2084
2023–presentA self-hosted MUD built on Evennia — game design, backend, deployment, and networking all owned end to end, with puzzle design prioritized over grinding mechanics.
What it is
“2084” is a MUD — a text-based multiplayer game, the genre that predates and directly shaped the modern MMO — built on Evennia, a Python framework for this kind of persistent multiplayer world. It’s self-hosted and self-administered: real infrastructure, not a tutorial project left running on localhost. It’s live and running today; the next step is opening it up publicly, with three playtesters already lined up for launch.
Approach
Most portfolio projects show a slice of a stack. This one is deliberately full-stack in the literal sense — every layer between “idea” and “players connected” was mine:
- Game design — puzzle-driven content and world-building, with an explicit priority on humor and craft over traditional grind-based progression loops.
- Backend — Python/Evennia server logic: game state, command parsing, persistence.
- Deployment & operations — self-hosted on my own server, which meant owning networking and firewall configuration, uptime, and the operational layer that most data engineering roles abstract away behind a cloud provider’s dashboard.
Why it’s here
It’s the clearest evidence I have of end-to-end ownership outside of an assigned work project — design, build, ship, and keep running, including the systems administration and networking work that doesn’t usually show up in an enterprise data role where infrastructure is someone else’s team. It also demonstrates comfort with ambiguity: no ticket, no spec, no reviewer — just a system that has to work.