Gareth Coles

An English programmer with an Irish perspective



Gareth is an English programmer living in Ireland. Mostly specialising in Python, but with experience in a wide range of technologies, he's been working in IT from a hobbyist perspective, and using way too many commas, since 2008.

As a huge supporter of the open source community, many of his projects are available for free, source-code included. See below for his primary projects and work, or head to the projects page for an overview.


If you'd like to contact Gareth directly, you can find him in the following places.

Discord and email are preferred.



The Archives

2008 - 2015

The Archives was Gareth's introduction to the world of Linux and programming in general. A Minecraft community that originally made waves as the world's first Minecraft network to support multiple worlds, finite liquid physics, message blocks, portals and so on, Gareth inherited this from its original owner (Andrew Godwin) when he no longer had the time to maintain it.

Having set up the software along with the help of Adam Guy (who also provided hosting), The Archives went through many iterations. While it was never as popular as today's super-popular networks, it garnered an active, loyal community through most of its life, with several members sticking around for the entire seven years.

Eventually, Gareth became responsible for the hosting of the network itself. At its peak, he was hosting a blog (using Drupal), forum (using Discourse), nine Minecraft servers, a Starbound server, a Team Fortress 2 server, an IRC server and a (janky) Postfix setup, along with maintaining a Steam group, several IRC channels across four networks in total, a Steam group, a Facebook group, and a YouTube channel.

Eventually, the buzz fizzled out and users began to not show up. The Archives closed its doors in October of 2015, and while there are no plans for a return, the remaining community is still together on Discord.


Ultros

2011 - Present

Ultros is one of Gareth's pet projects - a multi-network, modular chat bot. Written entirely in Python, it started life as a helper bot on the IRC channel for the infamous MCBans. It did some very basic tasks, such as standard anti-spam jobs and providing access to the MCBans API from the channel.

Later on, as Gareth had moved away from MCBans, the project was renamed to Ultros. With the help of Leagsaidh Gordon (who joined the project in early 2012), Ultros has become a capable bot and is in use by multiple people today.

Ultros is currently undergoing a lengthy rewrite in order to target Python 3 and better handle a lot of edge cases that were found in the current version. That said, the old version is still functional and in use by a few people. Due to lack of time, the rewrite has stalled - but hopefully it'll pick up again soon!


Glowstone

2015 - Present

Glowstone is a Minecraft custom server project, which has existed in one form or another for a very long time. However, it rose to the foreground for many people as a result of the Bukkit DMCA drama, as a possible replacement.

Glowstone has always aimed to be a free, open-source implementation of the Bukkit API - containing no proprietary code and attempting to match the behaviour of the vanilla server as closely as possible. While Gareth has not contributed any code to this project, he has been a large cog in the wheel for some time.

Over the years, Gareth has provided his support in several ways: Hosting the Maven repo, main website, forums and, at one point, hosting the continuous integration service (powered by Bamboo). He also takes an active role on the Discord community, handling the webhook automation tasks and providing help with community management as needed.



This website © Gareth Coles 2018 / Made with ♥, but mostly UIKit