Francisco Salinas
San Francisco, CA
I learned to code during lockdown and built an $800K+ business selling video game mods from my freshman year dorm room. 12,000+ paying customers across 103 countries, all before I turned 22.
Working that closely with the operating system made me naturally curious about desktop development, and after noticing there was no good disk space visualizer on Windows, I thought it'd be a fun engineering challenge to take on. I'd later call it Diskify. I spent months building the sunburst rendering engine by hand. That process made me realize how much I cared about building software that actually feels good to use, not just software that works.
I'm now building Ida, native macOS software for turning voice commands into actions across desktop apps. The work spans transcription, app integrations, command routing, and interface design.
B.S. in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University with a focus on Web Design — selected for the 7th cohort of SCU's Bronco Venture Startup Accelerator shortly after graduating.
Hold one key, speak, and your desktop acts. Ida is a native macOS assistant built around a single interaction primitive — one key that does everything. Backed by a transcription and command routing engine that handles the complexity so the interface never has to.
Objective-C++ · AppKit · Qt6 · ASR
Qt has no native Liquid Glass support, so I built this library for the first version of Ida — bridging Apple's private AppKit glass effects into Qt6 via Objective-C++. Starred by a Qt platform architect. #4 all-time on r/QtFramework.
Objective-C++ · Qt6
Launched iOS app for sourcing car parts. Snap a photo of any unfamiliar part, a vision model identifies it, and the app surfaces matching listings so you can buy a replacement without leaving the screen.
React Native · TypeScript · Vision Models
Voice AI agent that automates SOP information retrieval to help manufacturing teams resolve floor issues faster. First place at a hackathon held at AWS.
TypeScript · Weaviate · RAG
Concept for a daily social app where everyone gets the same prompt and a limited window to respond. Instead of sharing what you're doing right now, you're answering a challenge — and seeing how differently your social circle interprets it.
Swift · Figma · React
Disk space visualizer for Windows — built after noticing no DaisyDisk equivalent existed. The biggest engineering challenges were keeping memory footprint low while caching enough filesystem data to render it densely in a sunburst format.
C++ · Qt6
ImGui login menu with a full Node.js + SQLite backend. AES-256-CBC encrypted client-server comms, HWID locking, license management. 53 stars, 18 forks.
ImGui · Node.js · SQLite · C++
Fetches and stitches real-time INRIX traffic tiles, then uses OpenCV to extract contours into mappable coordinates for high-quality traffic visualization.
C++ · OpenCV · ImGui