A Full Release, at Nine, in Scratch
The beginning is two years earlier than I tell people
I used to say I started programming in late 2018. That is when I started typing code, and it is two years late. The oldest thing I have published is a Scratch project called "My Game," dated December 10, 2016, when I was eight. By nine I was shipping "Maze Run Infinite (Prerealease)" and "Clicker Full release," a prerelease and a full release in a drag-and-drop editor that has no concept of either. About fifty people looked at all seventeen projects combined. I kept versioning them anyway.
The Honest Origin
"I got into coding because I thought I was smart enough to market and grow a Discord Server that would somehow become profitable."
The Minecraft Awakening
First package, first plugin, first five stars
This is where my public text code begins, and where a pattern sets that never breaks: I learn by building real software and publishing it, at a pace that embarrasses adults. In March 2021 I pushed nodejs-notebook to npm, my first package. A month later came minecraft.js, an API wrapper written like a library instead of a script, and MoreSurvival, a Bukkit plugin. I was twelve.
The Moment It Clicked
"I got my first 5-star review, and moved forward."
The Craftsman Emerges
Gradle, a 25-version abstraction, and real users
The gap between 2021 and 2022 is the largest single-year leap in the record. My commit count went up fivefold, my Maven plugins became multi-module Gradle Kotlin DSL builds, and MobChip, an Entity AI Library for SpigotMC, reached 88 stars across 17 versioned adapters. After I stopped maintaining it, another developer took it over, which is about the highest compliment an open-source library gets.
Building Tools That Build Tools
And GamerCoder becomes gmitch215
In 2023 I stopped building only applications and started building tools that build applications. InceptusNMS is my own documentation engine, a Kotlin parser that turns JSON schema files into a browsable site in the style of the JDK Javadoc. KotlinMC automated my own distribution with an hourly job that polls JetBrains, bumps a Gradle plugin and publishes to Modrinth. I was fifteen. That summer GamerCoder also became Gregory Mitchell, then gmitch215.
Why I Rebranded
"I was getting older and needed to be more professional. I wanted a name that reflected my identity as a developer, not just a gamer."
Ten Languages, Five Registries
Range, proved in a single artifact
2024 opened with the most advanced thing I ever built in Minecraft, then pivoted hard toward range. SocketMC pairs a server plugin with a client mod over a socket protocol, and it is a direct ancestor of edgeport. Then benchmarks ran the same algorithms in C, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Kotlin/Native, PHP, Ruby, Rust and Zig. You cannot fake that; it takes idiomatic code in ten languages at once.
Published to the Grown-Up Registries
kasciffy and TabroomAPI to Maven Central. TabroomAPI to npm. gitle to the Gradle Plugin Portal, built so I would stop paying for a hosted repository just to consume my own libraries.
Other People's Repositories
Patches upstream, and a support desk I never signed up for
The easy story about a teenager with a lot of commits is that he worked alone. The record disagrees. Across four Minecraft years I sent 29 pull requests into 19 organizations I do not own and filed 91 issues into roughly 45 upstream projects, the first merged when I was twelve. Strangers filed 69 issues on my projects and I answered them, and 19 of 22 outside pull requests got reviewed and merged.
How the Bukkit Patch Ended, in My Own Words
"It seems this approach is unpopular. I've decided to decline this PR and maybe make a new one overall in the future, perhaps with better implementation."
Pointing My Superpower at the Thing That Hurts
cmdfx, teaching, and the mission
Three storylines converge in 2025. cmdfx is a game engine for the terminal, written from scratch in C, because after kasciffy I needed an excuse to get back into C. I taught Java to seventh through ninth graders that summer. And in May I founded the org behind The Earth App, a platform against loneliness, which won the 2025 Congressional App Challenge for Illinois' 2nd District.
It Was the Harness, Not the Model
What actually moved, measured against my own logs
For four years my curve sat near 2,000 commits a year. In 2026 it broke: 8,045 commits in ten months, more than 2024 and 2025 put together. My own stored prompts date the break, and the obvious answer is wrong. A year of Copilot Chat left my median month flat, 182 commits to 199. The step came in May 2026, the month the first CLAUDE.md appeared in one of my repositories. It was the harness, an agent that can run the build, the tests and the deploy. It was not a better model.
The Objection, and Why It Fails
Agents might just split work into smaller commits. My median commit went the other way, from 27 changed lines to 90.
A Computer Nobody Has Finished Writing
Drupflare, gmux, and a tool for why things pass here and fail there
On August 9 I started a spike to answer one question: can Drupal 11 run on Cloudflare Workers? v1.0.0 shipped on September 13: PHP 8.5 compiled to WebAssembly, running inside a Durable Object that uses its own SQLite as the database. No VPS, no container, no origin server. The same trick then ran Java (bytebox), images (tinyimg), arbitrary WebAssembly (burrow) and finally Linux itself (gmux). The claim underneath all of it: a serverless platform is a general-purpose computer that nobody has finished writing the runtimes for.
The Rule That Came Out of It
An absolute CPU figure comes only from cpuTime in wrangler tail on a deployed worker. In-PHP microtime() returns 0 on the edge, and Date.now() once reported 114 ms for a 1,374 ms invocation. Zero is obviously broken; 114 survives review.
The Accounting I Did Not Have To Publish
PHP in wasm costs the same energy per request as native PHP-FPM, to within 13%. My cost table prints the case I lose: one busy site is $5.15 on Workers against a $5.00 VPS. And on a per-tenant Cloudflare wattage: "there is no counter being withheld; there is no counter."
The Rule Every Measurement Confirmed
"Preserve the abstraction, remove everything the abstraction does not require." An interrupt in place of polling took idle host wakes from 13,588 a minute to under 300.
Build Software So People Feel Less Alone
CS and Quantitative Social Science, aimed at the problem
The Earth App is live in the app stores at v1.0.3, with four surfaces that each do one job: a Drupal 11 API, a Cloudflare Worker, a Nuxt web app, and a native iOS and Android app. Then I compiled the whole mission into one small app. recess says "Go Outside." No server. No account. No competition. No social graph. Nothing is uploaded, and the points buy nothing, because there is nothing to buy. I grew up inside engagement mechanics, so I built the opposite on purpose.
What Two Summers Taught Me
"Developers have a problem-solving mindset; it becomes difficult for us to recognize when it shouldn't be us who solve the problem."