Welcome to Refined. I’m Cooper, also known as Cooper Codes, “Coop da loop”, DeskSpacing.com founder, CoderPrep failure, and Washington State Univeristy college dropout. I’m imperfect, so I thought I’d write here about my thoughts as I go about my life.
To understand my imperfections, I thought I’d write the cliff notes of my life. Here goes:
- During the summer of 2020 I built the website DeskSpacing.com , amassing around 1,000,000 unique visitors. Revenue? Zero. I used it as an excuse to become an “entrepreneur” anyways.
- In early 2021 I dropped out of Washington State Univeristy, where I had studied Computer Science. I had some disagreements with the collegiate system, particularly student debt, so I left.
- During 2021 I started the early working of my Cooper Codes YouTube channel, which I worked on for around 3 years. I gained 13,000 subscribers, collaborated with top YouTubers, and eventually burnt out after developing a philosophy that was increasingly against content creation in isolation. This period of collapse is where my intrigue with learning systems and learning algorithims began.
- From 2021 to 2023 I worked a handful of software engineering internships, namely at Cigna, PagerDuty, and Microsoft.
- During early 2024 I began working on a website called CoderPrep, a game based learning system for learning how to code. It failed brilliantly, and honestly the product wasn’t that great. By the end of 2024 I was nearly $40,000 in debt and burnt nearly $25,000 in savings. If I were a venture capitalist I would have labeled myself an “inverse YCombinator”.
- Throughout 2025 I worked as a waiter at an old folks home, and for the most part I abandoned my entrepreneurial pursuits. I lived in my childhood bedroom and I worked dilligently to pay off my debts. By December 2025 I had paid nearly everything off, including going to court to settle a credit card debt. I didn’t talk much about Cooper Codes, I used this period to work on my social skills and developing personally outside of the chaotic online landscape.
- At the start of 2026 I went to work as a waiter on a high end cruise line going from New Orleans to Pensicola, but after one month of it I decided the job wasn’t for me. Rich people from Lousiana are miserable, that’s the lesson.
Now we get to the present! I came back from the cruise line and within 2 days I started working as a security guard for an office complex for 40 hours per week. I got my old waiter job back at the old folks home as well. My combined schedule is currently 72 hours per week.
I live in a shitty room for rent, $900 per month utilities included. Every single night I brandish a fly swatter to slay the random gnats tha fly into my room because of a leaky window. Not exactly your common “entrepreneur” story. The plus side? I save nearly $4,000 per month, and I just hit $20k in the bank with no debts. I’m gearing up for my next chapter, so that’s part of my why I decided to start writing now.
An MMORPG Based On Education?
CoderPrep failed, but I think the core loop of answering questions and building an adaptive learning system remained. I’ll talk more about the specifics of my projects in a different posts, but let me briefly mention Branch.
Branch is my current software project. I work on it during my commute on the bus, with homeless people making constant attempts to swipe my macbook, and software engineering nerds spying curiously over my shoulder. The goal is an MMORPG where users have skills, ranks, quests, regions, and more to make learning fun and also effective. I’ve been working on a combat / questing system for learning. It sounds pretty crazy but it’s getting close to an MVP, with my main first focus being on SAT preparation. I’m being vague here for the sake of conciseness, we can talk Branch later.
Ok, We Know You Now… But Why Refined?
Throughout my journey I find myself studying different archetypes, different ways of living, and I have found that the common “entrepreneur” hustle way of life wasn’t for me. I’m constantly refining my own ideas, and developing my own thining, so I thought I would make a blog about that process.
Some of the posts will be analysis of my own projects, some of them will be technical, some will be about design, and some will be about philosophy. I even want to write posts of my inspirations, how web designers can learn from Tom Ford, how fashion designers can learn from Steve Jobs. Anything in the pursuit of refinement, that is this space.
I hope that the ideas here are valuable to others, that maybe my little ramblings can expose some reality to the process of building great things. Or horrible things?
Who knows, I just hope to build.
Both a better life and better projects.
Cooper