Operational simulator
The Yard. A fictional Indonesian SOEyou can work inside, starting today.
Coding bootcamps train coders. Pandai trains operators. The Yard is how. PT Nusantara Logistics — a fictional 15,000-person SOE we spent 6+ months building — becomes your employer the moment you log in. Start anytime. Work it at your own pace.
90 seconds inside
Monday morning. Standup. A ticket lands. You ship.
A typical day at PT Nusantara Logistics, compressed to a minute and a half. Watch the work move the way it moves at a real engineering team.
What it is
PT Nusantara Logistics. A real-feeling fake company.
The cast: Bu Sari is the Customer Success Lead, 8-year veteran. The VP Eng has been at the company 12 years and remembers when the Oracle decision was “a good idea.” The CTO joined 18 months ago and is still finding skeletons. There’s a Slack. There’s a runbook. There’s a backlog older than some of the engineers.
- Founded
- 2003
- Employees
- ~15,000 nationwide
- Industry
- Logistics & warehousing, inter-island trade
- Tech team
- ~80 engineers across Jakarta, Surabaya, Makassar
- Stack
- Legacy PHP (2008 era), modern Python (2022+), Next.js, older React, React Native
- Database
- Half-migrated Oracle → Postgres
- Digital transformation
- Five years in. Half-finished. The interesting half.
Your team
You don’t work alone. You join a team that already exists.
Standups happen at 09:00 WIB. PR reviews come back the same day. The customer success lead DMs you when a shipper escalates. You learn the codebase by reading the comments on yesterday’s merged PR — written by someone you’ll talk to on Slack tomorrow.
CTO
Anto Sutrisno
Joined 18 months ago. Asks “what’s the second-order effect.” Writes ADRs.
VP Engineering
Hendra Kusumo
12 years here. Terse. Cites ADR numbers in PR review. Gatekeeps the legacy system.
Customer Success Lead
Sari Wijayanti
8 years. Warm. Knows every shipper by AWB. Onboards new joiners with a one-page welcome.
Product Manager
Mbak Dewi
Files Linear tickets mid-sprint. Scope-creeper. Asks “can we ship by Friday?”
QA Lead
Karina Sutanto
6 years. Methodical. Files bugs with screenshots and repro steps. Refiles when ignored.
DevOps / SRE
Bambang Sutrisno
Owns titan-prod-01. Says no to Friday deploys. Switches into Bahasa when annoyed.
Junior Engineer
Aldo Pranata
14 months in. First job. Asks dumb questions in #tech-help. Pairs well.
Ambient
HR & Finance
THR reminders. Reimbursement deadlines. Attendance pings. Background texture, like real life.
Why fictional
A real BUMN can’t be the training ground.
We built Nusantara Logistics from scratch so we could seed deliberately bad code without insulting any real company. A real BUMN’s engineers shouldn’t have to read public training materials that turn their employer into a punchline.
Fiction also lets the Yard persist as shared institutional memory. Every engineer who works the Yard inherits the bugs the last one didn’t fix. Bu Sari remembers. The on-call wiki grows. Real production engineering is a continuity game; the Yard is the only way to teach that without subjecting a real company to the learning.
What students do inside
Operational reality. Not isolated coding exercises.
Inside the Yard, work moves the way it moves at a real Indonesian enterprise. You get tickets. You get paged. You get scope-changed. Ship work that actually moves things.
Production incidents
3am Friday page. The customer portal is down. Start with the tracking router, not the portal — the portal is usually the messenger.
On-call rotations
Real rota. Real escalation matrix. Bu Sari pages you when Tanjung Perak calls about a stuck container.
Scope changes
Mid-sprint, a regulator deadline gets pulled forward two weeks. You replan. You don't complain in standup.
Customer escalations
Indonesian customers mix Bahasa Indonesia and English. Don't standardise the strings file. Ops will explain why.
Legacy migrations
The Oracle→Postgres migration started in 2021 and is 60% done. Some tables live in both. Read ADR 0001 first.
Regulator deadlines
UU PDP audit, OJK reporting, BSSN compliance. Real timelines. You ship to spec or you ship the explanation.
The iceberg
The most important decisions happen in rooms you can’t see.
Real engineering orgs run on an iceberg. The Yard is the only program that models this explicitly. Some channels you read every day. Others happen without you, and you only feel their consequences in the tickets that land on your plate.
Visible to you
The channels you read with your coffee.
#standup— morning async#tech-help— Aldo, questions#design-review— PR-level debate#deploys— the deploy lane#prod-alerts— on-call#random— coffee chat
Hidden from you
Where decisions about your work actually get made.
#leadership— CTO · VP Eng · PM#sre-on-call— rotation, paging#cx-internal— customer triage- 1:1 VP Eng × CTO — biweekly
- 1:1 VP Eng × Aldo — monthly
- 1:1 Bu Sari × Dewi — weekly
By Week 8 you read the iceberg without thinking. When a wave of new tickets arrives Wednesday afternoon, you know the customer success team rolled them up at their weekly — and you know who to ask. This is the literacy real engineering requires, taught the way it’s actually learned.
How it’s set up
Each student gets their own Yard.
Everyone who starts the Yard gets a private clone of the Nusantara Logistics codebase to themselves. Branch freely. Break things on purpose. Roll back when you have to. Your mistakes don’t leak into anyone else’s simulation.
We don’t know of another program that does this. It’s why 6+ months went into building the Yard before we opened it up.
Sample voice from the Yard
“I’ve been here 8 years and I’ve watched 3 CTOs come and go. Read the docs in order. Don’t touch backend-legacy until you understand WHY it still exists. Ask me anything.” Start anytime
Take the seat.
A live company that keeps running whether you’re online or not. AI colleagues review your PRs, page you when prod breaks, and escalate when a shipper is angry — on your own private clone of a 15,000-person SOE, yours from the first login.
In the Pandai Cohort? The Yard is already included — see cohort details →