Fire and Rain — Why I Built Lumirain Studio

It was 2 AM and I was staring at two words on a sticky note.

One said fire. The other said rain.

I'd spent weeks trying to name this thing — this studio, this container for everything I wanted to build. Every name I tried felt either too corporate or too cute. I wanted something that held tension. Something that contained contradiction without resolving it.

Fire moves fast. It transforms. It's the moment a barcode scanner reads a book cover in under a second, the moment a voice note crystallizes into text before you finish your thought. Fire is compression — taking something that used to cost you thirty seconds of friction and burning it down to one.

Rain is different. Rain is patient. Rain doesn't care if you're a power user or someone who just got their first iPhone. It falls everywhere equally. Rain is the belief that good software shouldn't require a manual.

I wrote 炬霖 on that sticky note. Jù lín. Torch and rain together. Lumirain.

点燃灵感，润泽成长。 Ignite inspiration, nourish growth. That became the tagline, but honestly it was more like a compass heading. Something to check myself against when I'm three weeks deep in a feature and I've lost the thread.

The shape of an itch#

Every tool I've built started as an itch I couldn't stop scratching.

I own too many books. Not in the virtuous way — in the chaotic way, where you find the same novel twice on different shelves and realize you bought it a year apart. I wanted a way to point my phone at a barcode and just know: do I have this already? Where is it? When did I read it last?

So I built 七印 — Seven Seals. A book management app for macOS and iOS. The name is a bit dramatic for a library tracker, I know. But naming things after apocalyptic imagery keeps me humble about scope creep.

The core interaction is almost stupidly simple. Scan. Done. The book appears in your library with its cover, metadata, everything. That's the fire part — collapsing a multi-step process into a single gesture. The rain part is that my mother can use it. She doesn't read English, she's not technical, and she manages her bookshelf with it just fine.

Then came flash Memo. I kept having ideas while walking my dog, and by the time I got home and opened a notes app, half the thought had evaporated. So I built something where you just talk. Open the app, speak, and it captures your words as text. No buttons to configure, no settings to fiddle with. The best interface is the one that gets out of your way.

But notes are only useful if they go somewhere. They need context, connection, structure. That's what led me to Slate 2.0 — a note-taking app that uses AI not to write for you, but to help you think. It runs on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and the web. Building cross-platform was a deliberate choice. I don't want your operating system to be a gate. Rain falls on every roof.

And underneath all of it sits a Knowledge Base — a web system where everything connects. Books from 七印, voice captures from flash Memo, structured notes from Slate. Separate streams feeding the same river.

Building with fire, shipping in rain#

People sometimes ask about the tech stack, as if the tools explain the work. They don't, but for the curious: it's Flutter and Dart for the cross-platform pieces, Swift when I need to go native on Apple platforms, TailwindCSS for the web layers. I pick boring tools that let me move fast. The interesting problems are never in the framework — they're in the interaction design, the milliseconds between tap and response, the way a screen feels before you consciously evaluate it.

There's a principle I keep coming back to: compress everyday actions to under one second. That's fire. Make sure everyone can effortlessly tap the same button. That's rain. Where fire and rain coexist — that's Lumirain.

It sounds clean when I write it out like that. The reality is messier. Some weeks I'm deep in performance optimization, shaving 200 milliseconds off a scan, and I forget to test whether the onboarding flow makes sense to a first-time user. Other weeks I'm so focused on accessibility that I let a memory leak slide for three builds. The tension between speed and inclusivity isn't something you resolve. You just keep balancing.

What rain sounds like at 3 AM#

I still code late at night. Not because I have to — I've gotten better about that — but because there's a quality of attention at 3 AM that I can't find during the day. The world is quiet. The Slack messages stop. It's just me and the problem.

Sometimes I look at the home.lumirain.cn landing page and it feels impossibly small for what I want it to become. Other times it feels like exactly the right size. A studio, not a company. A place where one person can build things that are fast and gentle at the same time.

火与雨共存的地方。

The rain hasn't stopped. The fire hasn't gone out. That's enough for now.