Who writes this
myna is made in Singapore by Herbert Chan, who spent years automating other people's houses and then could not get his own household to run.
For a good while I was a systems integrator. Residential and hospitality control systems: lighting, AV, climate, the whole invisible layer that makes a room know you have walked into it. I have commissioned buildings that respond to a person more gracefully than my flat responds to me asking what time swimming is.
Then I had two young kids, a helper, and a week of enrichment classes and appointments that moves just often enough to catch me out. It caught me out constantly. The tools I had were built for individuals who happen to live near each other: group chats where the thing you actually needed is four screens up, and a calendar that works beautifully for me and for nobody else in the house.
It took an embarrassingly long time to notice that I had spent a career making other people's spaces coordinate themselves, and had never once pointed any of it at my own family. So I did, eventually, and it became this.
For the avoidance of doubt: I do not run this household. My wife does, and she has final say on anything to do with the kids. I built a coordination tool for a house I am a participant in rather than the owner of, which means the only test that has ever mattered is whether it works for her. The longer version is in why we built myna, including the parts that surprised me.
Why there's a blog
Everything on it is either something I needed and couldn't find written down properly, or something I got wrong first and would like you to skip.
I'm not a child psychologist, a teacher, or anyone with a qualification that bears on your child, and I don't write as though I were. What I have is a household that has to work on a Tuesday, an engineer's instinct for reading the actual manual, and a habit of going to the source, MOE's own pages, Google's own documentation, Apple's own support notes, rather than the fifteenth article summarising them. Where a claim matters, it's linked so you can check it yourself.
Why the posts say "Team myna"
Because they are not written by one person sitting alone. The research, the drafting and the fact-checking are a joint effort, and putting a single name at the top of that would be taking credit for other people's work. The household in the stories is mine. The writing is a team.
If you want to know who to blame for a specific claim, it is me. Corrections come here.
What this blog will not do
- No affiliate links. Nothing here earns a commission if you buy it.
- No paid placements or sponsored posts. If a product is recommended it's because it's the right answer, including when the right answer is a free tool from Google or Apple instead of ours.
- No invented statistics. If a number appears it's sourced and you can click through to check it.
- No pretending myna is the answer to everything. Several posts here end by sending you somewhere else. That's deliberate.
The obvious disclosure: I make a product in this space, so I have an interest in you thinking about it. That's exactly why the comparisons name real limitations, ours included, and why the recommendations point elsewhere when elsewhere is better. A guide that always concludes "buy mine" isn't a guide.
Corrections and contact
If something here is wrong, out of date, or has been overtaken by a policy change, please tell me and I'll fix it and say that I did. Facts about schools, phones and parental controls move faster than blog posts do.
Get in touch · myna is currently in closed testing, built and run from Singapore.