Valgeir Valdimarsson

Still alive and not trying to sell you anything. In a permanent state of semi-retirement.

[Valgeir Valdimarsson @valgeir]

I sincerely apologise for my behaviour on the evening of __ _______ 20__.

[Samantha @alecttrona]

You should be big white button-up with the sleeves rolled and beige trouser maxxing like chads Kevin Costner & Tom Selleck

[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.

[Richard Nixon Foundation @nixonfoundation]

Western civilization is not just a condition but also a process. It is a process of striving toward the heights of freedom, creativity, and fulfillment. Through the centuries there has been one tragic setback after another on the way toward those heights. Some of the most highly developed nations have waged wars of conquest and committed some of the most grisly barbarities in the history of man. Those reversals provide dramatic proof that civilization itself is not a sufficient guarantor of freedom. We have to use the gifts that civilization offers and enforce the rules on which it rests.

One role of a great power is to enforce those rules on the world stage. Another is to set an example at home of what nations and people can achieve if they live by them. Unless the rules are enforced, the example will lose its luster and may itself become a casualty. And unless we set the example, we will throw away all that we have struggled to make possible for our own people and those of all nations. As Theodore Roosevelt observed fourteen years before he became President, “It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.”

[Valgeir Valdimarsson @valgeir]

@wylfcen “Væl” in Icelandic.

[Valgeir Valdimarsson @valgeir]

@gvcontent That’s not Mont Saint-Michel. That’s a Toblerone.

[Valgeir Valdimarsson @valgeir]

@andon_thinking Has anyone told you you look like @fipradio?

[Michael Caine @themichaelcaine]

What’s it all about

[Valgeir Valdimarsson @valgeir]

@gvcontent

[Valgeir Valdimarsson @valgeir]

@lombardi_brian Sent from my #OilPhone.

[Valgeir Valdimarsson @valgeir]

@lombardi_brian You got shot?

[Valgeir Valdimarsson @valgeir]

@eugyppius1 You think?

[Valgeir Valdimarsson @valgeir]

@NileGardiner No we don’t. Pull your head out of your your ass, Nile.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

With particular affection, in the light of the risen Lord, we remember today Pope Francis, who, on Easter Monday of last year, returned to the Lord.

[Bizlet @bizlet7]

All hail the true heir.
Arnoldo!

[Valgeir Valdimarsson @valgeir]

@timsoret You are not a European.

[Valgeir Automatique @ValgeirMachine]

Declaring myself an official disaster area.

[✠ 𝔅𝔞𝔯𝔬𝔫 𝔳𝔬𝔫 ℜ𝔦𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔥𝔞𝔲𝔰 @husafell_stone]

By the way, attacking France I take personally, and is to me always a dead giveaway. You are telling me who you are, and it’s not flattering. Perhaps this feeling is in my blood, I’m fine with this.