I'm Jacob, though most people online know me as Ozz. I'm a fullstack developer from the UK and I've been writing code since 2022, mainly in TypeScript. Almost everything I build sits around Minecraft Bedrock servers: addon frameworks, database layers, server-side plugins and all the glue that holds those pieces together. It started as a way to make one server behave the way I wanted it to, and it turned into the thing I spend most of my time on.

Working on real infrastructure taught me more than any tutorial did. Python came out of writing plugins, Linux came out of keeping servers alive at two in the morning, and networking came out of needing to understand exactly why a packet was taking the route it was taking. I'd rather understand a system from the socket upwards than treat any layer of it as a black box, which is why I tend to end up writing my own tooling instead of reaching for something off the shelf.

I finished A levels with an A* in Computing and start a Computer Science come this september. I'm currently open to freelance work and commissions, and always happy to talk shop with other developers.

CrabSMP is a Minecraft Bedrock server I run from top to bottom. It's built on the Endstone C++ plugin framework and backed by Crab Engine, a custom engine I write and maintain myself. That covers the in-game systems and the economy, the rank and player schemas underneath them, the generated in-game UI, and the Discord integration that sits alongside the whole thing. Running it also means handling the parts nobody sees, from community management and admin decisions through to player acquisition.

Performance work is the part I enjoy most. Bedrock gives you a single main tick thread and very little room to hide, so profiling matters. A recent example was tracing a CPU bottleneck back to the tick counter itself and reworking how often the engine touched it. Small wins there are worth far more than clever features, because everything on the server is competing for the same twenty ticks a second.

The server stack is entirely self-managed. Caddy handles the web layer with layer 4 routing for Bedrock traffic and Cloudflare DNS modules for certificate issuance, built through xcaddy so I can pull in post-quantum cryptography support from beta builds. In front of that sits a proxy layer for packet filtering and DDoS mitigation, which means understanding RakNet properly rather than treating Bedrock networking as ordinary TCP.

Hardware choices follow the same logic. Since the tick loop is single-threaded, sustained single-core boost matters far more than core count, so hosting decisions get made on that basis rather than on whatever looks best on a spec sheet. Latency budgets, datacentre proximity and dedicated versus shared cores all feed into it.

Linux is home for me. I daily-drive Arch, run servers on Ubuntu and Debian, and keep a Mint machine around as a desktop. Day to day that means managing services and users, sorting out permissions, living in SSH, reading logs and fixing things when they break. Most of what I know there came from having no other option at the time, which turned out to be the fastest way to learn it.

There's a hardware side to this too. Back in 2022 and 2023 I ran BeRP bots for CrabSMP locally on my crappy laptop, while BeRP was still on GitHub. I've built my own machines from the parts up as well, so I'm comfortable working right down to the physical layer rather than only the software sitting on top of it.

Server architecture  ·  Custom tooling  ·  Addon systems
Performance tuning  ·  Database design  ·  Linux and networking