I have spent a lot of time in the time in the Minecraft server scene. I've been highly visible, in both my good and bad moments. But perhaps my most substantial and consequential project in that scene, specifically the Velocity Minecraft server proxy, is the most interesting story to tell.
Back in 2020, before the pandemic really hit, I started working on two projects built on top of Cloudflare Workers. One of those projects was the Mineteria Store, which jammed together server-side React running on top of an environment that server-side React didn't exactly run on at the time mixed with traditional client-side rendering, and a service to render Minecraft avatars called Crafthead, now maintained by Nodecraft. (Funny enough, the Mineteria Store is, to my knowledge, the only deployment of Elixir that was remotely close to the Minecraft server scene. What a time that was.)
I often like to start my day by keeping myself abreast of interesting things in the world of computer programming. Often this means a visit to Hacker News or Lobsters. I somehow managed to come across Richard Startin's article about why he doesn't use Google Protocol Buffers for telemetry. Near the bottom, he has an aside about VarInts and shares a few tricks to produce them more efficiently.
(Historical) Learn how to tune OpenJ9 to run your Minecraft server optimally, with a explanation of each flag and a convenient shell script.
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