Shida Li
Co-Founder at Obsidian
Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolShida Li is a seasoned software engineer and co-founder with roughly 15 years of hands-on experience building developer tools and consumer productivity products, currently leading core work on Obsidian and Dynalist. She spans the full stack—frontend UX polish and interactive scheduling UIs, backend analytics and infrastructure, and build tooling—having shipped features at scale from Dropbox and LinkedIn internships to production systems used across organizations. A prolific open-source contributor, her work improves developer-facing projects like Obsidian’s API and plugins, the Mermaid diagram renderer, and Azkaban’s scheduler UI, blending design-minded CSS/JS tweaks with TypeScript and JVM-level analysis. She pairs deep systems experience (Hadoop/Spark performance heuristics at LinkedIn) with product instincts for offline sync, payment integrations, and hosting/monitoring platforms. Notably, she contributed both UI/UX refinements and low-level API type documentation, showing a rare mix of aesthetic detail and engineering rigor. Based in Canada and trained at the University of Waterloo, she brings entrepreneurial drive and a pragmatic focus on reliable, user-friendly tooling.
15 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Diplôme d'études collégiales Pure and Applied Science, Diplôme d'études collégiales Pure and Applied Science at Marianopolis CollegeCandidate for Bachelor's of Software Engineering Software Engineering, Candidate for Bachelor's of Software Engineering Software Engineering at University of Waterloo
Chinese, English, French
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (32)
apache-spark10
javascript10
apache-hadoop10
css10
typescript10
diagram10
user-interface10
ui-design10
java10
plugin10
esbuild10
javas10
uid10
api-documentation10
ui-theme10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
obsidianmd/obsidian-api
Oct 2020 - Dec 2022
Type definitions for the latest Obsidian API.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:73 commits, 16 PRs, 112 pushes in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Shida contributed to the documentation of the Obsidian API, specifically focusing on type definitions within the `obsidian.d.ts` file. Their work included adding documentation comments, updating API definitions, and incorporating new interfaces like `PluginManifest` and `MetadataCache` with corresponding descriptions. These updates suggest a focus on enhancing the usability and understanding of the API for developers.
apitype-definitionsobsidian-mddefinitionsobsidian-plugin
obsidianmd/obsidian-sample-plugin
Oct 2020 - Aug 2022
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 release, 5 reviews, 34 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Shida primarily worked on enhancing a plugin for Obsidian, a note-taking application. Their contributions involved refactoring code, updating dependencies (e.g., `obsidian.d.ts`), and integrating a build system (rollup, then ESBuild) for efficient packaging. They added features like settings configurations, example code for hooks, and modifications to the CodeMirror editor. The user also updated the plugin for compatibility with newer Obsidian versions.
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