# About · KinfeMichael Tariku

Source: /about

05About

# KinfeMichael Tariku

- Founder
- YC alum

I'm an Ethiopian design and software engineer, and above all an open source maintainer who turned a hobby into a career.

I co-founded and maintain [Better Auth](https://better-auth.com) and I'm a core maintainer of [assistant-ui](https://www.assistant-ui.com), the TypeScript and React library for AI chat.

Hover to scatter Kinfish

Better Auth started as "there has to be a better way to do auth" (spoiler: there was one, but not there yet) and has somehow accumulated over 30k GitHub stars and more than 30m+ downloads. The internet is weird like that.

When I'm not maintaining those, I run [Farming Labs](https://github.com/farming-labs), where I collect JS garbages so that you don't have to. That is where [Farm.js](https://farmjs.dev) and the rest of my [projects](https://github.com/Kinfe123) come from.

As a competitive programmer, I enjoy the masochistic pleasure of solving problems that make me question my life choices, and then I write about them because suffering alone is boring.

I'm a deeply technical person, and I write [blog posts](/articles) about the things I'm genuinely curious about: how frameworks and runtimes work underneath, AI tooling, bundlers, performance and security. When something doesn't make sense or seems oddly designed, I dig into it and write about what I find. This is either a healthy intellectual curiosity or an unhealthy obsession I'm still deciding.

My favorite hobby away from the keyboard is reading. I love reading books about as much as I love writing, and the ones I've finished live on my [books](/books) page. The rest of the time I'm probably exploring new frameworks or contributing to open source, because I clearly haven't learned my lesson about free time yet.

Neymar is the GOAT for me, and no, I won't be taking questions about the diving. I'm a big football fan in general, which mostly means shouting at a screen as if the players can hear me, but Neymar is just different. He also has more spots on my [pics](/pics) page than most of my friends.

If you only remember one line about me, make it this one, borrowed from a movie:

> I'm 147 pounds of pale skin and fragile bone, and sarcasm is my only defense.

## 05.1Elsewhere

- [X](https://x.com/KinfishT)@KinfishT
- [GitHub](https://github.com/Kinfe123)Kinfe123
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kinfemichael-tariku-1497b3201/)kinfemichael-tariku
- [Email](mailto:kinfetare83@gmail.com)kinfetare83@gmail.com