Social Singapore needs art & culture so that creativity doesn't become stifled in an engineering monoculture. I've been thinking about this a lot. https://www.sopha.social/api/snaps/collection/ns-culture

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Whenever I visit my extended family members, I am always reminded – for all its best-in-class safety, surveillance, and public infrastructure capabilities – just how creatively stifling and ideologically monocultural Singapore can be, and the reasons many of them chose to live, study, and work in the West. One uncle exited to Canada so his son could avoid mandatory military training (National Service – NS). Another distant cousin recently graduated from college in Australia. Meanwhile her brother recently finished NS, and, though humbled by the experience, has no motivation left to pursue higher education. My own parents exited the Singapore education system in the 90s and fully bought into the American Dream – with all the financial and administrative ups and downs that entailed – and in particular sacrificed greatly to raise me and my brother with a Silicon Valley education. I am forever grateful to them.

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ok banger

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I used a hand-me-down family Mac Mini throughout elementary school and middle school to learn Scratch and Objective-C and JavaScript. In high school I was issued a Chromebook which I used to hack around on Cloud9, CodeAnywhere, Khan Academy, CodePen, Replit, RunKit, and a number of obscurely-named FTP clients and code editor apps downloaded from the Chrome Web Store (until a friend taught me how to dual-boot a Linux distro). A few summers later as a rising high school junior, I used the proceeds I saved up from math tutoring and teaching computer programming workshops to buy a shiny new MacBook Air. It served me well throughout college, until one fateful day in 2021 during “Zoom university” when the SSD decided to quit working. Everyone’s career starts somewhere, even if all you have is an absolute potato of a computer. https://x.com/samhenrigold/status/2032080638635880796

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Wild second half of 2025 for me: • attended @farcaster Developer Day in NYC (second time this year!) • attended Devconnect (@devcon) in Buenos Aires, Argentina (first time ever stepping foot in South America!) • redesigned @walletbeat and transitioned the site to a new minimal-dependency architecture • shipped some miscellaneous behind-the-scenes UI work for @ethglobal, @kamigotchi • joined @spindl to learn about and help advance the emerging field of web3 attribution and onchain activity measurement (and to experience a bit of @base / @coinbase's legendary work culture for myself) • so. much. vibe. coding. Probably spent hundreds of dollars testing a dozen different LLM-assisted IDEs, CLI tools and agent platforms in the past half-year alone (though in practice I'm still quite loyal to Cursor) • found myself dabbling in more unfamiliar programming territory (Nix, LynxJS, SwiftUI, Go) with the help of our ever-increasingly capable LLM agent friends • continued deep self-learning and experimentation on the frontier of web-based UI engineering (async Svelte, TanStack, Astro, Solid, newly Baseline HTML + CSS) and the "backend of the frontend" (SvelteKit Remote Functions, client-side data syncing / caching / normalization, fine-grained query + subscription management) • along those lines – currently on my third attempt to rewrite @blockhead with a local-first data layer that will properly keep up with you as you browse entities across the decentralized web-iverse (turning out much harder than anticipated!) • dealt with (and unfortunately procrastinated on) lots of random personal administrative / life-related tasks in between work and travel which scattered my focus a lot this year – gonna make it a point to minimize / automate / delegate this sort of stuff as much as possible in 2026!

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Can attest! (as a computer science dropout who learned + practiced building in crypto/web3 through Twitter and hackathons)

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Projects I’d work on given unlimited time and AI compute: • MIDI player + visualizer with CSS scroll-driven animations + realtime AI audio transcription • hypergraph database like TypeDB, but local-first with the developer experience of Gel • @blockhead but cross-platform, offline-first, all major crypto/web3 data providers supported, field-level normalization / caching, and lots of visualizations • animated algebraic manipulation like 3Blue1Brown’s Manim, but realtime / web-based using MathML (Core?) + modern CSS / view transitions • desktop + mobile OS with built-in web engine, router, and proxy/VPN settings for individual apps / websites / PWAs / connected devices

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Wild first half of 2025 for me: • started freelancing • had my apartment broken into • won bounties from three hackathons during /ethdenver week • nomaded around Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan • attended /farcon-nyc • visited the Czech Republic • watched my brother graduate college • accepted a full-time role

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So a lot of you like music, huh? Music composition and production has been a solitary hobby of mine for a decade now, and outside of activities I did as a student I’ve never really shared it with anyone beyond my close friends and family. Now that the crypto × web3 social rails are more-or-less in place, I figure now might be a good time to do something about the huge pile of scores and tracks accumulating across all my hard drives. Just a few small things to figure out: • where to publish it (without losing attribution or signing away my rights) • how to monetize it (without inviting unwelcome levels of speculation) • how to present it (and especially what to name things) • how to get people to listen to it (or play it, or remix it, over and over again) If you know your way around the business and distribution of music in 2025, I would love to learn as much as I can from you.

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Just learned that an old coworker and founder friend of mine recently took his life. @eyqs was gregarious, an extremely hard worker, a great singer and one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met. He was the first to jump in and fix server outages at /dydx, commemorated every inside joke with custom Slack emojis set in hot pink Comic Sans (“darryl loves svelte”, “ok fine i made this emoji just for u”) and even tagged along with me to my first in-person @ethglobal hackathon (ETHNewYork 2022) where he contributed a few commits to @blockhead. After he left for the startup life, we’d run into each other at crypto conferences or grab lunch in NYC, and he’d pitch me on RWAs, tell stories about the fallout of being betrayed by an ex-cofounder, or ask if I could help out with frontend dev. The last time we made digital contact was just over a year ago. He wished me a happy 24th birthday. Reminder to self (and anyone who needs to hear it) to call up your old friends and ask them how they’re doing.

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I wrote a woodwind quintet when I was in eighth grade. This is how it ends. The bassoonist at the Stanford Youth Orchestra informed me that her part was extremely comfortable to play.

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I am THIS close to rejecting any and all opportunities coming my way involving a React codebase. I don’t care how much you’ll pay me or how prestigious the company is. Life’s just too short to be debugging apps built on bad defaults. I’d rather spend that time focused on making you a delightful experience.

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Sent from my mom to the family chat after a belated birthday dinner.

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Oh hey, it’s me!

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I was born a quarter century ago today. Taking this special time to do something I haven’t done since I went to college – write a personal homepage with plain old HTML + CSS. Excited to share it soon. Follow /darrylyeo if you’d like to be the first to know when it’s ready.

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