Projects

Things I’ve built or worked on, from a decade-plus running Minecraft server to tiny micro-software I thought was useful enough to share.

MCParks

Real-world theme parks recreated at 1:1 scale in Minecraft and operated as a live server since 2013.

Active2013–present

MCParks builds real-world theme parks in Minecraft a 1:1 scale, complete with working rides, shows, and attractions. With over 450,000 unique guests and 150+ volunteer Cast Members, MCParks boasts recreations of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Universal Orlando Resort, Disneyland Paris, Tokyo Disney Resort, Busch Gardens Tampa, Knotts Berry Farm, and Give Kids the World Village.

Our volunteer Cast Member team is primarily comprised of teenagers for whom this is their first experience working collaboratively with a team. They’re split into several teams,

As part of my work for MCParks, I’ve created multiple domain specific programming languages for volunteers with limited programming knowledge to create in-game effects and experiences:

Achievables is a system that can be used to define Achievements, Daily Challenges, Quests, and other things that players can “achieve” in a video game-like setting. It also boasts a Groovy-based programming language called BIGAL (BigAl’s Integrated Groovy Achievement Language) that allows you to define Achievables (with other metadata necessary to define an Achievement) in a human-readable and version-controllable format.

We use Achievables on MCParks to power Daily Challenges and Achievements.

ShowScript defines a programming language that allows console commands and other actions to be scheduled to run at specified timecodes.

The technicians on MCParks use ShowScript to make our fireworks shows, theatre attractions, ambient effects, and to schedule effects to run on our rides.

Founding PM: GitHub Copilot CLI

GitHub Copilot’s coding agent for the terminal.

Active2023–presentMy work at GitHub

GitHub Copilot CLI brings the Copilot coding agent to the terminal: it reads a repository, plans, edits files, runs commands, and works with GitHub through the same tools a person would use.

This is a GitHub product built by a team — it’s here because it’s what I spend my working hours on, not because it’s mine. What I can claim is the product work: figuring out what an agent in a terminal should and shouldn’t do on your behalf, and where the line between “helpful” and “unsupervised” belongs.

ryanhecht.com

The Astro site that publishes my articles, external posts, project archive, and current work.

Active2026–present

An Astro site with a pretty opinionated reading layer: sidenotes that stay in the margin, code blocks that know which lines you’re meant to type, figures that carry their own credit, link previews that tell you where an internal link goes before you spend a click on it, and an archive that visibly narrows when I haven’t published.

It’s also the reference implementation of everything above — every capability the article system has gets demonstrated inside a published article instead of described in a README.