minecraft java and bedrock use completely different pack structures. porting a pack between them takes at least 30 minutes, even for an experienced porter. that friction kept most packs locked to one edition, and most players locked out of half the ecosystem. i wanted every user to get a frictionless experience, whether they’re porting or just downloading.
/ what i did
leaned on my architecture & design background to build an ecosystem, not a single site. everything a player or creator would need to get a pack painlessly. a port bot that handles the java ↔ bedrock conversion, a pack gallery to browse and download, and an automated video production pipeline that renders 30-second youtube showcases for every pack. built solo. product, design, engineering, seo, community ops.
/ iii. technical deep-diveoptional · expand
/ architecture
two repos, one ecosystem, one database. the website renders the gallery and search. the bot handles ingestion and porting: creators drop packs in discord, the bot parses, converts between java and bedrock, stores assets, and writes straight into the shared postgres. both services run on one server, composed with docker, fronted by cloudflare. ci is github actions: build, typecheck, image push, deploy. the code itself stays private; the linked repos hold detailed readmes that walk through how each piece works.
/ infrastructure
/ learnings & what i’d change
the biggest lesson: just because something feels intuitive to me doesn’t mean it’s clear to anyone else. the community skews very young and standard features like pinned messages, forum tags, or help commands just get ignored. if the ui isn’t dead simple and obvious at first glance, it doesn’t work. every layer of complexity you add is a layer where someone gets lost. keep it simple, keep it clean, and design for the least technical user in the room, not yourself.
