A little about me

Hey there, me again. I’ll keep this brief but I’ve been interested in software development and especially game development since I was a little kid, but I’ve never actually been a developer (or designer, or artist, or anything other role you’d see in a studio.)

I started with QBASIC when I was ten, learned Java and HTML/CSS and Flash (lol) in high school, C++ in college. Even got Cisco certified, full blown nerd. Got a full ride to Drexel University because of my passion for making games, but I struggled with the transition to indepedence in college and got terrible grades, so to save my scholarship I switch from SWE to Business :/ So I became a Business Systems Analyst and since then I’ve sat next to engineers, designing systems and interfaces for them to build, but never building anything myself. And all of that work has been in the most boring contexts imaginable (like workflow orchestration tools for enterprise and government employees).

But now! With the dawn of seriously good AI coding agents, especially since around the turn of 2025 to 2026, I finally feel empowered to really build. I have been building apps with these AI tools for about a year now, starting with things like Replit (which evolved from pretty-much-useless to awesome-for-personal-apps while I was playing with it) and Cursor and Codex and Github Copilot, but things really took off in January when I started using Claude Code, mostly in the CLI. I know most folks that aren’t engineers can be intimidated by the terminal but Claude Code has an absolutelyt delightful interface and its harness is brilliant. Of course I will write a lot more about Claude Code and the other tools I’m using, but we’ll save that for later.

The first game I seriously designed was Crowns and Rebels, a project with a buddy of mine that was intended to be a text-based MMORPG, and which was heavily derivative of Kings of Chaos. We worked on the concept, and I started learning PHP and mySQL so I could make the site. But it was too hard, and I was a teenager.

Fast forward several years and I dabbled in Dwarf Fortress then fell in love with Gnomoria. I made a few mods for it (which entailed nothing but writing up XML files) and got several thousand downloads of a few of them, which brough me a disproportional amount of joy; knowing there were people out there having fun with something I’d done was exhilerating, even though it was such a modest thing. From then on I knew