Mike

Grumpy old man who writes code. Believer in science, objective reality and human rights. The Earth is an oblate spheroid. Emojis in Unicode are a blight.

[Mike @mstefan]

If you are using a service for free, the most important thing to remember is that you are the product.

[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.

[Mike @mstefan]

@happygeek @TracketPacer the Lords of Pemdas shall smite thee.

[Mike @mstefan]

@ToKenHull @alice_k_bull Back in the 70s, our community college had a "computers for kids" program that taught BASIC, Fortran and Pascal on Prime minicomputers. If you were lucky, you were able to snag one of the terminals instead of being relegated to teletype hell.

[Mike @mstefan]

@Synk556 @MizShannonS This is historically ... well, stupid. I'm sorry, but there's no other word for this. "Inaccurate" doesn't quite meet the depths of the abject ignorance reflected in the statment that "only in the last 70 years [has there been] two partners working".

[Mike @mstefan]

@JenMsft I did not, but I can imagine it was amazing. So many opportunities beyond "dark grey box on floor".

[Mike @mstefan]

@BaronDestructo This was disappointing news, I'm sorry for you and the rest of the writing team. I guess all we can hope for is that somewhere, somehow, sanity prevails.

[Mike @mstefan]

We don't deserve nice things, apparently.

[GateWorld.net #SaveStargate @GateWorld]

Amazon Has Axed Its New Stargate Series
https://t.co/CReonRt2Qg

Amazon MGM Studios is not moving forward with Martin Gero's Stargate revival, which was to begin filming this fall.

[Mike @mstefan]

@NerdyCheeseCurd I feel seen.

[Mike @mstefan]

@Zarkkill @AllisonRFloyd Look at you, out there defending the "entire species".

[Mike @mstefan]

@JenMsft Remember, birds aren't real. They're just up there on the power lines recharging.

[Mike @mstefan]

@kmcnam1 I should use this in my documentation.

[Mike @mstefan]

The first thing to get rid of would be the golf courses. That sport is nothing but a good walk, ruined.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

US Data Centers use about 150B gallons of water.
U.S. golf courses use about 500B gallons of water.
US Almond Farms use about 1500B gallons of water.

Now you know the scale of the problem. We cannot go on like this. We MUST control our almond consumption.

[Mike @mstefan]

@sdbrownlie @davepl1968 Almondmilk probably uses a huge portion of that.

[vx-underground @vxunderground]

Unfathomable banger

[Mike @mstefan]

@JenMsft "All your couch are belong to me!"

[Mike @mstefan]

@shenetworks The most important thing about your resume isn't the length, it's the white text prompt.

[Mike @mstefan]

@kmcnam1 While not technically accurate, still funny as hell.