Yu-Wen Chen (Katness)

I'm a software engineer based in Ottawa, Canada. I spent six years as a software engineer at startups in Taiwan and Singapore, followed by two years of freelancing — most of it on SaaS products taken from a blank repository to a shipped MVP.

My work sits across the whole stack: interfaces in React and Vue, services in Nest.js and Node.js, relational and document data models, and deployments on GCP and AWS. The thread running through it is that I like owning a feature end to end, from the data model up to the pixel.

More recently that has extended into integrating AI into products — both cloud-hosted models and locally-run ones — which is what most of the work below is about.

Today, I focus on collaborating with non-technical founders. While AI allows almost anyone to 'vibe-code' an incredible initial proof-of-concept, taking a product across the finish line to become a truly workable, launch-ready MVP requires deep technical structure. I work closely with founders to pinpoint their technical hurdles, unblocking their workflows and establishing a solid foundation for rapid product iterations.