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.

A new report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) confirms Fulani militants caused more deaths than Boko Haram or ISIS over the past year by mostly targeting Christian farming communities in Nigeria. Commenting on the report, Open Doors CEO Henrietta Blyth said: "My heart has been broken as I have heard stories from women and men who have seen their beloved family members butchered in front of them or carried off into a life of slavery."

I Tried @taylorotwell's Dead Simple Dev Setup.. Now I Get It New Video: youtu.be/HkNJA5yqWSY?si=hdlz…

In his book, Gowon cast Ojukwu as the bad guy on #Biafra & Aburi. In this video, Ojukwu replied Gowon word for word, as if he knew what was to come.

We’re thrilled to announce that we have raised $300M at a $5B valuation. The round is led by IVP and CapitalG, both doubling down on their investment in Baseten, and joined by 01A, Altimeter, Battery Ventures, BOND, BoxGroup, Blackbird Ventures, Conviction, Greylock, and NVIDIA. Read more here: baseten.co/blog/announcing-b…

Anthropic CEO (Dario Amodei): "Coding is going away first, then all of software engineering." What do you think about this?

php laravel is the best stack in the world imo tried a different style for this video.. more editing, touching grass, and pitching php/laravel to people who haven't seen what this stack can do lmk what you think watch here: youtu.be/C_0XBmrubsY?si=90r9…

A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you don’t know much about the subject, don’t care or don’t have a clear idea of what the you want. This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I don’t know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive. Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely can’t one-shot it.

Jinseoul ranks the top 10 states she visited in Nigeria 💜