From the Kitchen

There's a pub not far from here that's been standing since the 11th century. Nearly a thousand years of people walking through the same door, sitting at the same bar, ordering a pint.

I'm back in hospitality now. Long hours, early starts, the kind of job that doesn't leave much room for side projects. I spent years working in professional kitchens before life pulled me in a different direction for a while. Now the kitchen has pulled me back.

But I didn't start building here. I started a couple of years ago, in a quieter chapter, with more time and fewer certainties. The path from there to here has not been a straight line.

My name is Chedz. I'm the founder of CheddaTech Ltd. I've lived and worked across multiple countries, and somewhere along the way became obsessed with the idea of building things that couldn't be taken away.

That obsession became CheddaBoards.

This newsletter, The Standard, is named after that pub. Because the pub has lasted a thousand years. And that's the kind of infrastructure I want to build.

Why I'm Writing This

There aren't many newsletters written by someone building on the Internet Computer Protocol at midnight on a second-hand laptop, between kitchen shifts and whatever else life throws at them.

I figured that was probably a gap worth filling.

The Standard will be a mix of:

No hype. No fundraising announcements. No excited-to-share language.

Just honest dispatches from someone building in the gaps between shifts.

What I've Built So Far

CheddaBoards is an open-source gaming backend SDK. It gives game developers instant access to leaderboards, OAuth authentication, player profiles, anti-cheat systems, and achievement tracking. All serverless, all persistent, no database to manage.

It runs on the Internet Computer Protocol. Think of it as infrastructure that lives on a decentralised network rather than a server someone could switch off.

I started building it in early 2024, learning Motoko from scratch alongside everything else. Eight months later I had a working system. After a seven-month beta with 100+ users from the ICP developer community, CheddaBoards went live in December 2025.

I have built several games on top of it to prove it works. The Cheese Game, CheddaClick, Scooter Dash. Each one stress-tests a different layer of the infrastructure. Each one runs the same backend.

It's live. It works. Now comes everything else — the docs, the developer experience, getting it into the hands of people who need it.

From the Build Log

This week I have been building the infrastructure behind the thing you are reading right now.

The Standard is not delivered through a VC-backed email platform. It is a serverless newsletter, hosted on the same decentralised infrastructure that powers CheddaBoards. Because writing about permanent, unstoppable tech and then sending it through someone else's platform felt like a contradiction I could not live with.

More on the technical side of that in a future issue.

For now: welcome. I am glad you are here.

If you want to know when the next issue drops, you can subscribe to the mailing list.

One Thing From the Kitchen

There is a term in professional kitchens: mise en place. Everything in its place. Prep done before service starts. No scrambling when orders come in.

I think about software the same way.

CheddaBoards exists so that when a developer ships a game, the infrastructure is already in place. No scrambling to add leaderboards after launch. No realising you need auth halfway through development. Everything ready before service starts.

Mise en place. For games.