Victor CODES🚀👨‍💻

Software Engineer | I design & build fast, scalable websites and mobile apps that turn ideas into thriving products 🌐

[Smart👨‍💻 | Software Engineer @smartnakamoura]

A First Bank employee named Tijani Muiz Adeyinka worked on the electronic products team.

His job gave him legitimate access to process reversals for customers.

He used that access to credit merchant accounts with money that was not theirs.

The fraudulent postings went to his wife's Zenith Bank account first.
From there to 34 other accounts.
Which then spread to 1,190 secondary accounts across multiple banks.

By the time First Bank noticed and reported it to the Nigeria Police Force on March 25, 2024...the figure had grown from ₦12 billion to ₦40 billion.

He was already on the run.

Three court orders across Lagos and Jalingo were obtained to freeze accounts.
Some of the money had already been converted to USDT through crypto traders.

This is what insider fraud actually looks like in Nigerian banking.

Not a dramatic hack.

A staff member. A privileged function. No second authorization required.

If your system allows any single person to trigger financial transactions without a second approval layer that is your vulnerability.

Segregation of duties is not bureaucracy.
It is what stands between your system and ₦40 billion walking out the door.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

Someone cloned Netflix.
Then cloned Spotify.
Then cloned Instagram.
Then cloned Airbnb.
Then cloned WhatsApp.
Then cloned TikTok.
Then cloned Amazon.

Then put the source code for all of them on GitHub. For free.

Not one app. Not ten. Over 100 open source clones of the biggest apps on Earth. With source code. With demos. With tech stacks listed.

It is called Clone-Wars. 34,555 stars on GitHub.

Built by an Indian-origin developer named Gourav Goyal. He started collecting open source clones of popular apps into one list in December 2020. In March 2021, it went from 0 to 4,000+ stars in 7 days. It was on GitHub Trending for 5 days straight. Someone posted it to Hacker News and it hit #1 on the front page.

Here is what is inside.

Netflix clones. React, TMDB API, full streaming UI.
Spotify clones. Music player, playlists, search, albums.
Instagram clones. Feed, stories, likes, comments, DMs.
WhatsApp clones. Real-time messaging, read receipts, group chats.
Airbnb clones. Search, booking, maps, payments.
Amazon clones. Products, cart, checkout, Stripe payments.
TikTok clones. Short video feed, upload, likes.
Twitter clones. Feed, follow, tweet, retweet.
Slack clones. Channels, threads, real-time chat.
Trello clones. Boards, cards, drag and drop.
YouTube clones. Video player, search, comments.
And 90+ more.

Every clone has source code, a live demo, and the tech stack listed. React, Next.js, Node, Firebase, MongoDB, GraphQL, Tailwind. Every modern stack represented.

Here is why this matters.

Coding bootcamps charge $10,000 to $20,000 to teach you how to build apps like these.

Udemy courses charge $50 to $200 each. One app at a time. One framework at a time.

This repo gives you 100+ fully built apps with source code you can read, fork, and learn from. For $0.

Here is the wildest part.

The best way to learn to build Netflix is to look at someone who already built Netflix. Not a tutorial that teaches you one feature at a time. A complete, working clone with every feature connected.

You do not learn architecture from tutorials. You learn architecture from reading real projects.

100+ apps. 100+ demos. 100+ source codes. One repo.

Bootcamp: $10,000 to $20,000. Teaches 2 to 3 projects.
Udemy: $50 to $200 per course. One project each.

Clone-Wars: $0. 100+ projects. Every big app cloned.

34,555 stars. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Every app you use. Cloned. Open sourced. Free to learn from.

(Link in the comments)

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“One of the most underrated skills you can learn is the ability to ignore your mood and stick with the plan.”

[Rimsha Bhardwaj @heyrimsha]

An engineer from Charlotte, North Carolina sat down in the spring of 2000 to write software for guided missile destroyers in the United States Navy. The ships needed a database that did not require a system administrator on board.

So he wrote one himself. 26 years later that database, SQLite, runs inside every iPhone on Earth, every Android phone, every Mac, every Windows machine, every major web browser, every airplane cockpit avionics system, and most of the cars built in the last decade. It is the most widely deployed software in human history. He still maintains it from his home in North Carolina.

His name is D. Richard Hipp. Most people call him Richard.

Here is the story, because the engineer behind the most replicated piece of code on the planet is a man almost nobody can name.

Richard was born in Charlotte on April 9, 1961. He grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta. He graduated from Stone Mountain High School in 1979 and went to Georgia Tech, where he earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering by 1984. He spent three years at AT&T Bell Labs working in Unix and C. Then he went back to school at Duke University and earned a PhD in Computer Science in 1992. His dissertation was on spoken natural language dialog processing under Alan W. Biermann.

He could have stayed in academia. He told one interviewer the market for PhDs was saturated with better qualified candidates. He started a software consulting company instead. He married a musician and author named Ginger G. Wyrick in 1994 and renamed the firm Hipp, Wyrick and Company.

Then in 2000 he picked up a contract through General Dynamics to write software for the US Navy. The target was the Aegis class guided missile destroyer. The original system ran HP-UX with an IBM Informix database backend. The whole stack required a database administrator on board. The Navy did not want a database administrator on board. Richard's job was to make the database administrator unnecessary.

The design goals were simple. The database had to be self-contained. It had to run inside the application. It had to have zero configuration. It had to be transactional and reliable. It had to require no separate process. It had to be small.

On August 17, 2000 he released SQLite 1.0. He wrote it in C. The whole thing fit in less than a megabyte. The license he chose was the most extreme one possible. He released the source code into the public domain. No copyright. No royalties. No restrictions. Anyone could use it for anything forever.

The decision changed software history.

SQLite spread quietly. Mozilla adopted it for Firefox. Apple put it inside iOS. Google put it inside Android. Microsoft started shipping it inside Windows. Chrome, Safari, and Edge all use it. Photoshop uses it. Skype used it. Every major operating system you have ever touched runs SQLite somewhere underneath. The Airbus A350 uses it for flight software. Every Boeing 787 has SQLite onboard.

By 2026 SQLite was estimated to be running on more than 1 trillion devices. It is the most replicated piece of software ever written. Richard has personally turned down what is almost certainly hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties over the past 26 years by keeping it public domain.

The SQLite team is tiny. Richard and a small group of core contributors. He maintains a separate version control system he wrote himself called Fossil. He maintains a parser generator he wrote himself called Lemon. He maintains a diagram language he wrote himself called Pikchr. He is a member of the Tcl core team and has been for over 25 years. He answers questions on Hacker News under the username SQLite.

The project's public commitment is to support SQLite through the year 2050.

A Christian engineer from North Carolina wrote a small database for missile destroyers and released it for free.

It is now running inside every device in your house.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Robert Greene said it right:

“Eventually, the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up with you, and the fall will be painful.”

[Captain Insight @CaptainInsightX]

The man who killed the $10,000 GPU myth.
He did it alone, from Bulgaria, with one C file. 🤯

>Meet Georgi Gerganov.

>Bulgarian developer. Nobody had heard of him.
>In March 2023, Meta’s LLaMA model leaked online
>Within days he wrote a single C file
>Called it llama.cpp
>It ran a full AI model on a MacBook. No GPU. No cloud.
>The entire AI industry said you needed $10,000 GPUs to run LLMs 🔥
>He proved you didn’t. On a laptop. Alone.
>Also built whisper.cpp ~ same thing for voice AI
> His code is the foundation of Ollama, LM Studio, and GPT4All
>107,000+ GitHub stars. Fastest open-source Ai project to hit 100K ever. 🚀
>In 2026 Hugging Face hired his entire team
>Still ships code. Still open source. Still free.

Whenever you run AI locally, you’re running his work.

Absolute Legend 🐐

[Puneet Patwari @system_monarch]

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.

[blue @bluewmist]

I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

[Adewale Yusuf @AdewaleYusuf_]

There are dozens of accelerators, grant programs, and startup funds actively looking for founders right now.

Here are 5 worth applying to before the end of June:

1. Techstars Anywhere
• Fully remote
• Any industry
• Any country
• No relocation required
• Funding: $220,000
• Deadline: June 10

2. Hello Alice x Allstate Main Street Grants
• 2-week Boost Camp
• 100 founders selected
• $20,000 grant per founder
• Deadline: June 23

3. Google for Startups Accelerator
• 10-week program
• AI for Energy startups
• Pre-seed to Series A
• No equity taken
• Deadline: June 30

4. The Bridge Fall 2026
• For non-US founders
• San Francisco residency
• Pre-idea to early-stage
• Up to $250,000 first check
• Backed by Entrepreneur First
• Deadline: June 28

5. mHUB Chicago Compute-Energy Nexus
• AI + Energy Hardware
• $200,000 investment for 6.5%
• Backed by Equinix, HPE, and Salesforce
• Deadline: July 13

One lesson I’ve learned after more than a decade building startups:

Most founders overestimate how ready they need to be before applying.

The best opportunities often go to people who apply before they feel ready.

If you’re building something interesting, submit the application.

Let investors, accelerators, and customers tell you “no.”

Don’t do it for them.

PS: PS: I’m hosting a free webinar for Africans in the US interested in starting a company. Visit: https://t.co/DC1ZWiSZJg to book a seat.

[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.

[Lex Fridman @lexfridman]

Here's my conversation all about @FFmpeg, the legendary open-source software powering most video on the Internet. In the episode, I talk with Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Kieran Kunhya. JB is lead developer of VLC and Kieran is FFmpeg contributor, codec engineer, and the person behind the now-infamous @FFmpeg account on X.

VLC (@videolan), by the way, is also a legendary piece of open-source software: it's a video player that can open basically anything & has been downloaded over 6 billion times.

I think both FFmpeg and VLC are two of the most important and impactful software systems ever created, both open source, and both created & maintained by volunteers: brilliant engineers from all walks of life.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to FFmpeg and VLC, and in general to all engineers giving their heart & soul to building systems used by millions (or billions) of people, and often doing so not for money, status, or fame, but purely for the love of building great software and doing good for the world.

Thank you to the builders! 🙏❤️

Shoutouts in this chat to @ID_AA_Carmack @karpathy @elonmusk @TimSweeneyEpic and everyone who is a contributor & fan of open source!

It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment).

Timestamps:
0:00 - Episode highlight
2:17 - Introduction
5:35 - Weirdest things VLC opens
9:59 - How video playback works
19:20 - Video codecs and containers
30:07 - FFmpeg explained
51:07 - Linus Torvalds
55:46 - Turning down millions to keep VLC ad-free
1:10:04 - FFmpeg & Google drama
1:29:18 - FFmpeg developers
1:35:55 - VLC and FFmpeg
1:40:29 - History of FFmpeg
1:43:46 - Reverse engineering codecs
1:57:01 - FFmpeg testing
2:01:08 - Assembly code (handwritten)
2:25:26 - Rust programming language
2:34:42 - FFmpeg and Libav fork
2:43:04 - Open source burnout
2:50:51 - x264 and internet video
3:04:07 - Video compression basics
3:11:04 - CIA and fake VLC
3:21:39 - Ultra low latency streaming
3:39:07 - AV2 codec and video patents
3:48:59 - VLC backdoors
3:59:14 - Video archiving
4:05:51 - Future of FFmpeg and VLC

[Neo Kim @systemdesignone]

If you want to get ahead of 99% of software engineers, star & bookmark these 9 GitHub repos:

[Ujjwal Chadha @ujjwalscript]

I met an engineer friend for coffee yesterday who told me he’s getting ready to QUIT Software.

He’s a mid-level dev, incredibly smart, but completely burnt out by the doom-scrolling!

He said, "Look at the 2026 data, man. Active tech openings are down to a multi-year low. Entry-level hiring has dropped nearly 20%. Eric Schmidt is out here telling everyone traditional coding is dead, and tools like Claude Code can resolve half our production bugs autonomously. What is even the point of trying to compete with a machine that works for pennies?"

He genuinely believed the popular consensus: The machines are over, so human developers are obsolete. I let him finish, took a sip of my coffee, and told him he was completely misreading the room.

Yes, the market is restructuring. Yes, companies are trimming the fat. But they aren't firing people because they want less software. They are firing the the people whose entire value proposition was copy-pasting boilerplate, writing routine unit tests, and manually building CRUD apps.

Look at what happened to the senior engineering market. Demand for system architects, infrastructure specialists, and platform engineers is actually holding strong. Why? Because when it costs zero dollars to generate 10,000 lines of code, you don't need fewer engineers. You need better engineers to make sure that mountain of synthetic code doesn't blow up your production server.

I told him: "Two years ago, your value was looking up syntax and type. Today, your value is your judgment. Can you break down a messy business problem into concrete technical constraints? Can you look at 5 different architectural patterns an AI suggests and weigh the cloud token costs against technical debt? Can you audit a script and spot the logic flaw before it hits production?" 

Laying bricks is cheap now. Designing the building is where the money is.
If you are thinking about quitting tech because "AI can code," you are giving up right at the exact moment the boring parts of your job are being automated away.
Don't quit. Upgrade your cognitive stack. Move from a coder to a conductor.

[WELCOME TO BLACK TWlTTER  @blacktwiterthrd]

nobody coming to save you also implies
no one is coming to stop you

[Joe @JoePostingg]

I'm the data protection guy at my company, and one thing I'm learning is that people love uploading confidential information into ChatGPT.

[Victor CODES🚀👨‍💻 @codes_victor_]

@smartnakamoura Junior dev signal. There are many things you're yet to know as a software engineer. Not a big deal. Chill

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Major cheat code for life: Increase your recovery speed.

You will get rejected. You will lose money. You will embarrass yourself. The goal isn't to avoid the fall. It's to shorten the time between the fall and the reset.

The ultimate life hack is the ability to quickly reset and recover.

From a poor decision. From a bad interaction. From a missed workout. From a bad day. You can start over whenever you want. You can't always control what happened, but you can control how long you carry it.

Fast recovery compounds.

[Essential Mastery @EssentialMastry]

“Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, mathematics, and computers.”

- @naval

[Vaishnavi @_vmlops]

A guy didn't have a CS degree
wanted to work at Google
studied 8-12 hrs/day for months
got hired at Amazon instead

he open-sourced his entire study plan
coding-interview-university - 337k stars on GitHub

covers everything: DSA, trees, graphs, dynamic programming, system design, OS, networking

https://t.co/CbcPEStrWb

the most complete free CS curriculum on the internet

[Victor CODES🚀👨‍💻 @codes_victor_]

I'm doing this more and more now

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Rumi said “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.”

Clarity doesn't come before action.

It comes from action.