Meet 12-year-old app developer Puck Meerburg
Wired, February 2012
Twelve-year-old Puck Meerburg (above) from Delft, Holland, is an app developer. Since 2010 he has published seven apps for the iPhone and iPad, including a guide for the Netherlands’ oldest museum, the Teylers in Haarlem.
“My dad had got an iPhone and I was interested in how you wrote apps for it,” he says. “So I downloaded the software development kit. I had already written a web app called TafelTrainer, which helps kids learn their times tables, so I turned it into something for the iPhone.”
Meerburg taught himself JavaScript, PHP and the JavaScript library resource jQuery when he was “about seven or eight”. TafelTrainer was followed by a card-game app called 4 Kings, and last October he launched The Quizzer, an app that links an iPad and some iPhones into a general-knowledge quiz.
His apps – mostly free, with the exception of TafelTrainer+ and The Quizzer – were downloaded about 75,000 times in 2011. His ambition is to be a games designer – like his idol, Minecraft creator Markus ” Notch” Persson. “In ten years, computers will be super-fast,” he says. “We’ll be able to play games using brain sensors.” Meerburg, who plays piano and is learning Arduino, is also becoming something of a pundit, appearing on Dutch television and at conferences such as SIME in Stockholm and TEDxYouth in Amsterdam. “It’s fun to be asked about the apps,” he says. “But I like programming best.”
