Than Gk

Practicing SRE

[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.

[Alex Xu @alexxubyte]

What Are Agent Skills Really About?

How Do They Work?

We made a video to explain it clearly.

[Mohit Mishra @chessMan786]

Explaining Pointers Until I Go Insane

[blue @bluewmist]

computer science from scratch(literally)
from semiconductor transistors to programming in c.

[Than Gk @thgkr]

Monitoring ECC memory on Linux #Linux #Server #Monitoring #ECC
https://t.co/1rAGYWBUB0

[Ivan Velichko @iximiuz]

From VMs to Containers to Pods 🧵

Containers are (just) Linux processes.

A helpful approximation to "get it." But at some point it might start limiting one’s understanding of the tech, hence the abilities.

[Ivan Velichko @iximiuz]

A thread on Desktop Container Environments 🧵

We'll peek into the inner workings of running cross-platform containers and discover some exciting tools like OrbStack and Lima!

Get ready for a fascinating journey! 🚀

[Kamran Ahmed @nilbuild]

OAuth - How does it Work?

[Vladimir Mikhalev @heyvaldemar]

Linux bash cheatsheet

#devops #devsecops #kubernetes #cicd #k8s #linux #docker #sysadmin #automation #technology #cloudcomputing #serverless #bash #shell

[howtopam @howtopam]

30 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know
Need to monitor Linux server performance? Try these built-in commands and a few add-on tools. Most distributions come with tons of Linux monitoring tools.
https://t.co/1tBntJSeX2

[Than Gk @thgkr]

@LinuxSeb Try @gentoo far more entertaining

[Than Gk @thgkr]

@LinuxHandbook XFS

[Programming Wisdom @CodeWisdom]

"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." – Dennis Ritchie

[Go News @golang_news]

Learning Generics In Go https://t.co/bQ13v7Bbjb #reddit

[Binni Shah @binitamshah]

Linux Page Cache for SREs : syscalls, kernel internals and knobs, perf, vmtouch, cgroup v2, LRUs, writeback, mmap() tricks and much more : https://t.co/wqgqX9d1Ln credits @brk0v

[Jim Huang @jserv]

The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide is a free book, and it had been a long time (> 13 years) since last modifications. Recently, my students and I are updating the content and corresponding sample code to Linux v5.x. Check it out: https://t.co/jMKP73frVN

[nixCraft 🐧 @nixcraft]

System and IP failover illustrated

[Linux Foundation Education @Linux_Education]

If you’re looking to start a career in Linux, this free guide will teach you what you need to know! Download "A Brief Guide to Starting Your IT Career as a Linux Sysadmin" at https://t.co/K7nihFBGHN #learnlinux #itjobs #itcareers #sysadmin #linux #opensource

[Phoronix @phoronix]

#Google Proposes Multi-Generational LRU For #Linux To Yield Much Better Performance

Yes, please! Very promising data!

https://t.co/dbD7MRpO80

[Than Gk @thgkr]

Evolution of Unix
https://t.co/kCAbBcOm4l
#Greek #Greece #Audiences