About

Hi, I'm James Im (opens in a new tab), and Prefabrik is a personal project of mine.

When I started working on Prefabrik in the summer of 2023, I was primarily driven by a couple of practical motivations:

  1. Creating personal apps remained costly for individuals and small teams. In 2023, I was still seeing too much time and money being spent on developing even basic app functionalities. This led me to believe that there is an opportunity for a tool that can drastically reduce the cost of creating new apps.
  2. All of my work up to that point had been on proprietary, closed-source projects. I wanted to create an open set of app components that can be reused across many projects and use cases.

As I started to build early versions of Prefabrik, I began to learn more about related product categories like no-code and developer tools. Then, I reflected more broadly on the recursive nature of software used to create software, and was reminded of how I originally started building apps because I wanted to see my own ideas come to life. Finally, I connected the dot between the lack of human-centric tools for software creation and the general feeling of dissatisfaction and powerlesness in the zeitgeist caused by the increasingly passive role end-users are relegated to in their everyday computing.

That's when Prefabrik took on a new meaning for me. It became clear that I was working on a problem that is deeply personal to me, with potential implications far beyond my original motivations. These realizations culminated in the following beliefs that now form the foundation of the Prefabrik project:

  1. Software is a digital fabric. It can be tailored to any form to meet our diverse and personal needs.
  2. Every individual uniquely understands their own needs and desires.
  3. Therefore, everyone should be able to create and customize their own tools to place in their digital environment.

I hope that Prefabrik helps people reclaim an active role in their software use, echoing the early days of personal computing when individual creativity and agency were at the forefront.