Amos Wenger

Most people who read about computers want to know how things work. Amos Wenger is one of the rare few who wants to show you. Not in a professor-with-a-pointer way. In a "let's take this apart together and see what's actually happening inside the kernel" way. Their blog, fasterthanli.me, is where systems programming goes to become approachable - long, meandering, delightful, and surprisingly funny for content that regularly touches io_uring internals.

The alias fasterthanlime is the kind of clever that only lands when you say it out loud. Faster than light? Sure. But with a citrus twist - the domain is fasterthanli.me, a URL that doubles as a declaration. Amos builds fast things and is not humble about it.

They grew up in Switzerland, studied computer science and microengineering at EPFL - one of Europe's top technical universities - and then did something most EPFL graduates do not do: they went to work for itch.io, the indie game marketplace, and started writing articles that made the whole internet stop scrolling and actually read.

After itch.io came Netlify, then Fly.io - a resume that reads like a tour of the companies that defined the developer infrastructure conversation of the 2010s and 2020s. At each stop, Amos built things that were hard, learned how they broke, and then wrote about it in a way that made the next person's job easier. In 2022, they stopped working for anyone else and founded bearcove.

Bearcove is not a startup. It is not trying to raise a series A. It is an open-source organization that exists to ship Rust tools that are genuinely useful, fund that work through sponsorships, and produce educational content that treats readers like adults. It is, in the truest sense, a one-person publishing house where the product is understanding.

Based in Lyon, France, Amos lives with two cats, makes music in Ableton Live, cuts videos in DaVinci Resolve, and writes code in Zed - itself a Rust editor, naturally. They are transparent about autism, ADHD, and depression in a way that makes other engineers feel less alone. When they started antidepressant treatment, they wrote about it publicly and said the thing a lot of people feel but rarely say: "fuck, how many years have I wasted."

That combination - technical brilliance delivered with radical honesty - is what makes fasterthanlime a presence in the Rust community that is impossible to ignore and easy to trust.

Here is a story that sounds like a brag but is actually a lesson. Amos spent 18 months transitioning from managed hosting at Fly.io - the very company they used to work for - to a completely self-hosted Kubernetes infrastructure running on bare metal. They learned k3s, Helm, and Terraform not from a course but from necessity, failure, and a few unplanned disaster recovery exercises.

The result: a CDN-like system that deploys website code to servers worldwide in under 60 seconds and achieves a time-to-first-byte of 21 to 70 milliseconds across most global locations. The monthly cost is €85.

For context: that performance profile competes with major cloud CDN products that cost orders of magnitude more. Amos achieved it not because they had a team of infrastructure engineers, but because they understood the actual constraints well enough to eliminate the parts that did not matter.

This is the fasterthanlime method applied to infrastructure: read the source, understand the system, refuse to accept the abstraction layer as the floor. The blog post about the journey is, predictably, an extremely long and satisfying read.

When you work at Fly.io and later run your own competing infrastructure, you earn the right to have opinions about cloud pricing. Amos has several.