back.

Git fixes all of that.

It tracks every single change ever made to a codebase.

Who changed it.
What they changed.
When they changed it.
Why they changed it.

Every version of every file. Every moment in history. Perfectly preserved.

If something breaks, you go back.
If someone makes a mistake, you undo it.
If you want to try something risky, you branch off, experiment, and merge it back when it works.

Most version control tools of that era needed a central server.

Git has no central server.

Every developer holds the entire project history on their own machine.

No server goes down and blocks your work.
No permission needed to start contributing.
No single point of failure.

You just work. And when you’re ready, you share.

That one idea changed how all software gets built.

Today Git is how essentially every line of software on earth gets written.

Every engineer at Google uses it.
Every engineer at Apple uses it.
Every engineer at Amazon uses it.
Every startup, every open source project, every app on your phone.

All built using a tool one developer made in days because he was annoyed.

The most remarkable part?

GitHub, the platform built on top of Git, was acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion.

Git itself?

Still free.
Still open source.
Still maintained by volunteers.

Nobody owns it.
Nobody controls it.
Nobody can take it away.

You are using software built with Git right now.

The app on your phone.
The browser you’re reading this in.
The operating system underneath both.

All of it tracked, versioned, and shipped using a side project born out of frustration.

That’s the thing about tools that change the world:

They were never meant to change the world.

Someone was just tired of things being broken.

So they fixed it.

[trish @TrisH0x2A]

Redis does not use C strings

antirez wrote a custom string library called SDS: Simple Dynamic Strings

it later became a standalone library

C strings had three problems Redis could not accept

- strlen is O(n) because it scans until the null terminator
- strcat needs manual capacity management and often scans the string again internally
- and C strings cannot safely store arbitrary binary data because null bytes end the string

SDS fixes all of this by storing metadata in a header placed right before the string buffer

[Harman @itsharmanjot]

In 2000, a developer named D. Richard Hipp was building software for a U.S. Navy destroyer.

The ship needed a database that could work anywhere.

No server.
No internet.
No administrator.
No setup.

Just data that worked reliably, even in the middle of the ocean.

So he built one himself.

He called it SQLite.

Almost nobody noticed.

What makes SQLite different is that it breaks the rule every major database follows.

Most databases MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle run as separate server processes. Your application talks to the server, and the server manages the data.

SQLite has no server.

A complete database is just a single file on disk.

Your application reads and writes to that file directly.

No installation.
No configuration.
No network connection.
No database administrator.

You can copy it, move it, back it up, or ship it with your application like any other file.

Most databases are infrastructure.

SQLite is a library.

And because of that, it became the default database for the modern world.

Today, SQLite is embedded in billions of devices and applications.

Every iPhone uses it.
Every Android phone uses it.
Google Chrome uses it.
Adobe products use it.
Countless embedded systems, aircraft systems, applications, and operating systems depend on it.

You probably used SQLite today without realizing it.

Opened Instagram? SQLite.
Played music on Spotify? SQLite.
Sent messages on WhatsApp? SQLite.

The most remarkable part?

Richard Hipp still maintains the project he started more than two decades ago.

No venture capital.
No IPO.
No acquisition.

Just an obsessive focus on reliability.

SQLite’s test suite is famously enormous larger than the database engine itself and reliability is treated as a feature, not a marketing slogan.

Google relies on it.
Apple relies on it.
Microsoft relies on it.
Thousands of companies rely on it.

You are probably using SQLite right now.

And there’s a good chance you’ve never heard the name Richard Hipp.

That’s the thing about the most important software in the world:

Sometimes it’s invisible.

[Horde Mode Gaming @HordeModeGaming]

Bobby Prince, the legendary composer behind games such as DOOM, DOOM II, Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 3D, has sadly passed away.

May he rest in peace ❤️

[Ayaan 🐧 @twtayaan]

A Linux engineer moved three lines of code and got a 5% storage speed boost on every machine running Linux.

Three lines. That is it.

Here is what actually happened.

The Linux kernel was doing a cleanup task after every storage operation even when there was nothing left to clean up. Like washing a plate you never used. Every single time.

Fengnan Chang spotted it. Moved three lines so the cleanup only runs when it actually needs to. That is the entire change.

The result: 5% faster storage on Linux. Faster reads. Faster writes. On high speed NVMe drives the improvement is even more noticeable.

Every server and every laptop running Linux 7.2 gets this automatically when it ships in August 2026. You do not have to do anything.

This is why people who truly understand systems can do in one commit what AI tools generating thousands of lines of code cannot.

Full story here:
https://t.co/MzKoL2a7Ui

[Daniel J. Bernstein @hashbreaker]

lib25519-20260614 released: https://t.co/7QTwDXNyVP https://t.co/YbLXjhsicK Many new and improved ARM implementations from Kaushik Nath. Improved integration of verified code from s2n-bignum. Ported to more environments. CPUID tests and compiler lines are now auto-generated.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

Dennis Ritchie invented C in 1972, co-built Unix in 1969, and his code is running inside every device you are reading this on right now and the colleague who announced his death had to do it through a Google+ post because no journalist thought to check.

He worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey for 44 years. He never gave a keynote. He never ran a company. He never appeared on a magazine cover. He just wrote code that became the invisible foundation everything else is built on.

Here is what he actually built, and why it matters more than almost anything that happened in tech.

In 1969, Bell Labs had just walked away from one of the most ambitious computing projects in history. The Multics project, a joint effort between MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, had collapsed under its own weight. Too complex. Too expensive. Too slow. Bell Labs pulled out.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie refused to let the ideas die.

Working in a small office in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix in three weeks during the summer of 1969. One week for the file system. One week for the process management. One week for the command shell. Ritchie was working alongside him, and when the system needed a language that could express what they were building, he built one.

In 1972 he completed C.

C was not just another programming language. It was a different philosophy about what a programming language should be. Before C, most systems code was written in assembly, which meant every program was tied to the specific hardware it ran on. You could not move code between machines. You rewrote it from scratch every time.

C changed that. It sat close enough to the hardware to be fast, but abstract enough to run on anything. When Thompson rewrote the Unix kernel in C in 1973, it became the first operating system that could be picked up and moved to a completely different machine without starting over. Portability was a new idea. Ritchie made it real.

The branching that followed is almost impossible to overstate.

Unix spread from Bell Labs to universities. At Berkeley, it became BSD. BSD became the foundation of macOS and iOS. Unix influenced Linus Torvalds, who built Linux in 1991. Linux now runs every Android phone, every major web server, every supercomputer on the Top500 list, and the overwhelming majority of cloud infrastructure at AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

C became the parent language of C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Objective-C. Rob Pike, who worked across the hall from Ritchie at Bell Labs for 20 years, said it plainly: "The browsers are written in C. The Unix kernel that the entire internet runs on is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C."

Ritchie won the Turing Award in 1983. He won the National Medal of Technology in 1998, presented by President Clinton. He was head of System Software Research at Bell Labs for decades.

He answered emails from strangers with technical questions until the end of his life. His home address stayed listed in the phone book. His colleague Brian Kernighan, who co-authored the definitive C textbook with him, said Ritchie was a private person who did no self-salesmanship. That was not false modesty. It was just who he was.

He died on October 12, 2011, at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He was 70. He had been ill for some time. The world did not notice until Rob Pike posted a quiet announcement on Google+, and the news spread through the programming community in hushed tones.

No front pages. No tributes from heads of state. No candlelight vigils outside corporate campuses.

The device you are reading this on runs code that traces directly back to what he built. So does the server that delivered it to you. So does the browser or app you opened to get here.

Most people will never know his name.

The ones who built everything you use every day do.