From professional kitchens to WinUI 3 — the personal story behind FluentOverlay and Fluent Studio.
For seven years I worked as a professional chef — long hours, high pressure, and an obsessive focus on getting every detail right. I loved the craft, but I started spending nights and weekends writing code. That hobby became a 14-month full-stack bootcamp, then a career pivot into software. From there I went deep on C#, .NET, and WinUI 3 because I wanted to build desktop tools that feel native, not another Electron wrapper.
I wanted to build things that last longer than a dinner service.
I watched Mac users hold a key and see every shortcut for the current app — instant, elegant, obvious. Windows deserved the same. The hunt for equivalents turned up abandoned tools, web-only databases, and forum threads from another decade. Raycast recently landed on Windows, but it is a launcher first — not a live menu overlay tied to the foreground app.
The gap was clear: roughly a billion Windows users and no modern, native shortcut discovery tool that respects context.
I chose WinUI 3 and .NET 8 because the experience had to be fast, small, and honest on the glass. The breakthrough was UI Automation — if the OS can expose menus to accessibility clients, we can surface them to power users too. The first time the overlay appeared over Visual Studio with real shortcuts, I knew the project was worth finishing.
Reality intervened: many professional apps do not expose classic menus. That led to JSON packs — now 157+ shipped and localized — and eventually tabs for prompts, snippets, workflows, and terminology so FluentOverlay stays useful even when you are not hunting a key chord.
Every piece of data FluentOverlay touches stays on your machine. That is not a marketing line — it is how I want software to behave when I use it. No product telemetry, no account requirement, no cloud gate for the core workflow.
If we mention email on the website (for example the contact form), that flow is described in our privacy policy.
FluentOverlay is the first product, not the last. Fluent Studio is a bet that small, native, privacy-first utilities can compound into a suite people trust — starting on Windows, without painting ourselves into a corner. Think future companions like FluentClip and FluentType: focused tools that show up only when you need them.
One person, one studio, one gap at a time.
If you have ever thought Windows deserved better tools, try FluentOverlay. Download it from the product page, double-tap your trigger, and tell us what you miss — I read what comes through the contact form.
