About

Hello! I’m YJ Soon, from and in Singapore. I teach, design, code, and build things. Depending on the time of day, I’m also a programmer, person who draws chickens (phrased this way because “chicken drawer” would be a notably different activity), and/or business owner.

Most of my work happens at Tinkertanker, the company I co-founded, where we teach coding and making to learners of all ages. I also spend money on AI coding subscriptions at a rate I’d rather not discuss.

Work

Tinkertanker: The company I co-founded with my friends Akmal and Steven.
- Tinkercademy: Our education brand. We teach coding and making to learners of all ages, covering agentic engineering, introductory programming, app development, web development, game development, and more.
- Swift Accelerator: A year-long talent development programme I run for aspiring young app developers, supported by IMDA and Apple.
Agentic Builders Collective: A Singapore community I co-founded for people building with AI agents. You can add yourself to our website by pull request—just point your favourite coding agent at the repository and demand to be added.
Get Hacking: An online store run by Tinker Class, a joint venture between Tinkertanker and Classroom HK.
Tinkermind: A maker education company in which Tinkertanker holds a minority stake.

Things I’ve made

Personal projects

JustNow: A native macOS menu bar app that keeps a short, fully local rewind history of your screen, with OCR, search, screenshots, and zero telemetry. Source.
YNAB Rewards: A rewards tracker for people who obsessively categorise their YNAB transactions to maximise their credit card rewards. Hello! Source.
This blog: Built with Astro, originally based on the AstroPaper theme, and subjected to continual tinkering.

Work and teaching projects

Bamboobot: Generates certificates of achievement with text properly embedded in the PDF. Source.
Classroom Widgets: A real-time teacher and student activity board with polls, questions, timers, QR codes, randomisers, handouts, feedback, and voice commands. Source.
Discord Drive Uploader: A self-hosted Discord bot and setup interface that uploads photos and videos from mapped Discord channels into Google Drive folders.
Points Accelerator: A Discord economy and assignment bot for class communities, with group points, personal wallets, a marketplace, betting, lucky draws, and an OAuth dashboard.
TKrobot Stickers: Stickers for the company mascot, made by complaining extensively at imagegen. Source.
Vibbit: An AI coding assistant for micro:bit MakeCode, packaged as a Chrome extension and bookmarklet, with a managed classroom backend and a bring-your-own-key mode. Source.
IC Photo: Our first iOS app. Hundreds of thousands of downloads! Years and years of neglect!

Older but still around

DF-Style Linked List: A WordPress plugin I haven’t touched in over a decade, which remains my most-starred repository. Yay?
Tinkerer’s Guide to the micro:bit Galaxy: A book we wrote during the pandemic.

Unreasonably old animations

Some 3D animations my friends and I made in high school in the late 1990s, using 3D Studio R4 or something: