Yacine Brahimi — better known as "kache" on X, where he posts as @yacineMTB — is a Canadian software engineer in Ottawa who turned a seven-dollar domain and a meme editor into one of the more unusual small-business stories on tech Twitter. dingboard, the fast browser-based image tool he built alone, went viral in late 2023, made real money, accidentally got him hired at X, got him fired a year later, and is now the base layer for a stranger ambition: agents that design and print physical things.
Who kache is
The handle predates the fame: "kache" was his nick on the freenode and rizon IRC networks, and his site still bills him only as "yacine — systems engineer." The surname "Brahimi" comes from third parties — the program of a talk he gave at AI Tinkerers Ottawa, the listing for his Emergent Behavior podcast episode, company profiles — rather than his own pages, where he is just Yacine or "Yacine B." His archived about page says he studied computer science at Carleton University and built IAM systems for most of his career.
He spent about two years at Stripe, drifting from software engineer toward systems engineer and LLM work — he writes that he got Stripe mentioned on OpenAI's GPT-4 blog post. In May 2023 he published "I left stripe to build stuff," a compact statement of the worldview that runs through everything since: scaled orgs get capped by Amdahl's law, he wanted "goofy capabilities research" on small consumer-grade models, and "user happiness will be my eval." He funded the independence with part-time contracting.
dingboard
The origin story is pure kache. A diagramming tool he used for memes added a watermark, so he built his own; he named it after the "console.log dingus" string he drops while debugging JavaScript, and registered dingboard.com because it cost about seven bucks. The product is the pitch: it opens straight into a working editor, no landing page, and he has told VCs not to fund any AI product that doesn't load "as fast as dingboard dot com (instantly) with 0 clicks." At AI Tinkerers Ottawa in early 2024 he walked through the technical half of that bet — running ONNX models client-side so the browser does the work.
Growth ran through his own posting. Through late 2023 his account flooded X timelines with dingboard-made memes; by mid-December he was logging 760 DAU on LinkedIn and correcting pronunciation ("it's pronounced DING board"). In March 2024 he flipped on a $12.99 monthly tier — confessing the earlier invite codes were "an if statement with a hardcoded string" — and posted that he doubled his MRR in a weekend. Peak self-reported figures: about 1.4k DAU and roughly $10K MRR, profitable, zero funding. On the Emergent Behavior podcast he set the goal at "a billion users, a billion, with a B," and brushed off venture-backed competition: "I can go nuclear... I can go get a job at McDonald's to keep Dingboard running."
The X interlude
In May 2024 he posted the line that made the story legible outside his own timeline: "I tried to sell dingboard to X. they gave me a job instead." He joined as a staff software engineer and kept dingboard alive on the side. At X he read every commit pushed to the codebase — a habit he says the post-xAI-merger shipping velocity made physically impossible, and which he describes with genuine admiration for the pace even as it ended his run.
In June 2025: "I got fired today. I'm not sure why." On TBPN days later, he gave his version — remote work had become untenable, he declined to relocate weeks after his son's birth, and was let go. He also said he'd take $2.5M to go back to big tech, naming Shopify and Cohere, which tells you the firing read more as logistics than grievance.
From memes to atoms
The current work bends toward hardware. His bio now reads "RL, robots, embedded, simulators." He is rewriting dingboard on "Soal," a cross-platform GL transpiler meant to compile one graphics codebase to iOS, Android, and web. dingcad — a live-reloading OpenSCAD replacement he wrote on raylib, ManifoldCAD, and QuickJS — is pitched on his site as "live AI CAD in your browser." In September 2026 he demoed "astra," an agent that used dingcad's manifold API to design parts, wrote its own slicer, and drove his Bambu Lab printer — all from his phone, capped by the very kache boast "you are living 1000 years before my time." On TBPN he introduced the "Ding Bot," a 3D-printed robot concept for lawn dandelions, and floated a disposable lawn-robot subscription.
Between the headline projects sit the smaller artifacts that make the pattern legible: dingllm.nvim (his ~855-star "no frills" LLM scripts for Neovim), twittergrep (linked on his site as "cancel me"), scribepod (an automated AI podcast), and the "o(1) kache lookups" Substack where the whole philosophy is written down in his own words.
The through-line is a builder who owns the whole stack — editor, transpiler, CAD environment, slicer, agent — treats posting as distribution rather than marketing, and wraps real engineering in a running joke named after a debug string. The ding-verse (dingboard, dingllm, dingcad, Ding Bot) is self-aware branding, but the revenue and the 400K-follower audience are real.
What the record does not settle
The record is thin where his life is thin in public: no birth date, no education dates, nothing before Stripe. The surname itself rests on third-party listings — and collides with a famous footballer. dingboard's current numbers are self-reported peaks; the firing at X is unexplained even by him; and the robots sit somewhere between product, demo, and bit.
This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the subject's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.