yjsoon

The Death of Good Enough

yjsoon — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I've posted about Swift Accelerator, the app development class where we teach teens to build with Xcode for iOS; the final project is to build and release an app on the App Store.

That last bit is, understandably, a struggle! Building an entire production-ready app, that App Store Review deems ready to release, for use by anyone in the world, is no mean feat. But with agentic coding tools, the students (who are supposed to work in groups) can probably each finish one version of the app individually in a tiny fraction of the time it used to take.

So I've been wondering, for over a year now, what happens to the last 60-80 hours of our class, which we've carved out for building and releasing their apps. Students should still spend time ideating and researching, for sure. They could still spend time prototyping in Figma (but wouldn't it be faster to just make app prototypes in Xcode?). And what happens when they finish, in an hour, what they used to have to struggle through for days and weeks?

I came across this article which might point the way to some answers:

The Death of Good Enough by iOS engineer paularambles

It's about how agentic coding tools might finally be able to relieve the tension between "aahhh just make it work" and "but but but it's not good enough yet":

When you're an iOS engineer at a small startup that ships on a daily basis, you don't get a sprint to build a playful celebration animation. You get a concept, a deadline, and the animation gets cut, or worse, it ships as a fade-in and everyone agrees that's fine. And over time you end up with the version of your app where everything works but nothing delights.

That era is ending. Shipping no longer requires sacrificing craft for speed.

And how "perfect" might no longer be the enemy of "good":

We've always been told "don't let perfect be the enemy of good." That made sense when "perfect" cost a sprint, and "good" cost an afternoon, but when "perfect" costs an hour, and "good" costs five minutes, maybe it's time to retire that saying. We don't have to agonise over whether something is worth attempting, instead we can just try it, and if it doesn't work, we can try something else. We always wanted to build the delightful version, and now we can, while having the most fun we've had building software.

(Great article! Click through for some cool SpriteKit animations that Claude Code generated.)

I think I'll have to come back to this article often with my teaching team in the coming months (class starts tomorrow!). For us as a class, maybe the bottleneck shifts from "how can we build it" to "how can we perfect it"? This has so many second-order effects, like individual motivation, group dynamics, and for me, whether they're actually learning (when building comes from deciding, and not coding). That's a lot to figure out as a teacher, but I haven't been this excited about teaching coding in many, many years.

Annoyingly Excited

yjsoon — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Here's a lovely article by Paul Ford in the New York Times about what vibe (agentic, whatever) coding means and how it could meaningfully disrupt the software industry. I enjoyed this much more than the drastically more hyperbolic Matt "Something big is coming, get your finances in order" Shumer piece, which is still worth a read if you haven't yet.

I could (and will, incessantly, to anyone attending a class I teach) cite entire chunks of paragraphs that I enjoyed, but here's a few:

November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful -- but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.

[...] right now, excited developers are overextending themselves to the point of burnout, obsessively coding all the time.

This is so true. With agentic coding tools, you really can just do things. The problem now, however, is how to stop doing things. I now have 6-10 projects I do concurrently, and I feel bad every time I don't have an agent running, I keep spending money on AI subscriptions, I spend all my time reading X about AI developments while waiting for my agents to code, my day job is suffering, send help please

All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.

My industry is famous for saying no, or selling you something you don't need. We have an earned reputation as a lot of really tiresome dudes. But I think if vibe coding gets a little bit better, a little more accessible and a little more reliable, people won't have to wait on us. They can just watch some how-to videos and learn, and then they can have the power of these tools for themselves. I could teach you now to make a complex web app in a few weeks. In about six months you could do a lot of things that took me 20 years to learn. I'm writing all kinds of code I never could before — but you can too. If we can't stop the freight train, we could at least hop on for a ride.

The simple truth is that I am less valuable than I used to be. It stings to be made obsolete, but it's fun to code on the train, too. And if this technology keeps improving, then all the people who tell me how hard it is to make a report, place an order, upgrade an app or update a record — they could get the software they deserve, too. That might be a good trade, long term.

AI could never write like this. (Well, it probably could, when the NYT stops suing OpenAI, then this article will be ingested into the borg.)

Peter Steinberger's OpenClaw story

yjsoon — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You might have read about Clawdbot (no it's Moltbot, wait now it's OpenClaw). I've tried it, and it's great, and I'm happy to ramble like a maniac about my experience with it to anyone who'll listen.

What's far more interesting to me though is the creator, Peter Steinberger. He's got an interesting story — he ran a super successful B2B business, PSPDFKit, and burned out and gave it all up and just stopped coding for a few years. I heard him speak at iOS Conf SG a couple of years back, and got the impression he didn't miss his coding days, as he'd lost the "spark".

Then came Claude Code mid last year, and he embraced it and found his spark again, and he made so many people (including me) excited about just making things again. And now he seems to have made the agentic assistant that the big companies can't (maybe not because of ability; more because of constraints) make, and it's been amazing to watch.

This 2-hour interview video is his story, and I highly recommend it.

▶ The Pragmatic Engineer interviews Peter Steinberger on OpenClaw

Some choice quotes (compiled for me by my OpenClaw bot):

"What blew my mind so much was this realization that I can build everything now. Before you had to really pick which side project you build because software is hard. Yeah, it's still hard. But now... I'm so good at this technology and so bad at that one, and I'm like 'oh let's make the CLI in Go.' I have no clue about Go. But I have a good system understanding." — 0:44:15

"There are people who really love to code on hard problems, think about algorithms, don't really like the 'I'm building a product' part... Those are the people who really struggle and often reject AI, because that's exactly the job where AI excels — it solves the hard problems." — 0:50:45

"All the mundane stuff of writing code is automated away, I can move so much faster. But I have to think so much more. I'm still very much in the flow. It is completely the same feeling... but it is mentally even more exhausting." — 0:54:46

"I'm not the least surprised that current companies cannot very successfully use AI. I mean, they do to a degree, but you have to do a big refactor first, you know — not just on your codebase, but also on your company." — 1:36:21

"When I get a pull request, I'm actually more interested in the prompts than in the code. I ask people to please add the prompts, and I read the prompts more than I read the code. Because to me this is a way higher signal — how did you get to the solution, what did you actually ask, how much steering was involved." — 1:48:02

And, my favourite:

"I don't like the term vibe coding. I tell people what I do is 'agentic engineering' with a little star. Vibe coding starts at 3am." — 0:54:32

Home-Cooked and Barefoot

YJ Soon — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There's this 2020 Robin Sloan essay on apps as home-cooked meals, which I cite endlessly to my students and anyone who'll listen. It's about how "an app can be a home-cooked meal": When people learn to cook, most aren't aiming to become professional chefs; they likely just want to make a meal for themselves, or the ones they love.

The same goes, I tell my students when they deign to listen to me in between Subway Surfers scrolling sessions, for them learning to build apps.

"You don't have to become a software engineer! It's great to just be able to build!"

"OK! Skibidi."

Today, I came across this talk, "Home Cooked Apps and Barefoot Developers" by Maggie Appleton. It's great:

▶ Maggie Appleton on Home Cooked Apps and Barefoot Developers

It's also available on Appleton's website in essay / slide transcript form (such lovely slides!).

Appleton puts forward an updated thesis for this age of agentic coding. With AI coding becoming more and more capable... and, funnily enough, she gave this talk in 2024, pre Claude Code, pre "vibe coding", in a stone-age world of just Copilot and Cursor... with AI coding becoming as powerful as it is nowadays, "large language models will create a golden age of local, home-cooked software and barefoot developers":

I have this dream for barefoot developers that is like the barefoot doctor. These people are deeply embedded in their communities, so they understand the needs and problems of the people around them. So they are perfectly placed to solve local problems. If given access to the right training and tools, they could provide the equivalent of basic healthcare, but instead, it's basic software care.

I love the idea of home-cooked apps. I've recently been making a couple of web apps purely for myself, happy with the knowledge that I don't care if anyone else ever uses them, which is quite a liberating feeling! And something that (for me, anyway, at this point in my life where I have less time to code than I'd like) I can only do with vibe coding.

And I love the idea of barefoot developers! That people who want to build solutions now have so many more tools to be able to do so.

(Related: I recently watched this Theo video about AI startups, where he posits the most promising startup founders aren't tech bros who think they can solve everyone's problems with their tech skills; they're the domain experts who are now enabled by AI to rapidly build real solutions for problems only they can address with their years of experience.)

We're at the cusp of something truly incredible, and I'm just super excited to see how all this unfolds. I remember the feeling, back at the dawn of mobile, when the App Store launched — checking leaderboards daily, downloading new and innovative apps, trying them out — and that's the excitement I'm finding again with every new agentic coding tool being released enabling me to build my home-cooked apps.

The General Problem

YJ Soon — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I was entering my credit card transactions manually into my personal finance app YNAB*, and got distracted by a mini vibe coding project — what if I made a personal web app to send screenshots of my bills (not the full PDFs of course) to a LLM to get CSVs I could upload into YNAB**?

This led me down a rabbit hole where I ended up making a side app to compare LLM processing speeds on OpenRouter in converting images of credit card transactions to CSV. The "test" was to parse one screenshot of transactions (about 11) into a given format (date, description, memo, incoming, outgoing), timed, and checked against the expected number of transactions and summed total.

Observations and conclusions:

Gemini 2.5 Flash beat the crap out of every other model I tried (the full list: Claude Haiku 3, Mistral Small and Pixtral, GPT 5-mini and 4o-mini, Llama 3.2 Vision and 4 Scout, Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and Gemma 3, Qwen 2.5VL, Grok 4 Fast, Kimi VL, GLM 4.5V). 4 seconds to parse the page, vs. 10+ for the next nearest model! I'd previously just done this with ChatGPT, but got bored waiting for it to make me a nice Markdown table, and this is blazingly fast in comparison.
Local models are still currently awful. I fed the same prompts to some qwen and llama models and their ilk (whatever can run on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 64GB RAM), and they kept making up output or missing results. Maybe I just don't have enough experience working with local LLMs, but I fear it'll be a while before they get good enough for anything other than specialised tasks.
I was trying local LLMs because of cost, but each month of credit card bills costs me under 10 cents to process. Worth it!
With all the time I spent doing this, I could have manually entered all my card transactions by now. Cue XKCD comic about "The General Problem"! There's always an XKCD comic.

The GitHub repo is at yjsoon/ynab-llm-formatter. Upload one or more images, and get back a CSV in the upload format YNAB expects. That's it! Try it out, and let me know if you actually end up using it. (And if it's not quite what you need, fork it and send it to your own AI coding agent to edit!)

* It's designed for automatic transaction imports using Plaid, which... isn't supported here. Sigh.

** I just re-read the second half of this sentence, and there's way too many acronyms for this to have made sense.

Vibe coding with an AI character

YJ Soon — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

One issue with AI-assisted coding is how easy it is to just ignore what Codex/Claude Code says. It's (currently) important to review the code that AI produces, but it's so tempting to just skim it, assume it's correct, and pay the technical debt later.

In order to force myself to read the AI's output, I set up my AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md files to make the agent swear like a Singaporean Ah Beng when talking to me, and now I can't help but pay attention to this imaginary platoon-sergeant-turned-coder screaming obscenities while coding. Try this out with whatever amuses you enough to keep you reading!

Grateful to live in a time where I can provide increasingly stupid vibe coding tips 🙏🙏🙏

Teaching in stick shift

YJ Soon — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Half a day into my vibe coding class, I found myself teaching participants about APIs, private keys, databases, CRUD, and edge functions — things I'd only normally cover after 6-10 days of intro web.

And everyone did fine directing their LLMs to set up CRUD, incorporate API keys into the back-end, and much more; all without knowing a lick of HTML, CSS, JS, React, or TypeScript.

Which makes me wonder if programming instructors are like driving instructors at a point in the past. We might be at that point where driving instructors saw their learners taking to driving with automatic transmissions, since all they wanted was to get from Point A to Point B, and didn't feel the need to learn everything about internal combustion and gear shifts and stalling, even as their instructors wanted to teach them the ALL-IMPORTANT FUNDAMENTALS — conceptual knowledge and practical skills which the instructors loved and enjoyed and had gotten really good at.

So the fundamentals as we know them just... aren't, any more? That's quite a shift (sorry) to process. I'm sure we'll continue to have professional programmers — like how we have professional drivers who understand the ins and outs of torque and transmission — but it's nice too that everyone else is now enabled to just get where they want to go.

If you teach the Singaporean on the road

YJ Soon — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 12:00:00 GMT

A former student posted this heartfelt piece about why they're leaving Singapore, titled "if you meet the singaporean on the road". It's a great read, and resonated strongly with their audience on Twitter.

I met up with them for lunch yesterday, amidst the throngs of students leaving school early from their Teachers' Day celebrations, just to catch up and wish them well on their next step. Afterwards, I just sat for a bit and marvelled at how lucky we are as teachers — to get these precious glimpses of young lives growing and becoming themselves.

Happy Teachers' Day to all who teach and who've taught: my family, friends, colleagues, and of course teachers.

(This student will be in the SF Bay Area, and if anyone in my network is happy to lend them any kind of support, let me know; I'm sure they'd appreciate the connection.)

DHH interview

yjsoon — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

About a month ago, Lex Fridman released a 6-hour (6-hour!!) long interview with DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), creator of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp. I'd never watched any of Fridman's interviews before this, and in recent years, I've been finding DHH to be a bit too much of a Loud Opinionated Online Figure for my taste, but I ended up watching all 6 hours (6!! hours!!!) of this.

▶ DHH interview with Lex Fridman on vibe coding

Here's the transcript.

Some choice notes and quotes, which I'm sure I'll get back to in future posts.

DHH reminisces about the easy feedback loop of PHP, and this reminds me of how well-designed creative AI apps reduce the distance from intention to output:

In many ways I think the pinnacle of web developer ergonomics is late '90s PHP. You write this script, you FTP it to a server and instantly it's deployed. Instantly it's available. You change anything in that file and you reload, boom, it's right there. There's no web servers, there's no setup. Jump to timestamp.

On the web getting ridiculously complex in the 2010s -- something I experienced firsthand when I stepped away from web development for a few years to come back to React and Node and webpack and whatever else is now "standard":

You had all of this brain power applied to the problem of how to work with the web, and there were some very smart people -- with some I'm sure very good ideas -- who did not have programmer happiness as their motivation number one. They had other priorities, and those priorities allowed them to discount and even rationalize the complexity they were injecting everywhere. [... They] sliced the development role job into these tiny little niches. 'I'm a front-end glob pipeline configurator!' Timestamp.

On why he -- and, I believe, some of my students -- feels strongly about not wanting to use AI to code for him:

If you don't have your fingers in the sauce (the source) you are going to lose touch with it. There's just no other way. I don't want that because I enjoy it too much. [...] When someone who sits down on a guitar and plays Stairway to Heaven, there's a perfect recording of that, that will last in eternity. You can just put it on Spotify, you don't actually need to do it. The joy is to command the guitar yourself. The joy of a programmer, of me as a programmer, is to type the code myself. Timestamp.

DHH and Lex on the non-judgmental nature of AI chatbots:

I'm getting smarter every day because of AI, because I'm using AI to have it explain things to me. Even the stupid questions I would be a little embarrassed to even enter into Google, AI is perfectly willing to give me the ELI5 explanation of some Unix command I should have known already. Timestamp.

It's a great basically search engine into all kinds of nuances of a particular programming language, especially if you don't know it that well. Or APIs you can load in documentation, it's just so great for learning. For me personally, I mean, on the happiness scale, it makes me more excited to program. [...] And even if I never use the code it generates, I'm already a better programmer. But actually the deeper thing is, for some reason I'm having more fun. That's a really, really important thing. Timestamp.

And it makes programming fun again, and gives him confidence to try new things:

What it's made more fun to me is to be a beginner again. It made it more fun to learn Bash successfully for the first time. [...] It gave me the confidence that, you know what? If I need to do some iOS programming myself... I haven't done that in, probably six years was the last time I dabbled in it. I feel highly confident now that I could sit down with AI, I could have something in the App Store by the end of the week. Timestamp.

How to approach learning programming with AI:

There should be more of the time writing from scratch if you are interested in learning how to program. Unfortunately, you're not going to get fit by watching fitness videos. You're not going to learn how to play the guitar by watching YouTube guitar videos. You have to actually play yourself. You have to do the sit-ups. Programming, understanding, learning almost anything requires you to do. [...] Now, I understand the temptation, and the temptation is there because vibe coding can produce things perhaps in this moment, especially in new domains you're not familiar with, tools you don't know perfectly well, that's better than what you could do, or that you would take much longer to get at. But you're not going to learn anything. Timestamp.

And, unrelated to all of the above, on being there for your kids:

I think there's just some ancient honor in the fact that, again, this DNA that's sitting on this chair traveled 30,000 years to get here, and you're going to squander all that away just so you can send a few more emails. Timestamp.

I'm not sure I agree with everything said, but it's certainly food for thought, and it kept me watching for all 6 hours (6!!!?! hours!!?!!).

If, like me, you're interested in AI, programming, and learning, and/or you've been building for the web from the 1990s till now, I highly recommend the interview. Just tell your partner/friends you have a great movie night pick lined up, and settle in for 6 hours of nerdy conversation!

(Disclaimer: I did not actually attempt to make my wife watch this.)

You can just do things (or, new blog engine!)

yjsoon — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:30:00 GMT

Over the last 3 days, I redid my personal website / blog. I got Claude Code (and some other AI pals, like OpenAI Codex and Warp) to:

Guide me through exporting from WordPress to Astro
Import a bunch of posts that I wanted to keep, archiving the rest
Download and set up the AstroPaper theme
Tweak various things to my liking, including getting it to recommend colour themes similar to my old site
Set up various features, like a lightbox and gallery I saw online
Find, import, and tweak an SVG icon for Threads
Guide me through deployment to GitHub Pages

If I tried this without AI, my efforts would probably have stalled fairly early on! I know for sure I wouldn't have been able to get this done, in my free time, in just 3 days.

That's what's been so remarkable about AI-assisted coding for me: the ability to just... type things out, and... have them happen. And so. Quickly. This nonsensically fast feedback loop is extremely addictive, and makes me want to keep tinkering and making.

Pete Steinberger (using Astro too, with the same theme) captures this feeling well in his blog post, "Just One More Prompt":

Yes, you can just do things. That's the beauty and the problem. Once you realize how powerful these agents are - this realization that you can finally build everything you ever wanted to build. All these ideas and side projects that you've been thinking about for years, but never had the time to do.

Anyway! New blog is at yjsoon.com (in case you're reading this from the RSS feed, which my AI assures me still works). I'll be cross-posting on LinkedIn, so you can follow my hand-written em-dashes there if you'd like :)

Now, I just noticed from the link preview on LinkedIn that the OpenGraph image needs replacing, so back to Claude Code it is...

Warped

yjsoon — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Today, I accidentally brought down our self-hosted instance of Canvas LMS on a Hetzner server, and couldn't get it running again (and didn't want to bother Rui Yang, the talented young intern-at-the-time who set it up).

So I sicced the Warp terminal / AI agent on it, telling the AI "Fix this ridiculous thing!!" and, shortly afterwards, "PLEASE DO NOT RUN ANY DB MIGRATIONS!!!!" (because that was in the plan it cooked up), then I went to take a bus to my next appointment.

When I reached my destination, I logged in to check, and 20+ docker compose ups and downs and 200 Warp credits later (less than 1/10 of a US$15 subscription), my LMS was back online. We are truly living in the future.

Anyway if you download it with my referral link I get a free... theme? Awesome.

Application for professional slopper

yjsoon — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

🔥 It’s not just fascination — it’s an obsession. 🔥

Lately, I’ve been on a journey (yes, a journey 🚀) to write like AI. Not just write with it — write *like* it.

This means:
💥 Starting every post with a high-impact one-liner.
🏑 Using em-dashes — this punctuation, “—” — as many as four times — in a single sentence!
🔄 Not just stating things outright — starting with the negative, then escalating into hitherto unparallelled levels of hyperbole.
🤡 Using emojis as bullet points.
✅ Leaving **all kinds of Markdown** in my posts accidentally when copying and pasting.
🗺️ And — of course — calling everything a journey.

It’s not just about automation.
It’s about amplifying impact.
It’s about unlocking potential.
It’s about showing up authentically while sounding completely manufactured. 🤖💡

Am I the problem? Possibly.

Will I stop? Not until I’ve crafted the perfect post that’s not just content – it’s connection.

#LinkedIn #AIWriting #Authenticity #JourneyNotDestination #UnlockYourVoice #CraftingImpact #Hashtags #Hashtag #Writing #Slopping

(Sorry.)

Sibeh awesome! Committed!

yjsoon — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Since my last post, I've settled on Claude Code for AI coding. Pedagogical questions aside, I seriously have not had this much fun playing with new tech for a while. My Git commit history is currently filled with random side projects I've put off for years, which I now "work on" in between classes. It's exhilarating, and the exciting part is how fast the tech --* are growing.

(I got tired of Claude telling me "You're absolutely right!", so I told CLAUDE.md to respond in Singlish.)

* Unfortunately, I also now have to use two single-dashes instead of my favourite em-dash to not sound like AI. Screw you, AI!

Early vibe coding thoughts

yjsoon — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Some thoughts on coding with AI (or, that awful, awful name, "vibe-coding"):

It's my kid's PSLE year*, and I got bored of reading spelling words to him.

So I thought, why don't I write an app for that?

45 minutes later, I had something fully-functional — not because I'm fast, but because I used Cursor (pictured). AI coding tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Windsurf can help programmers write full code, in-editor, soaking in the full context of the existing codebase.

This is different from "asking ChatGPT" because of the in-editor and full-context parts. In the "bad old days" of... 1 year ago, I'd have had to copy my code over to ChatGPT, give the AI context about what language and framework I was working with, get some code back, and hope that the generated code was easy enough to just plug back into my codebase somewhere. So much cognitive overhead!

This new tech, however, is remarkable; I really just ask for a feature, get the code inserted into my project. I check if it works, request some modifications, and repeat the process. AI researcher/influencer Andrej Karpathy calls it vibe coding:

I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it.

This is mind-blowing, and poses all kinds of new and frightening questions for programming educators. For my Swift Accelerator app development class in particular, I realised that the app I "made" in 45 minutes was comparable to what they'd take 2 weeks to struggle through. Wouldn't it be better for students to have a working product quick, and then iterate on it? We could just teach students the basics, then get them to "vibe-code" their way to awesome apps.

I posed this thought to my co-instructors at Swift Accelerator Jia Chen and Sean — both former students, from the first batch in 2018 — and I was surprised at the vehemence of their feedback. They worry about:

How it'll degrade the students' learning
Students generating code they might never understand
AI generating the wrong code
How it just changes what the class is.

All valid points! But I wonder about students who fall behind in my class — would this help engage them more? The feeling of creating something so quickly with AI can't be understated. Then again, I do acknowledge it's short-cutting the hard work of comprehension, understanding, and perhaps creativity that comes with "manual" programming.

I don't have any answers yet, but for this year's class, I'm intending to take a couple of groups with which to run this experiment.

* Positive vibes appreciated. Kiddo knows about Perplexity and he knows the AI is great at finding answers from specific questions from specific practice papers — a power he's abused to spend more time playing video games. Gahh!

One Million Checkboxes

yjsoon — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 03:19:04 GMT

In June, a programmer, Nolen Royalty or "eieio", released a web-based mini-game, onemillioncheckboxes.com, which allowed users to check or uncheck any of 1,000,000 checkboxes — and when they did, it changed for everyone viewing the site simultaneously. The goal was to get everything checked at once, which was nigh-impossible. The site went viral: 500,000 people ended up checking more than 650 million boxes in just two weeks. The Washington Post described it as "the most pointless site on the internet; it's fantastic".

In August, eieio detailed an unexpected, and remarkable, outcome of the game in this blog post :

Some technically-savvy teens discovered they could do more than just random clicking.
They realised they could encode the messages as binary data (1s and 0s), and began doing all kinds of weird tricks to send secret messages and graphics to anyone who could decode them.
eieio followed the breadcrumbs, and found the teens on a private Discord chat!
He had a great time chatting with them, and was just genuinely blown away by their ingenuity.

I loved this!

First, because the initial product was about making something useless and fun — and I always love seeing useless and fun things my students create with code.

Second, because this useless and fun thing managed to inspire young people to form their own learning communities, share discoveries, and build on one another's ideas.

It speaks to what I'd like to achieve as an educator — create spaces and enable students to explore, experiment, and find their own paths to understanding, perhaps in ways that I never anticipated.

I also really liked how he closed his video version of the blog post:

I found this so moving. As a kid, I spent a lot of time doing dumb stuff on the computer, and I didn't get in too much trouble for it, like when I, for example, repeatedly crashed my high school mail server. There's no way that I would be doing what I do now without the encouragement of people back then. So providing a playground like this, getting to see what they were doing, getting to provide some encouragement saying, "Hey, this is amazing!", was so special for me. The people in that Discord are so extraordinarily talented, so creative, and so cool. I cannot wait to see what they go on to make.

The blog post and video are great, but watch out for some swearing and crude humour in the screenshots, if any teachers reading this want to send them along to students 😄

Happy Teachers' Day

yjsoon — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Happy Teachers’ Day to:

My wife, who every day, brings all her primary school teacher experience to bear for our kids’ education, especially in Chinese language;

My parents, with over 60 years of teaching experience between them, part of which convinced them to spend weeks persuading me not to take a teaching scholarship 25 years ago;

My teachers, most of whom might no longer be teaching, but whose lessons still resonate after all these decades;

My teacher friends and peers, especially those still in the service, because look at all the lives you’ve touched! Could you have imagined that 20+ years ago when we started?;

My ex-colleagues, wherever you are now, for having supported me as a beginning teacher who unfortunately never quite stayed long enough to outgrow that term;

My current colleagues, who create curriculum and programmes and still step into classrooms to teach our odd little non-academic subject;

My kids’ teachers, who my wife and I try to bother as little as possible, because we know the kids love you and that’s really nearly all that matters;

All the teachers we work with, for giving us a chance to bring our lessons to your students;

And finally, to my 25-year-ago self, who — as teenagers are wont to do in the face of sound parental advice — thought a teaching scholarship to go study in the US couldn’t have been *that* bad an idea. I’m glad for the choices we made, and I’m grateful for the people who got us here.

Happy Teachers’ Day.

Code in Place

yjsoon — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

This week, I finished my final weekly volunteer session with my Code in Place section for 2024. Code in Place is a free online introductory programming course offered by Stanford University, teaching the fundamentals of Python programming based on the university's flagship CS106 course.

CS106 has been a huge inspiration for me ever since I took the class in fall quarter of freshman year (in 1999!), and especially since I took CS198, the course where they taught us to run our own sections. I don't think I'm overstating things when I say that CS106 + CS198 have been transformative experiences for me: My times section leading for CS106 were some of my fondest Stanford memories, and the inspiration and energy from then have informed my career for the last 15–20 years as an educator here. I'm not certain we'd have Tinkercademy or Swift Accelerator now if I hadn't been through those.

Thanks to all my students, mostly from halfway around the world, for showing up every week, putting in the work, and for participating actively in class. This was some of the most fun I've had teaching an online class in a while. (Yes, the cat made an appearance during section.)

The Code in Place team remains a huge inspiration — thanks to profs Chris Piech, Mehran Sahami, and the rest of the team at Stanford CS for this opportunity, all the teaching training materials, and for making this available to everyone.

Super cool too that I managed to reconnect with Leoson — an ex-student from over a decade ago when he was in high school — as a section leader whose post I happened to stumble upon in the forums!

A moving story*

yjsoon — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

My company, Tinkertanker, is moving from our Bukit Merah office of 5 years over to Jalan Pemimpin.

It's our fourth "real" office after we moved out of a study, and I'll remember it as an office where we hosted a lot of friends, partners, and visitors; where we had a meeting room the laser cutter venting went through (loudly); where we got through the pandemic (and when Engineering Good kept the lights on during lockdown) and published a book; where we over-engineered our automations and decorations; where we continuously got complained at by management by putting random nonsense like a TARDIS outside our door; where we watched colleagues and students and interns join, leave, visit and grow.

I'll miss the nearby noodle queue, the mysteriously large number of roadside chickens, and the vague worry that the mezzanine would collapse on us in the meeting room whenever there were too many people upstairs.

Pictured: Memories from the old office; the old office being cleared out; fun electronics projects we really should have thrown away earlier; a preview of the new office with fun pink stairs and a lift that I got trapped in on the very first day.

* ok I know sorry sorry

[Photo Gallery]

2020 Vision

yjsoon — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I waited years to make this stupid pun (as did the copyright holders, apparently). Happy new year!

Drawn on an 11” Pad Pro with Procreate.

Determination to Learn

yjsoon — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 02:53:28 GMT

About a year ago, Daniel, a 19-year-old New Zealander, gave me a call, and asked if he could just come by our office and hang out and learn things quietly on his own. He wasn't sure what to do for university, or if he even wanted to study at all. He was aware we had a techie internship programme, but didn't feel qualified enough to join us and get paid for it.

We thought, why not? The worst that could happen was he'd come in, and stop showing up after a while. (Which is what happened with some other guy.)

He never stopped showing up.

He learned a whole bunch of programming, made himself very useful, we offered him a proper paid internship, and now he's off to study CS. Read his story at our blog.

Bird Box Challenge

yjsoon — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 02:53:28 GMT

Kind of.

Drawn with Procreate on an (old) iPad Pro with an (old) Apple Pencil.

Fries Robot

yjsoon — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 02:53:28 GMT

I've been promising Kiddo 1 I'd draw his requests whenever he finishes his home learning. Here's one.

What's a Tinkertanker

yjsoon — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:53:28 GMT

Republished from Medium.

We started Tinkertanker in 2011, and haven't written much about the company and what we do. As a result, we now regularly get emails from people who think we run an actual tanker.

Maritime recruiters, please stop sending us crew member CVs! We don't run a ship! We'll let you know when we buy one okay, but COEs are expensive

So, here we go:

A paper version of TKrobot, our mascot. We squished him once accidentally, and he's been mad at us since.

**Who we are. **Tinkertanker is a technology and education company. We're coders who enjoy teaching, teachers who enjoy coding, and coders who enjoy teaching, and people who repeat themselves. (Did we mention we're teachers who"¦)

**Our products. **We run Tinkercademy, where we teach coding and electronics to students of all ages; GuestDay, an iPad-based guest registration service; Get Hacking, an online store for technology toys and tools; and various smaller tech projects, like 125andup, which we recently retired, and our IC Photo app, which, uhh, we should probably get around to updating before Apple kicks us off the App Store.

**What we do. **Our core strengths are in building software, teaching technology, and creating with electronics; essentially, we spend our time making cool stuff with technology, or teaching folks how to do the same. Not everyone in our team codes and teaches, but we all enjoy tinkering with open-source frameworks, electronics, 3D printing, laser cutting, design tools, and more.

The office. Our office at Tai Seng is a workshop, lab, and warehouse, with a well-stocked pantry that usually doesn't contain solder or wood chips. We have three Michelin-starred eateries within walking distance, so that lets us get pretty fat.

Our technology stack. While most of our current production code is in Ruby and Objective-C, we have projects implemented in other languages„—„”„—Python, PHP, Clojure, Squeak. We teach in Python, Swift, Java, HTML, CSS, flavour-of-the-year JavaScript framework, Unity C#, Arduino C, Scratch, and more. Our upcoming projects are an Android app (Android Studio, Java), an iOS app (Xcode, Swift), and a micro-controller compiler (a healthy mix of C++, JavaScript, and staring at one another suspiciously).

So, there we go, an introduction to this little company we call our own. We'll keep this post updated as we evolve, and we hope to tell you more about what we do in future posts, which may or may not take another 6 years. Stay tuned!

Opportunity Job Fair

yjsoon — Fri, 25 Dec 2015 02:53:28 GMT

A commission from 2001 for some department in Stanford.

MICA Innovation Fiesta

yjsoon — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 02:53:28 GMT

A commission from 2006 for the then-Ministry of Information, Communication, and the Arts. I can't believe they let me put my chicken logo on there.

The most annoying teacher in the world

yjsoon — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 02:53:28 GMT

is MEEEEEEE