Madeline Miller
| Madeline Miller | |
|---|---|
| Born | 16 October 1997 Brisbane, Australia |
| 🏳️ Nationality | Australian |
| Other names | Me4502 |
| 💼 Occupation | |
| Known for | Developer of various Minecraft projects |
| 🌐 Website | madelinemiller |
Madeline "Maddy" Miller, or more commonly known by her online alias "Me4502", is an Australian computer programmer, technical writer, and disability/inclusion advocate. She is best known for leading major Minecraft server-side projects under EngineHub, and for her long-running technical blog focused on performance, user experience, accessibility, and the human side of technology.
Early Life
Miller was born in Brisbane, Australia on 16 October 1997. She began programming around the age of seven. No one in her immediate family was particularly technical, and she has said she was discouraged from pursuing computing as a hobby or career path [1]. As a child she displayed a strong sense of justice; she has recalled boycotting the Melbourne Cup as a pre-teen and attempting to become vegetarian, later comparing her younger self to the character Lisa Simpson [1].
She was introduced to Minecraft in late 2010 at the age of twelve by friends from the Powder Toy community [2]. Although she has stated that she plays relatively few games herself, largely because she is prone to motion sickness, she found community through server administration, plugin development, and supporting other players [1]. She soon began running servers and writing mods, activities that became a central part of her early technical and social involvement.
Miller studied at Queensland University of Technology, graduating around 2018. During her final year she also served as president of Code Network, a large student-run programming society in South East Queensland.[3]
Personal life
She is a cisgender intersex woman, noting that experiences related to being intersex have contributed to her interest in inclusive and human-centred technology design [1][4]. She has also stated that she has premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) [1]. Miller is prone to motion sickness, a factor she has linked both to her limited participation in certain forms of gaming and to her writing on accessibility in games and virtual reality [5]. She identifies as a disability advocate. She has a partner.
Career
Miller is a senior software engineer on the Clipchamp team at Microsoft, where she works primarily with TypeScript on the company’s browser-based video editor.
Earlier in her career she performed extensive contracted development for the Minecraft community. This included writing private anti-cheat systems, minigames, and plugins for large servers (among them EcoCityCraft, MineTown, MCCentral and LichCraft), as well as software for prominent YouTubers and other clients. Much of this work was conducted under non-disclosure agreements. She also provided security and performance consulting to major hosting providers and server networks.
Open-source and Minecraft contributions
Miller has been active in the Minecraft community since late 2010. She is project lead of the EngineHub organisation and the principal maintainer of three of its major server-side projects:
- CraftBook (lead since approximately 2011–2012), which adds automated bridges, compact redstone circuits, complex minecart systems and other gameplay features without requiring client-side modifications.
- WorldEdit, an in-game map editor used by tens of millions of players and credited with billions of downloads; she became a core contributor around 2016–2017 and later took on lead maintenance responsibilities.
- WorldGuard, a land-protection and gameplay-control plugin.
Collectively the EngineHub projects have been cited as having more than three billion downloads and more than fifteen million active users. Miller has also contributed significantly to the PaperMC (and earlier Spigot/Bukkit) server software lineage and served as a core developer and team manager for SpongePowered, representing the project at MINECON 2015 in London and MINECON 2016 in Los Angeles.
In addition to the core plugins she has developed supporting infrastructure for EngineHub, including a high-traffic nightly-build download service (built with Next.js and React), a specialised pastebin, and the organisation’s main website. Earlier open-source work included contributions to The Powder Toy physics sandbox (approximately 2010–2017). She has given public talks on managing large open-source projects and on performance optimisation techniques applied to WorldEdit.
Writing
Miller maintains a long-running technical blog on her personal website, madelinemiller.dev, which she began around 2016 [1]. The site also serves as a portfolio of her projects and experiments. In 2026 she marked ten years of writing with an extensive Q&A answering reader questions.
Her articles cover a range of topics, with a substantial portion focused on Minecraft server administration, plugin development, and community best practices. Other frequent subjects include software performance optimisation, the JavaScript ecosystem, privacy and user-experience issues (such as the limitations of phone numbers as identifiers, CGNAT, and platform account bans), and process-oriented retrospectives. She has also published a multi-part series on whole-genome sequencing that emphasises data privacy and local analysis tools.
Notable longer works include a comprehensive history of the first decade of Minecraft multiplayer (originally published in 2020 and later self-published as an eBook) and detailed pieces on accessibility topics. Miller has stated that she does not use generative AI tools to write her articles, does not accept guest or sponsored posts, and bases her writing on personal experience and opinion[6].
She has given public talks on managing large open-source projects (2019) and application performance optimisation (2020), drawing on her work with WorldEdit and related EngineHub software.
Advocacy and accessibility
A recurring theme in Miller’s writing is accessibility and inclusive design. Her first published article examined body-size diversity as an accessibility barrier in virtual reality [7]. She has written extensively about motion sickness (simulation sickness) in video games and VR, noting that the issue affects up to one-third of people and that she herself is highly susceptible; she has linked this personal experience to her limited engagement with certain games and to her advocacy for better accessibility options [5].
Miller has described herself as a disability advocate. She has also connected her interest in human-centred technology to her experiences as an intersex person, observing that intersex individuals frequently encounter design and social assumptions that do not account for them [1]. Additional writing addresses privacy risks associated with genetic data, the treatment of phone numbers as permanent identifiers, and the broader power of large platforms over user access to services.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 https://madelinemiller.dev/blog/10-year-q-and-a/
- ↑ https://madelinemiller.dev/blog/an-ode-to-the-minecraft-community/
- ↑ https://madelinemiller.dev/blog/2018-a-year-in-review/
- ↑ https://madelinemiller.dev/blog/whole-genome-sequencing-wgsextract/
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 https://madelinemiller.dev/blog/motion-sickness-accessibility/
- ↑ https://madelinemiller.dev/contact/
- ↑ https://madelinemiller.dev/blog/the-issue-of-body-size-in-vr/
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