Game development
Unity titles built solo and scoped to actually ship. Gameplay, tooling, and the build pipeline around them.
Skills
What I do
Senior LAMP engineering
Linux, web server, MySQL and PHP as one system rather than four separate parts — tuning, query work, and the unglamorous debugging that keeps a stack quick under load.
Custom plugin development
Purpose-built plugins instead of stretching someone else's to fit. Real architecture, versioned, documented, and maintainable by whoever picks it up next — including future you.
Rapid prototyping & delivery
Working prototypes in days rather than sprint cycles. Build the real thing small, put it in front of people, and let what comes back decide the next version.
UI/UX optimization
Interfaces judged by whether people actually get through them — flow, friction, accessibility, and the small details that decide if a feature gets used or quietly abandoned.
Security & compliance
Hardening, abuse mitigation, WAF and bot policy, and incident response — including for financial and mortgage industry clients, where the bar is set by regulators rather than preference.
Servers & DevOps
Provisioning, deployment, monitoring and ongoing care of client servers. Boring, on purpose.
Image & media optimization
Images and video that look right and still load fast — modern formats, responsive sizing, lazy loading and CDN delivery. Most sites ship megabytes they never needed to.
Technical SEO
Crawlability, structured data, canonical hygiene and Core Web Vitals — plus migrations that don't quietly discard rankings someone spent years earning.
Custom analytics & metrics
Measurement built against your own data, with no third party in the middle — event tracking, admin dashboards and reporting you actually own. Google Analytics too, where it earns its place.
Third-party integrations
Pulling external systems into yours and keeping them in sync — catalogue and metadata APIs, membership providers, and payment platforms including Stripe and Paddle.
Discord bots & apps
Bots and app integrations that put the right signal in the right channel — membership and moderation alerts, webhook pipelines, and tooling that does something useful rather than relaying noise.
Method
How the work gets done
Used well, AI turns months of development into days. Used carelessly, it ships bugs just as fast.
I use it hard, and I'd rather tell you that than have you wonder. Architecture, implementation, refactors, test matrices — work that used to be weeks or months of billable development now lands in hours or days. That holds from small fixes straight through to large, complex features.
What makes that speed worth anything is the judgement in front of it. Every line is read, understood and signed off by a developer with twenty years of experience. Nothing ships that I couldn't have written by hand, or can't explain line by line if you ask.
No vibe coding — nothing gets merged because it appeared to work. Everything goes out tested against what real users actually do, including the things they shouldn't be able to do at all.
A senior developer who isn't using these tools properly in 2026 is leaving most of their output on the table, and charging you for the difference.
- Months into days
- Reviewed line by line
- Zero vibe coding
- Tested past the happy path
Operations
What happens after launch
Disaster recovery & runbooks
Written, tested recovery procedures for the things that actually go wrong. When a server dies at 3am the answer is a documented runbook, not improvisation under pressure.
Multi-layer server backups
Redundancy across multiple providers, plus cloud and physical failsafes. No single vendor outage, billing dispute, or locked account can take the data with it.
GDPR, CCPA & data compliance
Data mapping, retention policy, and working export and erasure paths built in from the start — not bolted on in a panic after the first request arrives.
In production
Current Projects
Platform · Live
DEI Detective
A community review platform I built and operate end to end — the games, movies and series database, the review and voting systems, membership, moderation, and the server it all runs on.
Every load-bearing system is written from scratch: authentication and membership tiers, the review and voting engines, moderation and appeals tooling, behavioural bot and scraper detection, first-party cookie consent and data-rights handling, multi-source search with relevance scoring, an in-app notification and email pipeline, a points ledger, and a bespoke multi-tier cache. Nothing critical rests on an off-the-shelf plugin.
The catalogue stays in sync with external metadata APIs, and the analytics and moderation dashboards behind it are first-party too. It is the reference for everything above — the same architecture, the same hardening, the same operational discipline I put behind client work.
- 40+First-party plugins
- 100%Custom core systems
- 1Developer, end to end
grim@deid:~$ deid --status platformDEI Detective stackWordPress · PHP 8.4+ · Redis plugins40+ first-party cachecustom multi-tier securitylayered · abuse monitoring apisIGDB · Steam · TMDB · Patreon edgeCloudflare · WAF · Copium (Custom) statelive grim@deid:~$
Game · Under NDA
Undisclosed Unity project
A Unity title in active development under a non-disclosure agreement. I can't say what it is, who it's for, or when it lands.
What I can say is that it's real, it's moving, and it's where most of the engine work is going right now.
No further detail available until the holder says otherwise.
grim@copium:~/projects$ project --status codename███████ ████ engineUnity · C# genre██████████ team████ ndasigned · active statein development grim@copium:~/projects$
Open to select part-time work
I'm not building a client roster — but if something needs building, securing or unbreaking, it's worth asking.