The Whole Story

Who is this?

Paulyn — better known online as JakeOJeff — is an 18-year-old programmer, game developer and cyber-pentester based in Kochi, Kerala, India. If you had to compress the whole thing into one sentence: he's a maker. Games, tools, compilers, simulations, security utilities, a Minecraft server, an e-commerce store, a computer-vision spell-caster, a city transit app, original music, poetry — the medium changes, the instinct to build doesn't.

His GitHub profile just says “I love lua so much ahhhhhh <3 — Systems, Web and Game Developer (you only have one life, learn it all).” His other self-description is “I love guitars. Software Developer and Cyber-Pentester,” and between the two that captures the split pretty well. Half of him lives in Lua, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, Python, Java and C; the other half lives on six strings at open gigs. He's the #1 contributor to @trymimicode (an AI coding agent) under the Curious Engine builder collective, is a bounty hunter for Hack Club, moderates the W3Schools Discord community, and mentors younger coders around Kochi.

Origins — a kid and a copy of Roblox Studio (~2019)

It started around age 11 with Roblox obbies — those obstacle-course games where you leap across platforms and dodge glitchy traps. He wasn't thinking “I'm programming” at the time; he was just dragging blocks around Roblox Studio and poking at the Lua scripts whenever he needed something to move or open or kill the player. But that was the hook: the realization that he could build a thing other people could play. It never let go.

And he wasn't small on Roblox — he was genuinely good at it. He joined in May 2019, listed himself as “Scripter, Game Musician, UI Designer,” and ended up creating an entire obby sub-genre: the Glitch Per Difficulty Chart, where you clear sections by abusing in-game glitches instead of normal jumps. Other creators started making their own charts in the format he invented. His games pulled serious numbers — the main Glitch Per Difficulty Chart passed 160,000+ visits and a Halo-crates skill-jump speedrun cleared 117,000+ — and he founded and still owns the “JakO Obbyist Community” group, a few hundred members deep. A kid on a broken laptop quietly ran a hit game and its community.

It wasn't just building, either — from roughly 2020 to 2022 he was a full-on content creator. He was part of a YouTuber obby group, playing and racing through courses together and collabing on the channel, and cranked out a stack of videos. That spilled into a genuine video-editing spree — cuts, timing, sound effects, syncing moments to a beat — the same “fiddle until it clicks” itch as code, just aimed at a clip. Roblox was where he first got to be every kind of maker at once: scripter, game musician, UI designer, community runner, and editor.

The laptop he had back then was rough — 4GB of RAM, Windows 7, wheezing at too many Chrome tabs. As his ambitions outgrew Roblox, he found LÖVE (love2d): a tiny, lightweight Lua framework that ran on basically anything. It was perfect for a potato laptop, and its community was welcoming. LÖVE is the true foundation of everything he does now — it turned “kid who messes with Roblox” into someone who actually writes every line.

Running a world — MinersJoK (2020) & a GitHub account (2021)

Around 2020 he spun up his own Minecraft server, MinersJoK — minigames, survival, bedwars, hosted through Aternos, open to both cracked and premium accounts so everyone could join. He learned that running a server is far more admin than code: land-claim and anti-grief plugins, endless permission configs, constant babysitting. But it was the first thing he ran that other people depended on being up — a little world that was his, that others lived inside.

In July 2021 he created his GitHub account — finally somewhere to keep his code instead of losing it every time the laptop died. He found LÖVE around this era too. That account is the spine of the timeline that follows.

The LÖVE years — tools, libraries and engines (2022–2024)

His first real repository, JSRC-FRAMEWORK (June 2022), was a GUI library for LÖVE games — born from being tired of rebuilding the same buttons and menus in every project. It was the first time he thought “other people could use this too,” and building for other developers became a recurring theme.

This is also when the work turned professional — as a teenager. In August 2022 he took a remote job as a Software Tester at Suneflower, running manual and automated tests on web apps and writing GUI-based API reports — which quietly rewired how he sees software, as a pile of assumptions waiting to be broken. Barely half a year later, in 2023, he leveled up to Lead Developer at LuminoByte Studios, where he built the game engine and core mechanics and managed the team — his first taste of leading rather than just building.

In 2023 he also went on a tool-making spree: anim16 (a quickie sprite-animation tool, “so simple even grandma Alice could edit it”) and seductivehood (a 2D car-physics library obsessed with feel over correctness). That September he began Rhythm, a rhythm game — the perfect fusion of his musician brain and his coder brain, and a brutal lesson in how unforgiving audio-visual timing is.

2024 got deeper and more fundamental. He started building a 2D physics engine from scratch — no Box2D, no shortcuts, just collision resolution, momentum and contact math that humbled him repeatedly. He also shipped the Oversmart Shuffle, a smarter song-shuffling algorithm that avoids repetition and clustering.

2025 — the year everything happened

2025 was, by a wide margin, his most prolific year. It opened with cozy-music-player, a warm little desktop music player in Lua (inspired by @Nashallery), and a proper personal website to show his growing pile of work.

Then he leaned hard into security and web: OSSint, an open source intelligence tool for Google Dorking and defensive security (his Hack Club Summer of Making project), and Flowlog, a productivity Chrome extension to figure out where his hours actually disappear to. In July came Stacks Against You — a privacy-focused chat app with zero database, where nothing is stored and therefore nothing can leak. Privacy by architecture, not policy. That September he made the security side official too, earning his OCSP (Offenso Certified Security Professional) credential in Kochi — the paper behind years of machine, web and android pentesting.

And then the big one: Tales of Orbis, his most ambitious game — a full RPG in LÖVE where you play as Orbis, formed from the ashes of a god, racing to the core before the Dawn Lights end you. It grew into an entire universe: Liora (a prequel, built in Godot to stretch into GDScript) and Nullborn Saga (a visual novel tying the worlds together, where his poetry and writing side finally paid off). Keeping lore consistent across three projects in different engines was the most “author” he's ever felt while coding.

And that's only the headline projects — 2025 also overflowed with experiments that show his range. firespark, a computer-vision toy using OpenCV and MediaPipe to shoot fire particles from your fingertips like casting a spell. An emotional chatbot in LÖVE with typing simulation and flying-letter animations. luminzier, a drawing app where you define shapes with live math expressions instead of a mouse. levelisteria, a life-gamifying demo that's secretly a testbed for a React-like UI library he's building in Lua. VeloraOS, a from-scratch operating-system simulation — desktop, windows and apps — built to understand the layer he uses every day. Winpedia, a winter-themed social app where you freeze if you don't post. A Minesweeper AI (lemines) that reasons and gambles like a human. Gratitude Quest, a game he made for his own birthday to thank everyone who helped him. Plus a steady stream of small, finished games — Coinage, FallClicker, Game Over (a reverse murder mystery), Pollocks, Pulse, Pongers and more.

The back half of 2025 kept accelerating: Spellfluid, a hypnotic hybrid Euler-grid + particle fluid simulator (one of his most-starred repos); GoSpooks, a terminal horror game written to learn Go; Jengine, finally packaging years of physics experiments into a proper grid-based engine inspired by Box2D; and lat — a real, working compiler written in Ruby that transpiles a custom language (syntax drawn from Lua, Ruby, Python and Java) into Lua, complete with lexer, parser and code generator, published as a RubyGem. It's his most-starred project, and the one that taught him the most about how programming actually works. Notably, he used AI as a tutor for it, not an autopilot — the whole point was to understand compilers, not skip past the understanding.

2026 — systems, backends & going low-level

The most recent chapter goes deep into the stack. seashell, a Unix shell written from scratch in C — the thing that finally demystified fork, exec, pipes and file descriptors. Mantis, a scaffolding CLI (mantis new myapp) that spins up a production-ready Rails 8 + Hotwire + React-islands + Pocketbase app on NixOS flakes — “no Docker, no slop.” memsnoop, a Python memory-introspection tool that pairs with his pentesting work. And logo-scraper, a Nix-based Playwright + BeautifulSoup4 pipeline that taught him reproducible environments.

He also turned outward and local: KochiTransit, a React Native + Expo public-transit app for his own city (his first real dive into mobile), and jvpn, a WireGuard VPN wiring his own PC and laptop together over encrypted UDP, keys managed through WSL2 and NixOS. He's gone fully down the NixOS rabbit hole for reproducible, self-owned infrastructure. Game dev, full-stack, security, systems, mobile, civic tech — increasingly it's all one curiosity pointed at different problems.

2026 — building things other builders build with

2026 is also the year Paulyn stopped being purely a solo builder. He joined mimicode (@trymimicode), an AI coding-agent CLI — deliberately small, four tools, ripgrep-first, routing between Claude Haiku and Sonnet to stay 50–80% cheaper, with a memory that persists across sessions (“not your coding partner”). The project was started by Alvin Liju, but Paulyn became its #1 contributor, building essentially the entire terminal UI — the interactive TUI, the memory system with auto-compacting, slash commands and command palette, session history and restore, an interruption system, multiline paste, real-time stream rendering and switchable color palettes. When the tool outgrew Python, it was rewritten into a single zero-dependency Go binary, and there he stepped into a real maintainer role: reviewing and merging PRs, cutting releases, keeping a changelog. His first taste of shipping a reliable, auditable tool that real people run on real codebases.

mimicode lives under Curious Engine (curiousengine.org), a Bangalore builder non-profit whose whole pitch is “Build Without Asking Permission” — it hands fuel to people who are actually shipping, no equity, no pitch deck, no TAM slide. Paulyn runs its web and infrastructure side: he built the site and set up DNS as code (a versioned source-of-truth zone applied to the registrar with validate / diff / backup / apply). It's the exact kind of org he wishes had existed when he was a kid with a weird idea and no way in.

He's also been in the code on Plotter (plotter.so, “a canvas for thinking with AI”) — Affan Sajid's product that reorganizes AI chats as a branching tree instead of a flat list, so you can see the whole shape of your work and share it with full context. Serving someone else's vision instead of his own turned out to be its own discipline — and between that and mimicode, the solo maker quietly became someone other builders build alongside.

And the newest thread (mid-2026) points at mobile: he started Zenvoq Labs, an Android-focused micro-SaaS studio, with its first app in progress — FramePDF, a scan / crop / sign-to-PDF tool that's deliberately fully offline, no account. Same privacy-by-architecture instinct as Stacks Against You, aimed this time at the documents on your phone. Nothing shipped to the store yet — it's a just-started venture — but it's him chasing the “put it in front of real people” goal one more step.

Giving it back — teaching, mentoring & running programs

For all the solo output, some of the work he's proudest of points outward, and most of it radiates from TinkerSpace in Kochi — the maker space that's become his second home. He ran what was, as far as he can tell, Kerala's first game jam of its size there (24 hours, students from across the state), and taught CS and Lua to children at Dharmagiri Vikas, an initiative aimed at getting young girls into STEM and proving that where you start doesn't decide where you end up — something he means literally, having learned everything on a 4GB laptop.

The mentoring runs deep. He mentored at Tink-Her-Hack — TinkerHub's women's hackathon, one of the largest in the world, thousands of women building overnight across dozens of Kerala venues — working the floor across four different venues and earning a mention for it. He also mentored younger builders through Kerala Startup Mission, and even built a project (CraftConnect) for a student he was mentoring, because sometimes the best way to teach is to build alongside someone on something real.

And in Hack Club he crossed from participant to organizer. He's an official Hack Club contributor, reviews other makers' project submissions, did Summer of Making — and now designs and runs his own YSWS (“you ship, we ship”) programs: Orbit (build a gravity/space physics sim, earn a magnetic-levitation globe) and Pristine (games in pure HTML/CSS, earn a Logitech MX Master). Designing a good YSWS, he says, is a lot like designing a good game — crafting a constraint and an incentive that makes someone want to build.

The other half — music, poetry & life

Code is only half the story. He plays guitar — electric, acoustic and classical — performs at open gigs, and writes his own original compositions. For him the joy is identical whether it's a chord progression clicking into place or a physics engine finally behaving: “finding or getting something to work is a joy I cannot get anywhere else.”

He also writes poetry (quieter and more private than his code, but pulling from the same place — structure, rhythm, that satisfying final line), reads self-help books, and travels when he can. Ask if he's a programmer or a musician and he'll refuse the question: he just likes making things.

What he's actually pulled off

• Became the #1 contributor to mimicode, an AI coding-agent CLI — built its entire terminal UI and memory system, and maintains the Go rewrite — under the Curious Engine builder non-profit, where he also runs the site and DNS-as-code infrastructure.
• Worked real dev jobs as a teenager — Software Tester at Suneflower (2022) and Lead Developer at LuminoByte Studios (2023, built the engine and led the team) — and earned an OCSP security certification (2025).
• Created his own Roblox obby genre (Glitch Per Difficulty Chart) with games past 160K and 117K visits, and founded a Roblox community of a few hundred members — as a kid.
• Ran Kerala's first game jam of its size at TinkerSpace, Kochi (24-hour, students from across the state), and taught CS & Lua to kids to bring young girls into STEM.
• Built lat / LatLang, a working Ruby-to-Lua compiler, published as a RubyGem — his most-starred solo project.
• Shipped 88+ public repositories spanning Lua, TypeScript, JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Python, Java and C.
• Created an entire game universe (Tales of Orbis, Liora, Nullborn Saga) across two engines — playable in the browser on itch.io.
• Placed in the top 5 leaderboards at Hack Club for his physics-engine work, earning a set of RPG trading cards.
• Participated in Hack Club Summer of Making with OSSint, and is an ongoing bounty hunter for Hack Club.
• Moderates the W3Schools Discord community.
• Founded Vellapaper (2025), a real posters & vintage-paintings business he ran end-to-end — a hard, valuable lesson in unit economics when shipping costs wouldn't let the numbers close — and started Zenvoq Labs (2026), an Android studio, with FramePDF (offline PDF scanner) in progress.
• In Hack Club: an official contributor and project reviewer who now designs and runs his own YSWS programs (Orbit, Pristine); mentored at Tink-Her-Hack across four venues and through Kerala Startup Mission.
• Founded and administered MinersJoK, his own Minecraft server.
• Built and released a stack of tools & libraries used by other developers — JSRC-FRAMEWORK, seductivehood, anim16, tiled-wakatime and more — and is building a React-like declarative UI library in Lua.
• Ranges across computer vision (firespark, hand-tracked AR), AI/algorithms (a human-like Minesweeper solver), mobile (a React Native transit app for Kochi), and self-hosted infrastructure (a personal WireGuard VPN on NixOS).
• Organized a community open source project (foss-flip) under Tinker-Foss, contributed to the Kerala Hack Club community and its website, and is active in the wider India FOSS scene.
• Ships tons of small finished games on itch.io — Game Over, Coinage, FallClicker, Pulse, Pongers, Subzero Floors, Beneath Me and more — alongside the big engine projects.
• Performs original guitar music at open gigs, and writes poetry on the side.

Where things stand

From a kid making obbies on a 4GB laptop to someone who's shipped a compiler, multiple physics engines, a fluid simulator, an entire game universe, security tooling and a shell in C — the throughline was never a single specialty. It was consistency and curiosity: pick a project, learn whatever it needs, build it, ship it, repeat. He's not the most talented developer in any one room, by his own admission — he's just been relentlessly building for years, and it compounds. Whatever comes next, it'll almost certainly be something new he decided to figure out from scratch.