heyo!

i'm Neven, though in most corners of the internet I go by the pseudonym hex4. i'm a polymath creative, hacker, maker, designer, and do-er that coincidentally is also a middle schooler. i build scripts, websites, tiny tools, games, not-tiny tools, and worlds with a huge (too huge?) variety of tools & techniques.

computers are cool! for me, they're my favourite form of self-expression - i can type in a bunch of words, symbols, and numbers, and get out something that does things more reliably and precisely than any human ever could. i started coding when i was 8 (ish?) and have been loving it ever since. it's so special to be able to understand, tweak, break, and fix this dumb (?) pieces of fancy sand that run our world - i have a strong belief that we should try our best to understand and own the things that run on our devices. i also really like design, as is (hopefully) evident with this site! i really think that putting a little more thought into a design and a touch of animation and micro-interactions can really make software a joy to use. (full blog post on why juice isn't just for games coming soon!) lifeless, cold software - usually using Radix UI, the Inter font, and a monochrome palette - kinda hurts to see and i'm trying my best to remedy that :) i do gamedev too! my go-to engine is Godot, but i'm a fan of pico-8 as well. i've taken place in the GMTK Game Jam since 2023, and have made a bunch of (abandoned) side projects, like Countless. (which made it to a full demo somehow!) i realllly like gamedev since it incorporates so many different things - programming, optimization, art, writing, level design, game design, and, if you really try, science and acting. the fact that all my friends like games is a plus too haha right now, I have skills with html/css/js, astro + tailwind, svelte, godot, lua, and python, though I can handle new things pretty easily. i'm currently trying to learn C, Ruby, React and Rust! hardware is fun too - i've made a macropad and custom keyboard from scratch that I daily drive. when i'm not rotting away in my chair, i game, read, write, pat my cats, draw pixel (and regular) art, rock climb, play D&D, shock myself playing with breadboards, listen to music, bullet-journal, and snowboard. but like... why the hack am i making all this (mostly 💀) useless stuff? well. i think the internet isn't as fun as it should be. there's so much creativity and soul out there. but these days, it's all stuck on a few boring websites, forced to mold to those businesses' growth goals. it wasn't always like this. i'm trying to bring back the old web. a time where useless toys, stylized, quirky personal sites, and random gizmos roamed freely. one where the focus was on people, not algorithms or the next B2B AI SaaS. i'm trying to bring back a place where people didn't care about likes, views, or upvotes. a world where people made things because they could. a world of dreamers.