THE WORKS
A field guide to the workshop
Jackson Lang
First-year Rotman Commerce at the University of Toronto, Trinity College. Co-founder of Armin.
I make things. The category keeps changing: a campus app, an AI fridge, a TEDx event, short films, a workshop full of agents. The pattern underneath is the same: I notice something that is slow or broken, build a first version, find out what is wrong with it, and change it.
This page takes about a minute. The game takes about five.
Now: Armin
Fall 2026 - present
Armin is a Chrome extension for Canvas. It organizes a student's courses (to-dos, timetable, grades) and adds study tools grounded in their own course material: flashcards, practice exams and "Ask my course". Organization is free; the study tools have a free allowance and an optional premium plan. It is live in the Chrome Web Store.
Co-founded with Alfred Liu and Matin Mahmoud. Matin leads core engineering. I lead most of the product, business and growth work, and much of the execution around the product.
The point is not another dashboard. It is making the actual learning better, with the tutor already knowing what you are studying.
How it started: tPortal
September 2026
In my first week at U of T, knowing what was due meant checking course pages, a timetable and a stack of syllabus PDFs. I built tPortal that week: a free desktop app that pulls deadlines, timetable and campus events out of Quercus and ACORN onto one screen, refreshed every fifteen minutes.
Eleven releases in six days. More than 50 beta users, most of whom told me what was wrong in person, and more than 40,000 impressions on the launch posts.
Two weeks after launch I learned that the way it pulled deadlines was not allowed under the platform's API rules. I removed the feature, deleted every stored token, and rebuilt around sources students control themselves: their calendar feed, their timetable, their syllabi. The product did less for a while. Then the three of us followed the bigger problem into Canvas itself, and that became Armin.
Basil Home AI
2024 - 2026
Co-founded with two friends in high school. Basil was an AI kitchen assistant: a camera that recognizes what is in the fridge and a voice unit that suggests what to cook from it, to cut household food waste. We built prototypes and worked with an industrial designer on the housing; the design moved from two separate devices toward a single module.
I led the business side: the plan, the pitch deck, the budget, the website and waitlist, and the designer. First place and $3,000 at SPRINT; second place and the $500 Sponsor's Choice at TYSIC. We built prototypes, took a few preorders, and wound the company down in 2026 before launch.
TEDxUCC Youth and the films
September 2024 - May 2026
I co-founded and led TEDxUCC Youth, Upper Canada College's first TEDx, with Porter Riopelle: the licence, recruiting and coaching the student speakers, marketing, sponsor outreach, and show day with the tech crew. Seven speakers to a full house; the organization ran for two school years.
The films are the other half of the same job. Directing, editing and cinematography on student shorts. Thank You for Loving Film, the one I am proudest of, screened at TIFF for the IB Film Festival. Also Therapy Session (directed; one actor playing both roles in a split frame), Reconstruction - Contact and Action - Bill (edited), Keep Talking (cinematography).
Night Shift
2026 - present
An experiment in directing autonomous AI agents to build software. I set the brief and judge what is useful; agents do much of the implementation. The lesson so far: making agents do work is not the same as making something useful. Build, test, learn, improve, in that order.
Results are modest and real: First Dig, a small public app that reads two Toronto open-data feeds (permits and licences); BrawlCoach, an AI I trained on Brawl Stars gameplay to give tips and plan account growth; Roblox development; and other experiments.
Earlier attempts
Childhood - 2026
Most of what I have started did not work, and most of it failed a little less badly than the one before:
- A website selling Rainbow Loom bracelets made by family and a friend. My first storefront.
- A small Pokémon-card trading economy in grade school.
- A clothing brand my friends and I made ourselves. It sold nothing.
- A dropshipping store for novelty items. It sold a little.
- Math tutoring in my neighbourhood that peaked at four clients, one of whom was my sister.
- Outline Financial, summer 2025: mortgage and insurance administrator at a Toronto brokerage. Processed client files end to end, coordinated with brokers, lenders and clients, and reorganized the filing and document workflow so fewer files stalled on missing paperwork.
- Walkers Point Marina, summer 2026: summer staff at a full-service marina on Lake Muskoka. The ice-cream line never moved because every item was typed into the register by hand, so I built a checkout tool that let us pick items from a menu. My coworkers used it until the end of August.
Sport, coaching, camp
Ongoing
- Ski racing at Craigleith Ski Club from U10 to U16, then back as a CSIA Level 1 instructor and U10 race coach: nine kids across the nine-week weekend program in 2024, seasonal since December 2023.
- Volleyball: four years of rep (Leaside, Phoenix), fifth at Volleyball Canada Nationals U14 in 2022. At UCC: learned middle from scratch and started there; captain of the varsity team; Rookie of the Year 2025; CISAA division champions.
- Varsity badminton. Debate Club. Financial Literacy Club.
- Kilcoo Camp: two summers as a camper, Leader-in-Training in 2024.
- Tutoring: Spirit of Math students over video during COVID (2020-2022), then Horizons Tutoring in person with TDSB students (2022-2024), math and some coding.
- Certifications: National Lifeguard, Standard First Aid and CPR-C, Lifesaving Instructor, Swim Instructor, Emergency First Aid Instructor, CSIA Level 1, PADI Open Water.
On the record
Things I would put my name to in a form
- SAT 1590.
- Waterloo Fermat contest: Certificate of Distinction and school medal, 2025.
- National Spanish Exam: Gold.
- NSLC Business & Entrepreneurship at Duke, 2025: first in both the product pitch and the management simulation.
- Upper Canada College, IB Diploma, 2018-2026. University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce, Trinity College, class of 2030.
- tPortal: first commit September 11 2026; eleven releases in six days; more than 50 beta users.
- Armin for Canvas: listed in the Chrome Web Store.
Contact
Toronto. Early-stage product teams and founder programs.
This page is the text version of the game at jacksonlang.ca. Earlier versions of this site are kept at /sheet, /factory, /make and /facts.