MinecraftDockerJavaCommunity
2018 – 2025
At 13 I turned a hobby into HearthCraft: a survival Minecraft server I ran from 2018 through 2025. What started as learning to host on managed and bare-metal boxes (plugins, Docker, backups, all of it) grew into a community of 40,000+ players over seven years.
The server never reset. That was the point: a persistent world where people could build, hang out, and come back to the same place. I kept it non-pay-to-win, wrote and configured Java plugins, handled moderation, and treated it less like a game and more like a small platform with real ops work.
Revenue from optional cosmetics helped fund college and occasional charitable givebacks. Running HearthCraft taught me more about reliability, community dynamics, and saying no to bad ideas than most of my early coding jobs combined.