---
title: "About | yjsoon"
description: "YJ Soon — teacher, designer, and programmer in Singapore. Co-founder of Tinkertanker."
canonical: "https://yjsoon.com/about/"
language: "en"
---

# 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](https://tinkertanker.com/), 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.

[yjsoon on Twitter](https://x.com/yjsoon "yjsoon on Twitter") [yjsoon on Threads](https://threads.net/@yjsoon "yjsoon on Threads") [yjsoon on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/yjsoon "yjsoon on LinkedIn") [yjsoon on GitHub](https://www.github.com/yjsoon "yjsoon on GitHub") [Send an email to yjsoon](# "Send an email to yjsoon") [yjsoon RSS Feed](https://yjsoon.com/feed "yjsoon RSS Feed")

## Work

-   [Tinkertanker](https://tinkertanker.com/): The company I co-founded with my friends Akmal and Steven.
    -   [Tinkercademy](https://tinkercademy.com/): 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](https://swiftinsg.org/): A year-long talent development programme I run for aspiring young app developers, supported by IMDA and Apple.
-   [Agentic Builders Collective](https://agenticbuilders.sg/): 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](https://github.com/agentic-builders-collective/agentic-builders-collective.github.io) and demand to be added.
-   [Get Hacking](https://gethacking.com/): An online store run by [Tinker Class](https://tinkerclass.tech/), a joint venture between Tinkertanker and Classroom HK.
-   [Tinkermind](https://tinkermind.sg/): A maker education company in which Tinkertanker holds a minority stake.

## Things I’ve made

### Personal projects

-   [**JustNow**](https://justnow.tk.sg/): 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](https://github.com/yjsoon/justnow).
-   [**YNAB Rewards**](https://rewards.soon.sg/): A rewards tracker for people who obsessively categorise their YNAB transactions to maximise their credit card rewards. Hello! [Source](https://github.com/yjsoon/ynab-rewards-tracker).
-   [**This blog**](https://github.com/yjsoon/blog): Built with [Astro](https://astro.build/), originally based on the [AstroPaper theme](https://github.com/satnaing/astro-paper), and subjected to continual tinkering.

### Work and teaching projects

-   [**Bamboobot**](https://bamboobot.tk.sg/): Generates certificates of achievement with text properly embedded in the PDF. [Source](https://github.com/tinkertanker/bamboobot-cert-generator).
-   [**Classroom Widgets**](https://widgets.tk.sg/): A real-time teacher and student activity board with polls, questions, timers, QR codes, randomisers, handouts, feedback, and voice commands. [Source](https://github.com/tinkertanker/classroom-widgets).
-   [**Discord Drive Uploader**](https://github.com/tinkertanker/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**](https://github.com/tinkertanker/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**](https://stickers.tk.sg/): Stickers for the company mascot, made by complaining extensively at imagegen. [Source](https://github.com/tinkertanker/tkrobot-stickers).
-   [**Vibbit**](https://vibbit.tk.sg/): 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](https://github.com/tinkertanker/vibbit).
-   [**IC Photo**](https://icphoto.tinkertanker.com/): Our first iOS app. Hundreds of thousands of downloads! Years and years of neglect!

### Older but still around

-   [**DF-Style Linked List**](https://github.com/yjsoon/df-style-linked-list_wordpress-plugin): 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**](https://tgttmg.tk.sg/): 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:

-   [Teapots: Once Upon a Time in China](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mw1mhCZvwLQ)
-   [The Duckness of Space](https://youtube.com/watch?v=vuekAy5mGec)
-   [3D QBasic Gorillas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm7kP7eSrD8)