The Internet is my canvas. A doctor can operate on one patient at a time, while a line of code affects millions of users.
I'm Jia Wei, a software engineer and founder based in Singapore. I build things for the web and desktop, and I write about technology, AI, startups, and the things I'm trying to figure out along the way.
I got hooked on building things early. At 13, I was writing game scripts for fun. At 14, I tried building trading bots because I thought I could automate my way to riches (I couldn't). At 15, I launched titan.tf, a community gaming platform for Team Fortress 2 that grew to 460k+ unique players, 50+ globally distributed servers, and a community of 20k+ Steam group members. I ran it through polytechnic, through national service, and I still maintain it today.
That first taste of shipping something real, something that thousands of people used every day, changed everything. I was 15 and I'd learned more about product development, server infrastructure, community management, and staying up until 4am debugging than any course could teach. The lesson was simple: build things, ship them, see what happens.
I never really stopped after that.
Since titan.tf, I've founded 18 startups and shipped 17 apps in a 3-month stretch at my most intense. Some of them worked. Some didn't. All of them taught me something.
Decosmic was one of the first platforms for deploying AI agents grounded in trusted documents through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Non-technical users could build context-aware AI agents without writing a single line of code. The core architecture and everything I learned from it now powers what I'm building next.
Update Night started as a newsletter and grew into a curated AI tools directory, a podcast, a Discord community, and a Telegram channel. I ran it for over 2 years straight, covering the latest in tech and AI every single week. Consistency is underrated.
supply.tf is my streetwear label. It's not a tech company, it's a brand built around stories of chasing dreams and refusing to blend in. Fashion as a medium for narrative. Every drop is limited, every collection tells its own story.
In January 2025, I co-founded Base 7 LLP, a software studio that builds local-first, privacy-trusting products. The thesis is simple: technology should give people superpowers, and it should feel seamless, human, and invisible. No vendor lock-in, no cloud dependency, no compromise on privacy.
My main focus right now is Ryu, a local-first AI runtime that brings AI agents to everyone. It's a single Rust binary that runs agents, manages models, connects tools, and remembers context across sessions, all on your own machine. No cloud required.
The idea came from a gap I kept seeing: developers have access to incredible agent capabilities (tool calling, orchestration, memory, sub-agents), but normal people have no way to use any of it. They know "AI" and "ChatGPT," and that's about it. Ryu is the bridge. It takes developer-grade agent infrastructure and wraps it in a desktop app with visual workflows and managed integrations that anyone can use.
I'm building it in Rust with a Tauri V2 desktop app, a CLI, and messaging bot interfaces. The core is open, the architecture is modular, and I'm dogfooding it every day, using Ryu's own agents to help build Ryu.
I write a lot. 87+ blog posts published in about a year, covering AI, developer tooling, startups, and whatever else I'm thinking about. At one point I published 15 posts in 3 days. I'm also producing video content on YouTube, documenting what it's like building a tech startup in Singapore.
Some topics I keep coming back to:
I also write "WTF Is" explainers, BTO guides, credit card optimization strategies, and student developer tools guides, because I believe complex things deserve to be made understandable. If I've figured something out the hard way, I want to make the path shorter for the next person.
Not everything I do lives in a terminal.
I've worked on deep UX and content strategy rewrites for disability support services in Singapore, specifically for the Enabling Guide by SG Enable. The work involves auditing information architecture, rewriting content for caregivers navigating early intervention, therapy, and inclusive support services, and making sure people can actually find and understand the resources available to them. It's one of the most meaningful projects I've been a part of.
I'm also a top 25% contributor on Unsplash with 460k+ views and 4.3k+ downloads. I speak English, Chinese, and Hokkien.
Build more than you plan. I've learned more from shipping 18 startups than I ever could from planning one perfect product. The bias should always be toward making things, not theorizing about them.
Consistency beats intensity. Showing up daily matters more than bursts of motivation or raw talent. The compound effect of consistent work is the most underrated force in building anything meaningful.
Constraints breed creativity. I've never paid for ChatGPT Plus. I rotate between Claude, Gemini, and GLM depending on the task. I hunt student deals, compare $10/month AI coding plans, and use budget providers when they outperform the expensive ones. Zero brand loyalty, only outcome loyalty.
Privacy is a right, not a feature. Your thinking spaces should be protected. That's not about having something to hide, it's about preserving the freedom to explore ideas, be wrong, and change your mind without consequence. It's also why everything I build is local-first by default.
Details are the difference. The "icing on the cake" that makes a product feel magical is always the small, invisible things people don't consciously notice. That final 10% of polish is what separates something forgettable from something that sticks.
Stand out, not blend in. My mission has always been to help myself and others do exactly that. With belief and strategy, you can win against all odds.
I'm currently completing my BSc (Hons) in Computing Science at the Singapore Institute of Technology and University of Glasgow. Before that, I graduated from Republic Polytechnic with a Diploma in Business Information Systems on the Director's Roll of Honour (top 10% of cohort, 3 consecutive years).
Along the way: Google APAC Solution Challenge 2025 (Top 10 APAC, Top 1 Singapore out of 3,300+ students), Dell InnovateFest 2025 Finalist (featured on The Business Times), two Dell Cloud Native Awards (1st place in both Professional Software Development and Cloud Computing), and a stint at MINDEF where I built a machine learning risk model and automated data pipelines for 100k+ record datasets.
My day-to-day stack includes TypeScript, Rust, Python, and .NET. I work across Next.js, React, Tauri, Expo, and React Native on the frontend, and PostgreSQL, Redis, SQLite, Docker, and various cloud services on the backend. I run an automation-heavy workflow with AI agents handling blog publishing, job tracking, expenses, and social posts. Every repeatable task gets automated, because manual repetition is a bug, not a process.
I'm always happy to talk about AI, startups, developer tooling, or anything you're building.