Jordan Coin Jackson
Builder & writer. Detroit-made, Washington-DC-based.
I ship software people pay for, then write about what it taught me. By day I'm a senior engineer at a consumer-finance company, building AI systems that move real money and have to be right. Nights and weekends, I run a small portfolio of my own: a test-prep company, a book-club app, community tools, and a growing shelf of open source.
The through-line is the same everywhere: honest numbers, human voice, software that respects the person using it.
Where it started
- $7.40 an hour, Michigan One semester of college, then back to my mother's house and a job at a movie theatre.
- 10 + 1 the library years A library job and self-taught Swift. Ten apps built over two years. One launched.
- 20,000+ 2020 to 2022 Black Men Book Club: a book club with one member that became a newsletter, a site, an app, and a lot of Black readers. Closed August 10, 2022. The writing kept going.
My favorite place to be is the underdog, and it should be yours too.
Things that earn
Real products with real customers. No waitlists pretending to be companies.
- Social Work Test Prep Academy earning ASWB exam prep built around an uncomfortable fact: pass rates are ~75% overall and ~45% for Black test-takers. 1,000+ questions reviewed by a practicing LCSW, AI exam simulations, $129 until you pass. Web, iOS, Android.
- Hacked Summaries earning Audio book summaries and recommendations, grown out of Black Men Book Club. The app I built to get more people who look like me thriving through reading. iOS, 4.7★.
- AFK Mod building The only Discord moderation bot a community should need — an AI steward that watches, routes, and escalates so humans don't burn out. $59/mo.
- AppReviewReady new App Store review readiness for first-time developers — readiness checklist, rejection decoder, queue index. Free check; passes from $19.
Given away
Open source, mostly tooling for the AI-agent era of programming.
- codemap ★ 658 A project brain for AI coding agents — structural ground truth so your agent stops guessing at your codebase. Go.
- openfoia oss Local-first FOIA automation for journalists and the professionally curious.
- ios-skills-collection oss 200+ curated skills that make coding agents genuinely good at iOS work.
- crap4swift oss Change-risk analysis for Swift — finds the code most likely to hurt you. Ships via Homebrew.
- …and the rest 50+ repos docmap, Cassette, sockd, whats-next-mcp, a Homebrew tap, and whatever this week produced.
Written down
Essays on books, fathers, Detroit, and becoming. The longest-running thing I make — thousands of readers.
For social workers chasing licensure — study craft and the equity gap in plain language.
"Claude has my brokerage account. It mostly says no." A weekly account of the trades an A.I. refused to make — by Coin & Claude.
The early essays (2016–2021): dropping out, getting up, learning to build.
Now
Senior iOS engineer at Koalafi, where I originated and solo-built a purchase-validation platform that lets a lender finance carts at any retailer with zero integration — and where I learned that putting an LLM on a money path is a discipline, not a demo.
Increasingly writing and speaking about AI in consumer finance for underserved markets — the intersection where I live: the systems, the fairness math, and the people the credit system was not built for. If that's your world too, say hello.