𝐅𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬

rt's are not endorsements

[Ken Talks Tech @kenbonyo]

There is a new cash cow in town. 🚨
If you import a car to Kenya right now, @ntsa_kenya is taking weeks to print physical plates after allocation. Since CFS storage fees are piling up, you're forced to drive from Mombasa with your registration on a piece of paper. (1/4)

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This sentence by Van Gogh hits hard:

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”

[terminally onλine εngineer @tekbog]

me to mythos: hi

mythos:

[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.

[Young⁠ @Brayohki]

kuna vitu basic sana that people forget to check when they're buying a laptop, they always seem like minor issues but ni vitu zinaaffect it's productivity and value for your money
so I'll talk about a few that i know below... 🧵

[Three Year Letterman @3YearLetterman]

He mastered this app in 72 hours in a way I haven’t been able to do in almost 9 years

All you can do is tip your cap

[femiiiiii. @femiiiszn]

read more books. read to escape reality. read to understand reality. read to challenge what you believe. read to think better. read to write better. read to argue better. read to know yourself. read to build something. a single book can completely rewire your brain.

[trish @TrisH0x2A]

remember when 512MB RAM was considered massive?

programmers wrote code like every byte mattered. optimized everything. squeezed performance from nothing.

suddenly nobody cared about efficiency anymore. just throw more RAM at it, problem solved.

now we have 32GB RAM and Slack uses 2GB just to show text messages. Electron apps eat memory like it's free candy.

we got better hardware and built worse software. abundance made us lazy.

[Jesse @Dev_JesseMaduka]

Some developers spend more time tweeting about tech than actually building anything 😭

[Om @betterrcallom]

i think we should bring back the concept of waking up on weekends and watching cartoons first thing in the morning.

[𝖇 𝖔 𝖔 𝖙 𝖊 𝖗 @booterart]

I've been reading Crime and Punishment again, which lead to this thought.

The most dangerous people don’t look dangerous. They look anxious. They avoid confrontation. They shrink from small humiliations. The capacity is just dormant.

What makes you think you’re not capable?

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

“Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.” - G. Doyle

[𝐅𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 @tranquilfavours]

being constantly reachable with such ease was a terrible play from humanity

[Kones. @BCherich]

Writing SQL is fun.

[Mr. Buzzoni @polydao]

Vasilios Syrakis is back

after the massive success of his Atlassian video, he just dropped a follow-up addressing everything

the stuff people really wanted to know:

> no university degree, dropped out after 10th grade, started in help desk
> taught himself everything from scratch - books, videos, no mentor
> he didn't break any NDA - Atlassian published more detailed info themselves
> the architecture was 10 years old - he'd build it completely differently today

and the thing that hit hardest:

> to everyone who felt impostor syndrome watching his first video - he said the gap between you and someone who knows more is usually just time, not intelligence

the full response is above

and he's building a control plane from scratch on camera soon so you can see exactly how it's done

[Microsoft Learn @MicrosoftLearn]

Some call it procrastination, others call it background processing.