I got into Minecraft server administration at 12 - before I'd written a line of code, just clicking around config files and copying commands from forum posts, trying to figure out why my plugins kept conflicting with each other at 11pm on a school night. That's actually what pulled me into programming: I started at 13 with HTML, CSS, and JS, mostly so I could stop guessing and actually understand what I was editing.
A few years later, around 16, I picked up Lua and started running a FiveM server - right around when the whole FiveM roleplay scene was blowing up (this was the NoPixel-era boom, if that means anything to you). I ended up being decent at it - good enough that I was one of the more sought-after Lua/FiveM developers on the Polish scene at the time, picking up work for other servers on top of running my own. Different game, same underlying job: SSH into a box, fight with configs, figure out why the server crashed the moment more than a handful of people tried to join.
Nobody sat me down and explained SSH, cron jobs, or why my server kept crashing under load. I learned it the way most of us actually learn things - by breaking something at 1am and googling the error message until it made sense.
The part nobody tells you about running a server as a kid
Running a Minecraft or FiveM server isn't really about the game. It's server administration with extra steps. You're dealing with:
- SSH into a box you're renting with money you definitely should've spent on something else
- Config files that silently break everything if you get one line wrong
- Backups you don't think about until the day you desperately need one
- Plugin/resource conflicts that make no sense until you realize two mods are fighting over the same event hook
- Actual human beings (your players) who notice immediately when the server goes down, and who are not shy about telling you in chat
I didn't have a mentor for any of this. I had a terminal, a PuTTY window, and a community of people online sharing scraps of documentation. It was frustrating in a way that, looking back, was probably the best possible education I could've gotten. When something breaks and there's no support ticket to open, you learn to actually read logs instead of skimming them.
Cybersecurity, and why I started caring about "who has access to what"
A few years later, in my late teens, I got into cybersecurity on the side. That's when the server admin instincts I'd built running game servers turned into something more deliberate - thinking about attack surface, who has SSH access to what, why a "temporary" open port from six months ago is still open. Running a public game server as a minor is, unintentionally, a decent crash course in "someone is always trying to get in."
Somewhere in there I also ran a couple of small local businesses - car detailing, paving stone and facade cleaning. Different world entirely, but the same underlying lesson kept showing up: infrastructure you don't understand or don't control will eventually cost you, whether that's a rented pressure washer or a rented VPS.
Why this ended up shaping PtyXL
I didn't set out to build an SSH client because of some grand plan. It came from a much more annoying, specific irritation: modern terminal clients increasingly want to sync your host list, your keys metadata, sometimes your session data, to their cloud. Convenient, until their service has a bad day and you can't get into your own box - the same box you've been SSH-ing into since you were twelve, just with better hardware now.
PtyXL is local-first on purpose. Keys and configs stay on your machine, full stop. If I've learned anything from a decade of managing servers I probably had no business managing at the time, it's that the tool should never be the thing standing between you and your own infrastructure.
If you also cut your teeth running some janky self-hosted server as a teenager - Minecraft, FiveM, or something else entirely - I'd genuinely like to hear how you got into it. That path seems to produce a specific kind of stubborn, hands-on engineer, and I'm curious how common it actually is.
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