Trinket

» see trinket.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Nothing like this existed when I was learning to program. You got a compiler onto the machine, down a modem if that was the only way it was coming, and then the machine was yours to break. The constraint I grew up with was bandwidth. The constraint Trinket was built for is a different one entirely, and it is administrative: thirty school computers that a teacher is not allowed to install software on.

Trinket's answer was to put the interpreter in the browser tab. You opened a page, typed Python on the left, and the program ran on the right. No install, and no permission needed from anyone. A single trinket was also embeddable, which meant a teacher or a textbook author could drop a running, editable program straight into a web page, and that is how the thing ended up inside online books rather than only on its own site.

Elliott Hauser and Brian Marks started the company in Durham, North Carolina in 2013, and the earliest captures of the site are from early 2014. They also ran hourofpython.com, the Python-shaped answer to the Hour of Code. That is a fair summary of who the customer was: a teacher with forty-five minutes, a room full of eleven-year-olds and a lab nobody had the password to.

By the end the numbers the company published were large for a tool almost nobody outside education has heard of. Three and a half million users and fifty million trinkets. A hundred and sixty thousand courses, and one and a half billion recorded interactions with the editor.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the 31st deleted ~

The tombstone at trinket.io is unusually direct, and the directness is the worst part of reading it. Downloads are no longer available. Courses and account data are no longer accessible either. Then the sentence that closes the door: "We are not able to retrieve content or accounts."

So the fifty million programs are a real loss rather than a figure of speech. Some of them were a child's first working loop and most of them were not worth keeping, but nobody got to make that call, because the only copy lived on a server that was switched off on a Monday. A tool whose entire pitch is that you do not have to install anything is also a tool that never put a file on your disk.

~ the code is still there ~

Hauser and Marks open-sourced the software on the way out. The repository at github.com/trinketapp/trinket-oss was created on 18 January 2026, seven months before the shutdown, and the last push to it landed on 20 August, eleven days before the end. They released it under CC0, which is not a license so much as a surrender of copyright altogether. Whoever wants it owns it.

Somebody took them up on it. Strive Math, an education company in Singapore, began hosting the free version in late May 2026 and now runs the open-source build at trinket.strivemath.org for teachers who had lessons built on the original. Trinket's own notice points at it and is careful to say that this host is independently operated and not supported or monitored by Trinket. The notice also lists Pickcode and Dodona for anyone wanting a product with a company behind it.

~ one tombstone, every domain ~

Trinket owned more than one domain and all of them now say the same thing. Ask hourofpython.com for its homepage in 2026 and the title that comes back is "Trinket has shut down", with the identical meta description about alternatives and the open source release. The Hour of Python is its own memorial now.

That description, written by the company for a search engine, is more precise about the date than most obituaries manage: Trinket shut down on August 31, 2026. It is the only place on the site where the thing is stated as a fact of the past rather than a set of instructions for what to do next.

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