Indie maker · Hangzhou

Lin YuLin Yu

I am aFull-stack engineer

I build things I want to use.Hangzhou, China

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About me

A maker who turns personal pain points into products

Lin

Lin YuLin Yu@linyu

Full-stack engineerIndependent developerProduct designerOpen-source maintainer

Hangzhou, China

hi@linyu.dev

I am Lin Yu, an independent full-stack developer and product maker. Over the past six years, I have turned every idea I wanted for myself into a working product.

I always build things in reverse: first comes a problem that bothers me every day, then a product. Constant interruptions led to Tide; ugly code screenshots led to CodeFrame; notes scattered across five clouds led to the local-first Inkbook.

I believe in small, enduring software that one person can maintain, sustain as a business, and use for a decade. Technology is only a means; I care most about whether a product feels effortless. That final 5% of the experience often takes half my time.

This site is also dogfood: every pixel, from the aurora background to the guestbook, is built with my own component library and no external UI kit.

Skills matrix

How I turn ideas into products

For six years I have refined these disciplines: frontend is my foundation, full-stack and native work extend it, and design plus growth let one person carry a product end to end.

Frontend · React / TypeScript95%

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Component libraries / design systems / motion

Full stack · Node / Rust / Go82%

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Local first · Edge functions · CLI

Mobile · Swift / SwiftUI78%

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Native iOS / watchOS

Product design · Figma88%

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Visual and interaction design from zero to one

Growth · Content / SEO70%

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Launching an independent product

Languages

TypeScriptRustSwiftGoPython

front end

ReactNext.jsViteTailwindMotionWebGL

Backend / infrastructure

NodeTauriCloudflareSQLitePostgres

Design / tools

FigmaLinearRaycastVercel

TypeScriptRustSwiftGoPythonReactNext.jsViteTailwindMotionWebGLNodeTauriCloudflareSQLitePostgresFigmaLinearRaycastVercel

Featured work

Six products I use every day

Every product began with a real problem that bothered me. Open any project for the full story, screenshots, and key implementation details.

Web SaaSOnline

2024

Codemarker

CodeFrame

Turn code screenshots into artwork worth sharing.

ReactTypeScriptViteTailwindSatori

iOS APPOnline

2023

Tide

Let focus rise and fall like the tide.

Inkbook

A local-first Markdown notebook where your data always belongs to you.

TauriRustReact

Open-source CLIOpen source

2022

flowctl

Orchestrate your local workflow with one YAML file.

Your health at a glance on your wrist.

SwiftWidgetKitHealthKit

Browser extensionOnline

2025

Marginalia

Whitespace

Turn any web page into a clean reading experience.

TypeScriptWXTReact

Browse more demos

Timeline

From the first line of code to full-time independence

Not a carefully planned path, but a trail of ideas I wanted to use myself.

2024Became a full-time indie developerLeft my job to build independent products full time, supported by CodeFrame and Tide.
2023Released Tide on the App StoreMy first independent app reached 50,000 organic downloads in three months.
2022Open-sourced flowctlA local workflow CLI with more than 10,000 GitHub stars.
2021Left my second jobMoved from full-stack engineering toward becoming a generalist who can ship an entire product alone.
2019Wrote my first line of RustDiscovered the local-first software philosophy.
More is on the way...

Let's talk

Have an idea? Let's build something together

Whether you want to collaborate, ask for advice, or simply meet a fellow maker, leave a note or book a virtual coffee.

Let's talk

Prefer direct contact?

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hi@linyu.dev