This is the pilot episode of our new interview series Meet the Developer, where we talk to the people behind anti-censorship tools. Our goal is to shine a light on the developers whose open-source solutions help millions of people stay connected.

In this first episode, we sit down with Toby, the lead developer of Hysteria, to discuss the project’s origins, technical challenges and his perspective on internet censorship.

Let’s start with an introduction. Tell us who you are and what you do.

Just call me Toby. I’m a software engineer. Previously, I have worked for a large company. But right now, I’m a co-founder of a startup with some friends.

Nice to meet you Toby! Would you like to share what type of startup it is, or is it a top secret project?

We are still in stealth mode.

Why did you decide to develop Hysteria?

It was originally a project I developed for myself when I was in college.
China’s global Internet connectivity has been notoriously bad for as long as I can remember (still not any better right now). Not just in the sense of censorship, but also in terms of connection quality.

For example, if you have a server in the US and want to connect to it from China, expect over 10-20% or more packet loss.

So if you set up a proxy server in another country to circumvent censorship, it would be painfully slow (the most popular tools back then were GoAgent and later Shadowsocks).

So Hysteria began as an attempt to improve my speed for watching YouTube videos.

It’s always great to see developers building something to solve their own challenges. I can relate to the packet loss issue. Either you suffer the packet loss, or you have to purchase an expensive server with CN2 routing, which will cost a lot.

Meet the Developer: Hysteria