Why I Started AFFiNE - August 3, 2022

Every great product begins with a question you can't stop asking. Mine was: What if your data truly belonged to you? The Spark I'd spent the better part of two years inside a large engineering team, working on online documentation infrastructure. The codebase was aging. The tooling was borrowed from architectures designed for someone else's constraints. Every time a user lost work to a sync failure, or couldn't access their notes offline, I felt the gap between what we had and what was possible. I started building experiments in the margins of my actual job — prototypes of a different kind of editor, one that kept your data on your device first and treated the server as optional rather than essential. A local-first architecture, before I'd even heard that phrase used widely. Those experiments consumed my nights. And the more I built, the more convinced I became that the right answer couldn't live inside corporate walls. The Leap So I left. No roadmap approved by a committee, no guarant