The girl who kept opening the box.

I started the way a lot of people do — taking apart something that already worked to find out why it did. That habit never really left. These days it looks like design files, half-written Java and a browser with far too many tabs open, but it's the same impulse: see how the thing works, then make a better one.

These days most of that goes into ONR, a Minecraft network I develop for. Rather than buying plugins and wiring them together, I write them — the gamemodes, the ranks, the economy, the menus, the moderation tools. It means when something breaks at midnight, the fix is mine to make.

I like building for communities because the people using it are right there, telling you what's broken and what made them smile. A server is a rare kind of project: it never really ships, it just keeps being played.

I care about the small parts. Type that's comfortable to read. Buttons that say what they do. Menus that make sense on a phone at 2am, and on a console, and on a computer that shouldn't really be running the game at all. Nothing here is loud for the sake of it.

Make it clear before you make it clever. The rule I keep coming back to

Away from the screen I'm usually somewhere with music on — collecting songs, taking photographs I never post, and talking far too long about a book I've just finished.