abi.

A server under my desk

When I was ten, my school friends and I wanted Minecraft game modes that public servers did not run. Renting a server cost too much, so I turned my own PC into one and passed its address around at school. It stayed online for exactly as long as I left the machine running.

Plugins meant learning Java

Running our own game modes meant writing plugins, and writing plugins meant Java. I taught myself from YouTube in Eclipse, with nobody nearby to ask when something broke. Plenty of things worked long before I knew why they worked.

Chasing every dropped frame

Minecraft kept dropping frames, and I wanted to find out where they went. That question led to small games and engines of my own, usually built straight into the game I was making. Java gradually gave way to C++ as I kept looking further underneath.

The year it became a job

I started a four year software developer apprenticeship at TIE International, and it ran until 2026. It was the first time other people depended on what I wrote, with deadlines and reviews attached to it. The work also took me a lot further from home than I expected.

Three weeks at protocol level

At the Polkadot Blockchain Academy in Lucerne, I learned from the engineers and researchers who build Polkadot itself. After years of finished products, working with the machinery beneath them was more fun than almost anything I had studied before.

A studio of my own

Michel Studer and I founded Rapture, a software studio in Zürich. I work on our own products and on client projects, right across software. Some of it starts with a blank folder, some of it is keeping an old system useful under a modern workload. I do not much mind which, because the problem underneath is the part I came for, and I would call myself a programmer with some taste in UI and UX.