One person, a handful of brands, all built the same way.
I'm Gina Lyn Cox. I run Gina Makes LLC out of a home in Altoona, Iowa — a one-person studio behind a sourdough kitchen, a strategy game, a free reading room, a rug-making course, and a nail-care shop.
What I make looks unrelated from the outside — bread, a game, a reading room, a punch needle course, gel nail strips — but it comes from the same place. Sourdough taught me patience: the best results come from time, attention, and trusting a slow process. Code taught me the same lesson from the other direction.
On the bread side, most of what's here is sourdough, built on a small family of doughs, plus a few yeast-free bakes for when the starter isn't ready. Learn one good boule and the rest open up. I've been baking sourdough for a few months, so the recipe pages are best treated as careful reference material rather than a claim of mastery — the ones I've personally baked so far are the Classic and the Italian, and I'll work through the rest over time.
On the <dev> side, I take on freelance AI and software work for small teams and nonprofits, and I build the studio's own products on the same framework, The Starter. Practical, well-documented tools, licensed cleanly to the people who use them.
Gina Makes LLC
Gina Makes LLC is an Iowa company with one member, which is me. It's the studio behind everything here, and behind a few things that aren't — I design, build, run and support each one myself:
- Gina Makes — this site. The kitchen, the craft table and the code, in one place.
- Sasquatch Wars — a browser-first 4X strategy game, written in a Bureau of Forest Operations parody voice.
- Olive & Flame — a free, open reading room and a quiet place to pray, built and run as Olive + Flame Ministries.
- The Loop & The Line — a self-directed course in punch needle rug making.
- LYN — Love. Your. Nails. Korean semi-cured gel nail strips.
Running lean is the point rather than a limitation. One person means honest timelines, plain-language communication, and a clear paper trail. I'd rather do a few things carefully than many things in a hurry.
Whether it's a loaf, a game, or a piece of software, I care about the same things: it should be honest, it should be understood, and it should last.
Get in touch
The easiest way to reach me is email. For bread questions, dev projects, or just to say a recipe worked — I read everything.