A Kid, a Web Shop, and a Bad Theory About Money
Age 11, learning the family trade
I did not teach myself to code in a vacuum. I was born into it. My father runs Bright Plum, a Drupal and PHP web shop, and my first real programming happened there in late 2018, working on client websites at eleven years old. The lineage is not a metaphor; my email is still [email protected].
The names came first, and they tracked who I thought I was. MathyCrafter at seven (from accidentally setting my Minecraft username to an old email password), GamerTeach at nine when I started teaching friends about the games I played, then GamerCoder215 at eleven. Gamer to teacher to coder, in three handles, before I had shipped anything real.
That belief built my first Discord bots in 2019, the year I made a GitHub account and the work became real. It was the wrong theory about money and the right theory about me. The engine of the whole thing was an eleven-year-old convinced he could turn a hobby into a business, and stubborn enough to keep going when it turned out to be a lot harder than that.
The Minecraft Awakening
First package, first plugin, first five stars
This is where the record truly begins, and where a pattern gets set that never breaks: I learn by building real, published software, in public, at a pace that embarrasses adults. In March 2021 I pushed nodejs-notebook to npm, my first published package. It reached version 1.2.2, so it saw real iteration, not a one-and-done upload.
Then Minecraft. Within two weeks that April I shipped MoreSurvival, a Bukkit survival plugin, and minecraft.js, a low-dependency API wrapper I wrote like a real library rather than a script, at thirteen. QuantumPen, a packet-level world editor, became my first published plugin on SpigotMC.
The code was exactly what you would expect from a self-taught thirteen-year-old: single-module Maven builds, copy-pasted boilerplate, a getter or two that returned the wrong field, and commits literally titled "replit updates" because I was building in a browser IDE. It worked. It had zero tests and zero documentation. It was a beginning, and I knew it.
The Craftsman Emerges
Gradle, a 25-version abstraction, and real users
The gap between 2021 me and 2022 me is the largest single-year leap in the record. In one year I went from a kid pasting getters to a developer running open-source projects like an adult, and my commit count tripled. Three things happened at once.
I learned real build engineering. My Maven plugins migrated to multi-module Gradle Kotlin DSL, and Novaconomy grew a 25-version NMS abstraction layer: reflection-based adapters for every Minecraft server release from 1.8 to 1.20. Minecraft's internals are obfuscated and change every version; abstracting across 25 of them is the kind of thing that defeats professional plugin developers.
Then I shipped my best work. MobChip, an Entity AI Library for SpigotMC, wraps Minecraft's native mob-AI internals behind a clean, fully documented public API across 17 versioned adapters. It has 35 test files, CI, a Discord community, and a real Maven repository other developers depended on. At 88 stars it is still my most successful project by a wide margin, and after I stopped maintaining it another developer took it over, which is about the highest compliment an open-source library can get.
Then came the Big 4: Novaconomy, StarCosmetics, PlasmaEnchants, and BattleCards, alongside MobChip the library. By the end of the year a fourteen-year-old was maintaining multiple published libraries, with tests, CI, and versioned releases, that real strangers used. That is not a normal hobby. It is an apprenticeship completing itself.
Building Tools That Build Tools
And GamerCoder becomes gmitch215
Two things defined 2023. First, I stopped building only applications and started building tools that build applications, a taste most engineers never develop and almost no teenagers reach. InceptusNMS is my own documentation-generation engine: a Kotlin parser that reads JSON schema files and produces a JDK-Javadoc-style browsable website, with its own schema validator and template generator. A tool to document other tools.
Alongside it, KotlinMC automated my own distribution: an hourly GitHub Actions job that polls JetBrains for new releases, auto-bumps a Gradle plugin, and auto-publishes to Modrinth. I was fifteen, and I was already building the pipeline instead of running it by hand.
Second, GamerCoder became Gregory Mitchell, then gmitch215. My git display name flipped to my real name across every active repo that summer; the handle followed soon after.
The new name is just g plus mitch plus 215, a number I picked at eleven and am refreshingly honest about not caring much about. A teenager building a professional identity, deliberately, ahead of the rest of my life.
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, bridging the two halves of Minecraft development that normally cannot talk to each other. It was the technical capstone of my Minecraft years, and a direct ancestor of edgeport: both are fundamentally about making two machines talk over a socket.
Then I proved multi-language fluency in one artifact. benchmarks is a harness that compiles and runs the same algorithms across C, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Kotlin/Native, PHP, Ruby, Rust, and Zig, times them, and plots the results. You cannot fake that; it requires writing correct, idiomatic, comparably-optimized code in ten languages at once.
I also founded Calculus Games, an indie studio, and designed LevelZ, a human-readable file format for game levels backed with parsers in six languages, an IntelliJ plugin, a VSCode extension, and a CLI. That is more completeness than most formats get from an entire company. By the end of the year I had shipped libraries in three package ecosystems and written production code in ten languages. I was sixteen.
Pointing My Superpower at the Thing That Hurts
cmdfx, teaching, and the mission
Three storylines converge in 2025, and this is the year the mission gets discovered and decided. The first is cmdfx, a game engine for the terminal written from scratch in C, begun in January 2025, before Claude Code existed. CMake build, sanitizer harnesses, a hand-rolled assertion library, Doxygen docs, a Homebrew formula, and installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is my control sample: a large body of hand-written, low-level, manually-memory-managed C that I can prove is mine, because the AI that could have written it did not yet exist.
The second is a job. That summer, at sixteen, I taught Java to seventh through ninth graders in downtown Chicago, an hour from home, writing my own curriculum and delivering the lessons myself. The nine-year-old who called himself GamerTeach grew up and actually taught, and it is not a coincidence that this is the same person who wants to study psychology.
The third is The Earth App. In May 2025 I founded the org and began the most ambitious thing I had attempted: a social platform to fight loneliness and the mental-health crisis, built as a 16-repository, five-language microservices architecture. I submitted it to the 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois' 2nd District, and won.
This is where it crystallizes. I am easily drained, and more than anything I want to feel included; in 2025 I decided to point my one real superpower at the thing that hurts. From here on the code has a purpose that is not about code.
The Ceiling Breaks
Building the layer beneath AI
For three years my curve sat near a plateau of about 1,800 commits a year, roughly the ceiling of what a fast human can hand-type while also going to school. In 2026 the ceiling broke: 3,336 commits in seven months, more than any prior full year, because the constraint stopped being my hands. I was directing agents, not typing.
And I spent that velocity building infrastructure for the AI era itself. edgeport is a from-scratch TCP library for Cloudflare Workers, with clients for SSH, SFTP, SMTP, IMAP, NATS, MQTT, and more, tested against real Dockerized servers, because the platform advertised the capability and no maintained library wrapped it. MyLoRA is a full MLOps control plane that fine-tunes LoRA adapters on my own home RTX 4070, driven from a Cloudflare Workers UI. MyMCP turns any OpenAPI spec into a Model Context Protocol server.
I also got into Dartmouth, Class of 2030, my number-one school, and graduated high school. The way I describe my own use of AI is the tell: you can outsource the typing, but you cannot outsource the understanding. The architecture stays mine. Only the keystrokes are shared.
Build Software So People Feel Less Alone
CS and Psychology at Dartmouth, aimed at the problem
This is the payoff. The Earth App is the reason the rest of the record exists in the shape it does: a platform I built to fight the loneliness and mental-health epidemic, the through-line that runs from a Discord server I started to feel less alone, through the plugins and tools and the C engine, to a real product with a real purpose. CollegeDB, my second-most-starred project at 28 stars, was extracted straight out of it and published on npm.
My interest in mental health is not academic. I am that same self-aware, easily-drained, wants-to-be-included kid, deciding to point my one real superpower at the thing that hurts. That is why I am pairing Computer Science with Psychology at Dartmouth and aiming both at the problem, rather than at a job title.
I call myself the world's okayest developer. It is a good joke, and it is wrong. The truer version is in my own words: you only really need one or two languages to be successful, but I learned ten because I wanted to, and because I had a reason to. I had a reason to. It shows in every commit.
