Gregory R. Mitchell

I show my passion for video games, computers, and software through the development, modification, and release of platforms and projects that engage people in a fun and proactive way. My favorite color is lime green.

My first programming experience started in late 2018, working with Drupal and PHP on various websites inside brightplum, my father's shop. He did not want me going into tech, and he taught me that one framework and nothing else directly; what I got was an environment rather than an education, and I have paid for my own domains and infrastructure ever since. My first solo, industry-grade work came in 2019 when I built my first Discord bot for servers I privately managed. Falling in love with programming, with a head start in block editors like Scratch, foreshadowed a long and active path in software for me at age 11. I did more JavaScript with my first node module, nodebook, before spending my middle school and early high school years on Minecraft plugins and mods.

Terminal Miner, the first game I ever made in C++, is when I started branching out into all kinds of programming languages.

I have built a lot of different things, starting from Discord bots and moving into Minecraft plugins. Along the way I became immersed in a rich developer culture, and I still take in feedback at a high standard to keep the work good. That culture was not one-directional: I have sent 29 pull requests into organizations I do not own, filed 91 issues into other people's projects, answered 69 bug reports from strangers on mine, and merged 19 of the 22 patches other people sent me. I also submitted an API change to Bukkit at fifteen, got reviewed by its maintainers, and withdrew it myself when the objection turned out to be architectural. I tried game development for a while, but it never really clicked, especially as I slowly stopped playing games. In this waking age of artificial intelligence, human skill and knowledge only sharpen the need for creativity in tech.

My high school years saw me shift toward an interest in Psychology and human connection. I still really enjoyed programming and was not ready to give it up. So I built The Earth App, my long-term work against the mental health and loneliness epidemic in our society. It is not a prototype anymore; it is live in the app stores, and I compiled the whole idea down into a second, smaller app called recess, which has no server, no account, and no social graph, and asks you to go outside.

I spent two summers teaching Computer Science to rising 7th through 9th graders in Chicago. It was exhausting and surreal and worthwhile, and it taught me more about the psychology of learning to code than any of my own projects did. The nine-year-old who called himself "GamerTeach" because he taught his friends about games grew up and actually taught. I leave for Dartmouth to study Computer Science and Psychology, pointed at the same problem.

About Gregory