Member Name Viet_Nam
Additional In Game Names: BlendyCat
How old are you? 17
Location: California
Do you have Discord? Yes
How many hours per day do you spend on Meepcraft? (average) 5
Have you ever been a Tech on a different server? Yes! Multiple.
References: Please give IGN's CluelessKlutz, AdrianBFaust, qazini, smkorpi
Introduction: Hi, I’m Viet_Nam also known as Blendy or just Evan. I’m from California and the three things I love most are computers, art, and gardening. I like jokes and I’m not afraid to speak my mind. I don’t hate many things, but one of the things I do hate is people who are full of themselves. I absolutely cannot stand these people, especially when it comes to programming. I’ve been playing on Meepcraft ever since 2014. I never have found another server to have a more enticing economy or community than Meepcraft. It may be small but it is close-knit and I love it.
I first got into computers around the time I was 9, and I was only allowed to use it for 30 minutes a day. I started playing Minecraft in 5th grade and I mostly just played single-player. One day at church(my parents are religious) this kid told me he ran a Minecraft server and he gave me the IP. As soon as I got home I entered the IP and boom, I was on. This server wasn’t particularly great or anything but this is really what inspired me to become tech-savvy. I probably spent a good week figuring out how to set up my own server hosted on my computer, and even when I had the server up I still had to figure out how to get my friend to connect. I didn’t get into actual programming until my friend requested me to make a Minecraft Mod. I got back to the internet and started doing research. What I found was the Minecraft Coder Pack or MCP. The MCP decompiled Minecraft into all the Java classes (code files). I had absolutely no knowledge of Java when I started. I just opened the classes and tried to figure out what it all meant. By the end of that day, I had added my very first item to the game, albeit it didn’t have a texture or a name. Later that year, I decided to learn Java the right way, through YouTube tutorials (specifically theNewBoston, he’s great if you’re new to programming).
Please describe your experience as a developer. The first time I really could consider myself a developer was the first time I made a game in Java from the ground up. It was an asteroid type game where the asteroids come down the screen and you have to shoot them with your spaceship before they get past you. It wasn’t particularly good, but it worked and from there I only have gotten better. I would say the learning curve for programming is quite strange. You suck at it for years then just one month you are suddenly better; you just become fluent.
I learned to make plugins in 2016. This is when programming really clicked into my brain for me. Many of them aren’t that extensive and I would say that they don’t do a great job of encasing what I’m truly capable of but they’re on my GitHub anyways so you can feel free to check them out and laugh at me (Anything that starts with “Blendy” is one of my first plugins). Shortly after, I worked for Jess_4Ds’ server “Naturalis.” I made a plugin that allowed you to wear emoji faces on your head (See project entitled “emoji-heads” on my GitHub).
I didn’t do much work with plugins for a bit after this. I could never really get any of my attempts at servers to kick off so I was a bit discouraged. I decided I’d learn HTML5 and PHP instead for a bit. PHP is seriously one of the coolest languages out there. I’ve used it to build blogs, user based applications and more. Not to mention, I learned most of my MySQL when I was actively doing PHP so I could handle the user data. I’ve been doing web design for about a year now and I’ve had a couple clients (I probably can’t share these ones).
Skip to halfway through this school year and one me and one friend from school decide to make a Minecraft prison server for fun (and money). I wanted to make the prison plugin for the server so it would be a completely unique experience (See project entitled “QuadCraftPrison” on my GitHub). After slaving over this plugin for a week it I counted the number of lines, and it was just under 3000. Compared to other prison plugins, this one was pretty efficient. It was fast and didn’t use a lot of server resources and it had some pretty cool features such as prison shop signs. After this plugin, I made a few other plugins for voting, and chat. I wanted to keep the server modular so that if anything went wrong, it could be easily contained and fixed quickly.
What programming languages are you familiar with? Java, MySQL, PHP, Javascript, and Python
What are you most proud of as your work as a developer? Most certainly my QuadCraft Prison plugin! I put the most effort into it and I learned a lot of new things. It has a little bit of everything in it: economy, MySQL, user experience, and more. It is one of the most elaborate plugins I have ever made.
How do you plan to enrich the experience of MeepCraft with your development contributions? I plan to enrich the Meepcraft experience by always being there and open to chat while I fix bugs or develop new features. I aspire to be someone who is outgoing in game as well as hard working behind the scenes.
Do you have a GitHub account or personal website? If so, please provide the link(s) here. BlendyCat (Evan Merz)
BlendyCat - Source Code
