A dating app inside a code editor sounds like the setup for a developer joke. Ben Awad made it a repository. VSinder, his dating app for VS Code, is still pinned on his GitHub profile, sitting near DogeHouse, a voice conversation project, and an Airbnb clone built with GraphQL. The lineup has a particular rhythm: teach something useful, try something improbable, leave the source code where anyone can see it. For years, Awad’s audience watched that process unfold in tutorials and videos. Today, as cofounder and CTO of Voidpet, he is using the same instinct on a much larger canvas. The characters have eyes that multiply as they evolve. The code has acquired a world to live in.
A founder’s backstory often gets polished until every old experiment looks like a step in a master plan. Awad’s public trail is more interesting because it still shows the detours. There is a recipe manager he built with his mother. There are apps from his student years. There is a joke extension that found a more serious life as a website. Then there is Voidpet, which began with Linda Shad Awad’s creature drawings and an audience curious enough to try a password millions of times. The connecting thread is practical curiosity: put an idea in front of people, see what they do, and keep working.
The kitchen table was an early product lab
Awad attended the University of Texas at Dallas from 2015 to 2018. His early projects included Stack Calculator, a reverse Polish notation calculator, and LoL Scout, an Android app that used the League of Legends API to retrieve player statistics. They are modest names on a profile now, but they establish a habit. He was making software that had a clear task, an interface, and a user who might actually open it.
Saffron, the digital cookbook he developed with his mother Julie Awad, pushed that habit into a more personal setting. The pair worked as a mother-son team. Julie describes herself as the designer and cook; Ben handled the technical details. It is a wonderfully concrete division of labor. A recipe app needs someone who understands the kitchen as well as someone who understands a database. Neither can rescue the other from a clumsy grocery list.
The pair even recorded a podcast about building it. In 2018, episodes tracked decisions about a minimum viable product, pricing, the landing page, a React Native app and a better grocery list. The titles sound ordinary because product work usually is. A public record of those choices is more revealing than a launch announcement: it shows software arriving through a series of small arguments with reality. Awad later wrote about scraping recipe websites, including the importer that let a user bring a recipe into Saffron by pasting a URL. The feature is not glamorous. Anyone who has tried to collect recipes from scattered web pages knows exactly why it matters.
“You need to earn the right to make a big game.”Ben Awad, reflecting on mobile game development
The joke was allowed to grow up
On YouTube, Awad became known for long, detailed lessons on React, GraphQL and the tools around them. GitHub supplied the companion evidence: repositories people could inspect, run and adapt. The teaching was paired with an unusually playful set of side projects. VSinder borrowed the familiar dating app pattern and dropped it into the workspace where programmers spend their days. DogeHouse began, by Awad’s account, as a joke VS Code extension, then moved to the web. It is hard to claim a project has no audience when the audience starts sending pull requests.
Fifty-three days after starting DogeHouse, he reported more than 70 open source contributors and support for 13 languages. He mentioned scheduled rooms, a redesign in progress and even a possible conversation with Jason Calacanis’s incubator. It reads less like a polished corporate milestone than a builder telling everyone what had happened since the last upload. That tone helped make the work legible. Viewers could follow an idea past its first laugh and into decisions about features, collaboration and maintenance.
There is an important distinction between an audience that watches a person talk about code and a community that tries the code itself. Awad’s public repositories created a path from one to the other. His GitHub profile still pins DogeHouse and VSinder alongside more conventional teaching projects. The funny names are useful doors. Behind them are TypeScript, interface choices, bugs and other people’s work. The joke gives the project its invitation; the repository gives it a life after the punch line.
A puzzle at the entrance to the Void
Voidpet began with Linda Shad Awad’s drawings of creatures inspired by emotions. The first audience gathered around the art, and Ben and Linda then put up a password-locked signup page. More than two million users attempted entry; more than 300,000 worked out the puzzle. Those are striking figures for a door that, at first glance, seemed to keep people out. The password turned arrival into participation. Before there was a full game, there was already something to do.
The project expanded in stages. A minimalist web adventure in 2022 let visitors pick a Voidpet and explore a small part of its world. Trading, auctions and battles followed. Voidpet Garden became the first mobile app in 2023. Google Play named it Best for Personal Growth that year. Voidpet also joined Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun accelerator; Awad wrote that it was one of 34 teams chosen from 1,600 applicants. Forbes later profiled Voidpet in its 30 Under 30 coverage. Each marker belongs to the company, and each sits on top of a much less tidy history of releases and revisions.
The partnership has a recognizable division without being a simple split between art and code. Linda’s creatures gave the project a visual language and a cast; Ben’s product and engineering experience helped turn attention into something playable. Both had already made work in public. The early puzzle, the first web game and later app releases all depend on an audience willing to spend time inside the world. That is a more demanding kind of attention than a passing view on a social feed. A player returns, learns the rules and notices what changed.
The creatures themselves make that demand easier to understand. Voidpet describes them as beings born from the language of emotion, each with a signature eye shape and more eyes as it evolves. It is a strange, crisp design rule. A recognizable character can move from a sketch to a sticker, a card, a plush toy or a game screen without losing its identity. By the time Dungeon arrived as a mobile strategy RPG in 2024, the team had a whole visual vocabulary to draw from.
The engineer learns the price of a game
Awad has been unusually direct about the difference between shipping software and shipping a game. In a LinkedIn post reflecting on roughly three and a half years running a mobile gaming company, he listed lessons that rarely fit into a cheerful product announcement. Ads work, he wrote, even if his earlier engineer’s instinct said no one clicked them. A game needs a polished core loop before launch. A weak game cannot always be repaired by adding features. And a team needs strength in game design, coding and visual design, which may mean bringing in people whose skills are different from yours.
One line in that list is especially revealing: “You need to earn the right to make a big game.” Voidpet’s sequence makes the point almost graphically. Drawings came before a puzzle. The puzzle came before a small web world. Garden preceded Dungeon. The company did not have to guess whether anyone liked the creatures; people had already followed them through several formats. That does not make every later decision easy. It gives the team something better than a blank page: players, habits and a growing sense of what the world can hold.
Awad’s role has changed along the way. The YouTube channel remains available, but he now describes himself as an “ex-youtuber” and a Voidpet cofounder. He still identifies with both the company and the creator role. Those descriptions can coexist. The tutorials and jokes were a way to show how things get built; the games are an ongoing test of whether the result is worth returning to. One requires clarity in front of a camera. The other requires a team to keep making good decisions long after a video would have ended.
A world with room for more than one maker
Voidpet has grown beyond the first web adventure. There are plushies, a battle expansion, an illustrated fantasy novel written by Linda, an animated music video and Dungeon. A Dungeon expansion followed. This is more than a catalog of formats. Each gives someone a different entrance: a reader can meet the characters in a book, a player can assemble a team, and a newcomer can simply like a drawing enough to ask its name.
That range also puts Awad’s work in a different light. The engineer who built a recipe importer and posted GraphQL lessons is now part of a company where the code serves characters, art, stories and players. The public experiments of the earlier years were useful training: build something, make it visible, listen carefully, try the next version. The scale is larger and the costs of a wrong turn are sharper, but the rhythm is familiar.
The oddest part of Awad’s portfolio may be how sensibly it fits together. A dating app in VS Code, an open source voice platform, a family cookbook and a universe of many-eyed creatures share little on the surface. Each began with a clear invitation to another person: try this, use this, play this, tell us what happens. The audience did not arrive at the end of the work. It was there while the work was still becoming itself. That is why the old repositories matter, and why the first password matters too. Both left a door open, even when one of them pretended to be locked.