Active Works
Some of our currently active works include Forge, our personal website, a multi-platform game called “Minesweeper Reloaded”, and a personal/private relationship management platform called “My Connections”.
Forge
The featured image we have picked for this very page comes from Forge. At present, Forge is a work-in-progress. We see this as a super long-term, multi-decade piece of work. It will also be the center-of-gravity for a lot of the other personalised tools that we seek to build for ourselves and for collaboration purposes. Think of it like a hub where we can use to manage and coordinate our workflow across multiple platforms/tools and potentially, with future consulting clients.
Personal Website
By personal website, we are referring to this very current one that you are visiting right now. For many years in our career, we had invested most of it focused on mastering and working with WordPress CMS. Yes, we did have some exposure and experiences working with several other different CMS options as well. But we’ve always found ourselves gravitating towards WordPress. We believe that it is more about who we are, how we work, and the kind of value that WordPress offers to someone like ourselves.
At the current moment, our own background in PHP may be a little rusty. It is why we’re taking a moment to re-learning, remaster our skill in PHP. Alongside that effort, we will also be building several custom WP plugins that we will be incorporating into this website. Sure, we could’ve paid for premium plugins like we used to do. But the truth is, many of these plugins still felt lacking in some ways. They would often get us 95%, 98% of the way there, but it is that final few percentage that always felt like we were missing out on something. We have come to learn, those final few percentages is our standards.
So, what plugins are we looking to create by hand?
- Dashboard and Stats (similar to Jetpack, minus the paywall/subscription)
- AEO/GEO/SEO (like Yoast, minus the subscription as well)
- A streamlined syntax highlighting plugin.
- Our own dark/light theme.
- And others if deemed necessary.
As you might already be able to tell from the looks of our website right now, we have kept it intentionally minimalistic. Our aim here is to keep it clean with less clutter, that way, we can be more judicious about what we want to include. More isn’t always the best. More can sometimes just turn into noise, distraction.
Minesweeper Reloaded
For this third piece of work that we have going on right now, is inspired by the classic minesweeper game that often came with windows in the 2000s. Now that we have officially quit LinkedIn, we’re beginning to discover that being on social media and networking platforms for years, have zapped so much of our time, energy/attention away. And now that we have the space and freedom, we are looking for other forms of entertainment that doesn’t ask for anything in return. Sure, we do enjoy playing PC games too. But they often require certain hardware specs, and we might not be able to meet those requirements. But what if we could bring back a classic game and then make it better?
When we first got this inspiration, we did do our checks on various online stores, and found several variations of the modernised game. But what is very common about these games is that there is a paywall. And that paywall is only there to remove an inconvenience like ads. Which, honestly, doesn’t really provide much incentive/value for gamers to pay that kind of money.
So, what if we could make the free version totally ad free, but also include a paid version that unlocks value-adding features that deepen how the game plays. That way, players might actually be able to get something out of the game (should they decide to pay for it). Even if they do not, the free version will be all that they need to have a meaningful way of entertaining themselves without getting sucked into tech addiction (something else we have also struggled with for years).
We look forward to sharing this game via the Google Play Store first. Eventually, we will progress to Windows, Linux, and then iOS/macOS. We will be building this game using the native language/frameworks so as to provide the best possible native gaming experience (rather than using cross-platform frameworks/solutions).
Exploring a New AI Apprentice Working Relationship
On this game, we’re working with two different kinds of AI, in two different relationships. In the first one, we’ve chosen Sonnet 5.5 as our main daily driver. It is our Socratic partner, advisor, and thought-partner. In this working relationship, we’ve established clearly within our own “Inventor’s Doctrine” that the human part of the partnership will always comes first, and our involvement will always be at least 50% of the time. That also speaks to our personal/professional stance as a pragmatic optimist when it comes to the adoption of AI technology.
On the other side, we have something new that we are just starting to explore and evaluate, and that is our new working relationship with an AI coding agent. For now, that agent comes in the form of Claude’s Haiku 5.5 (via Claude Code). Within the context of building this game, we have chosen to see/treat Haiku as a virtual apprentice. This is not a replacement for a human apprentice (and human-level work), and nothing it produces ships without our review.
Our decision to involve an AI coding agent is also part of our own multi-year evaluation process to better understand how we can not only work with AI agents in general, but also to transform our entire workflow (especially the parts that will provide us with the most value).
At the time of preparing this summary, we also believe that there is a potential for this evaluation process to produce some sort of blueprint that we can use with future AI agents (be it in knowledge work, or more specialised work like design and coding). Beyond that, we like to think that this blueprint has the possibility of becoming something that we can share with the rest of the community, especially those people that are like us (i.e. solopreneurs, freelancers, independent consultants and the like).
My Connections
Finally, one of our existing, active pieces of work involves the crafting and building of a private, personalised relationship management platform. This idea was born from our own desire/decision to finally leave LinkedIn for good. No, we’re not interested in trying to recreate LinkedIn 2.0, or make a replacement. Instead, we want to take a more ground-up approach to creating a platform that we felt, “This is what LinkedIn should’ve been.”
In time, we will begin to invite people we know to join us on this platform, and we can test it together. On top of that, when the platform is ready, we intend on making it open-sourced, so anybody else can take it and deploy it and make it into their own personal networking platform as well.
Are there plans to make it into a singular, open platform where anybody could just sign up?
Answer is, not right now.
Again, we’re not interested in trying to recreate what LinkedIn is today. That is not our aim. We’re trying to start from the ground-up, while also crafting, designing and engineering non-addiction features into the very foundations of this platform. And maybe, if we can prove over time that this works at a smaller scale, maybe, just maybe it could become a more open platform. That is not a decision for today.
Pending Works
Some of our other pending works includes our up-and-coming professional website, a core, plugin-like product called “ContentEngine”, a personal utility tool called “Headspace Mapping Tool”, and a writing project titled, “The Design Engineering Handbook”.
As more progress in made on each of these pieces of work, and there is more substance to them, we’ll provide those updates here. Stay tuned.
What We’re Learning
At the present moment, our learning covers a few areas, mostly, they are in service of the various pieces of work that are either currently active, or about to begin. Like with so many things that we do, as well as who we are at our very core, we believe strongly that it’s never just about what you know, or what you claim to know. It is about what you could demonstrate, not just via the output itself, but also with deep understanding.
Remastering PHP (ver. 8.*)
At this current moment, in service of our personal website’s ongoing enhancements, one area that we had neglected in recent years was our understanding and ability to work with PHP. Our prior knowledge and experience of working with PHP ended around late-2018. Just before we made the decision to leave the industry (which we eventually did return to). PHP is at the very foundation of how WordPress is developed, and ultimately, maintained. And for us to craft and build custom plugins that would meet our standards and desired experiences, this is a part of the process that we refuse to skip over.
Remastering Kotlin
Another area that we’re also slightly rusty is in Kotlin (Android). The last time that we actively worked on Kotlin was in October 2024. We were working for a company then, and our job involved working heavily on an Android app that the company manages and owns. After leaving that job in November 2024, we basically went back to focusing on our web front-end skills. Now, with our most recent game idea, we saw the opportunity to revisit Kotlin, and also to use this time to remaster our own skill and understanding within Kotlin & Android development itself.
Claude Code
Last but not the least, we have to talk about AI agents. But more specifically, we are beginning our personal/professional evaluation from the angle of front-end engineering. And the best place we can begin is by diving into working with Claude Code. While many of the loudest online voices today like to talk about working with 20, 50 different agents and achieving 10×, or 20× productivity, we’re less interested in demonstrating how productive we can become because we’re working with AI agents. Instead, we’re more interested in discovering and understanding how we could work with AI agents (starting with Claude Code) in order to create the most value from the way that we work (collaborate).
