I'm Abi, a full stack developer in Zürich A Minecraft server running on my own PC got me into programming 🎮and I still spend my time making things run faster and work better
Wait. How did we get here?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I work on my own projects 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.
Find things to do near you
Kywi is a Swiss marketplace for tours, workshops and days out. I build the booking path people use to find an activity, choose a date and pay, then carry the same work through the systems that keep it running. Product decisions, frontend code, backend services and infrastructure are not handed from one desk to another. I am still building it, one useful edge case at a time.
Four apprenticeship years that made me a developer
TIE International gave me a start that was both demanding and generous. Over four years I met people with very different perspectives, got my software up to a professional standard, and learned that code is only one part of the job. Blockchain opened up there too. I travelled with TIE to work on site in Cape Town and in New York City, and the code I wrote sits inside their products.
Taught by the people who build it
I started with PBA-X Wave 01 remotely in January 2025, then spent three weeks on the Protocol Track on campus in Lucerne. The lectures came from the engineers and researchers building Polkadot itself, and only a small number of people get a place. For my final project I built a multi token treasury with its own governance system. I finished among the highest scores in my cohort, and both certificates were issued as NFTs on Polkadot Asset Hub.
I build these when a question will not leave me alone and client work has no place for it.
A browser for gamers that I am writing from scratch in C++. It lets me chase the parts browsers normally hide.
View on GitHubA Rust chat app for a local network. Devices find each other themselves, so there is no server between the people talking.
View on GitHub
Flappy Bird rebuilt in Java, starting with an empty window. I made it to understand every collision and point on screen.
View on GitHubSend me a note and tell me what you are trying to make. I take on client work and I answer every message myself.
