About me

I am Alexander Grabow, online mostly just Sneedle.

I build web applications and run them afterwards. From the first sketch through the database to the day somebody calls because something is stuck.

I started at fourteen, with pages for the gaming clans I was part of back then. Overloaded with graphics and, by today’s standards, hard to look at, but they ran. After that came myminecraft.de, a Minecraft server of my own that I kept running for about ten years.

sneedle.net has existed since 2009. The address has been almost everything since: a place for self-hosted games, a private blog now and then, mostly tinkering without a fixed purpose.

I have been working with AI since 2021. Individual applications turned into whole infrastructures along the way, which I set up and then run myself. What came of that is over on Projects.

How I work

Idea, code and running the thing, all from one place. What that mainly means for you: one person to talk to instead of a chain of agency, host and freelancer where everyone ends up pointing at somebody else.

No site builder, just my own code with everything attached to it - database, deployment, the maintenance afterwards. That takes longer at the start. In return, things can still be changed later that a finished system simply never made room for, and when something jams, nobody has to guess why.

There is something running to look at early on, not only at the end. You can have a conversation about a thing that runs in a browser and responds to clicks. About a description of it you can only speculate.

AI

In several projects AI does real work.

The combat log archive explains World of Warcraft combat logs. The game records every boss fight, hundreds of thousands of individual actions; the AI reads that and says what an attempt failed on.

In the Murloc pool, a browser game with a few hundred players, it spots outliers in the game values and proposes corrections. It is not allowed to change anything.

Archivar Horst, a chatbot inside a gaming community, answers questions that would otherwise sit in a manual nobody reads.

With what

TypeScript and Node at the core, Astro and SvelteKit for the web, Python for the backends that need it. MySQL or PostgreSQL, depending. Canvas and PixiJS for games, and generated sprites for pixel art now and then.

Working together

Not every good idea has to be mine. If you have something in mind that wants building - a game, a tool, something with AI in it - tell me about it. I am happy to think it through with you, and equally happy to say when I am the wrong person for it.

Contact

The contact form is easiest. It also spells out what happens to your idea and what does not.

If it is about a bug in a specific project, use the route built into it. That way the report lands where I will actually see it.