SuvaCraft / ToDo plugin

Management of own Minecraft portal + custom plugin (2015)

Throughout high school (and the freshman year of university), the PC game I was playing the most was Minecraft. I discovered the game sometime in 2012 and since the beginning, I was bored by the lone, single-player experience. So I quickly joined a local multiplayer survival server where I found a nice community and made few online friends (some of them later turned into real-life friends and we are in touch to this day, even though we no longer play).

As time progressed, I climbed the ranks, became one of the administrators of the server and was given FTP and SSH access, meaning I could fiddle with server and plugin configurations. Even later, the server shut down, so me and some of my buddies decided to continue the legacy and build our own community. I was placed in charge of Dev(Ops) side of things, so I registered a domain, set proper DNS records, rented a VPS and orchestrated all the different plugins for authentication, permissions, grief/cheat prevention, terrain forming, etc. to neatly work together.

Then came a time when I found myself in need of a plugin that would periodically remind my "staff" of builders, event masters, moderators etc. of tasks that need to be done. For the first time, the existing catalog of plugins online didn't contain a solution I would be satisfied with. I was already learning Java at that point, so I launched IntelliJ IDEA (my favorite IDE to this day), readSpigot (a wrapper around the official Minecraft Server API, providing performance improvements and additional capabilities) docs and in a few days, I had working ToDo plugin. It could assign tasks to different user groups, periodically show them to relevant users, and admins could edit and check them off once they were done.

I published it as a free plugin on Spigot portal and even though I lost interest in the server and game shortly after, to this day it amassed over 250 downloads from server administrators and even a handful of positive reviews. For the purpose of getting a screenshot for this article I loaded it again, and to my surprise it still works flawlessly 9 years later.

Lessons learned: Set up Java project with Maven, integrate with 3rd party API (Spigot), running and managing a gaming server and community.