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LATEST NEWS

July 2024: A new website, just in time for the Visibility Jam!
Ben Visness — July 6, 2024

Hey there, Handmade Network. Since you’re reading this on the website, you may
have noticed that things look a little different around here. As I talked about
in our last news post, we’ve been working for the last couple months to redesign
the Handmade Network website. Today I’m pleased to finally roll it out!

The new site design comes courtesy of Jes Chuhta, a wonderful UX designer who we
came to know through Handmade Boston and Handmade Seattle last year. The new
website is designed to reflect the new shape of the Handmade Network as it has
evolved over time. A quick summary of the changes:

 * Showing off activity from Discord. The website forums aren’t used much these
   days. The Discord, on the other hand, is thriving. With well over 7,000
   users, thousands of messages sent per week, and a steady stream of
   #project-showcase posts, the Discord is the most active part of the community
   right now. The new website design puts that content front and center. The new
   feed-focused design prominently features the work being shared on Discord,
   right alongside the other content typical of the website.
 * Your own customized feed. If you’re logged in, you can now follow users and
   projects here on the website. The home page will show you a new Following
   feed of just the content that matters most to you. In the near future, we’ll
   add RSS support for this feed as well, enabling you to keep up with community
   activity in whatever way you prefer.
 * Tons of improvements to projects. Handmade Network projects have been
   overhauled, making important information much more prominent and totally
   redesigning the project-editing experience. The new link editor replaces the
   confusing old textual format, and the distinction between primary and
   secondary links enables project authors to highlight the actions that are
   most important. Plus, projects now support header images, allowing you once
   again to show off what your project is capable of outside the long
   description.

In addition, the new design is actually much simpler to work with! Programmers,
trust me, you have no idea how valuable it is to work with a good designer. Our
HTML is so simple now, our CSS is so simple now, we have a third of the
variables we used to have. It is so easy to slap designs together and they look
good because they are consistent and aesthetically pleasing and please
programmers listen to me please

Because we needed to get this announcement out, the website is still a work in
progress. Several pages are still somewhat broken or need a little more
attention. But we hope that you all enjoy the new foundations, and we look
forward to expanding the site to highlight even more of the great work the
Handmade Network community is doing.


THE VISIBILITY JAM IS JUST TWO WEEKS AWAY!



That’s right, just two weeks! Our second annual Visibility Jam is coming up on
July 19, two weekends from the time of this posting.

The topic of “visibility” is critical to Handmade goals. To understand our
systems we have to see our systems. The underlying realities of computers cannot
be known unless programmers like us go to the effort of building tools,
visualizations, and editors. Making systems visible is the first step toward
improving those systems.

I covered this in my talk from Handmade Seattle last year. We don’t need to be
stuck forever with the towering pile of complexity that is modern systems. We
can learn how systems work, tear down the layers, and build new systems that are
just as nice to use but have a fraction of the complexity. If we are going to
build a new kind of “high-level” software, we first have to understand the low
levels, and the Visibility Jam is your opportunity to take that first step.

Plus, we’ve now made tons of improvements to projects on the website, so
submission should be much more pleasant this year. There’s no better time to
join the community and try jamming with us! Check out the jam page for more
details.


Read more »
Featured
Recent
News
Martin Fouilleul October 2, 2024
Babbler

I finally published my end of jam writeup about &babbler here:
https://forkingpaths.dev/posts/24-10-02/wheel_reinvention_jam_writeup.html
I explain the motivations of the project, how it works, how it differs from the
wheel it's trying to reinvent, what insights I got from it and the new questions
it raised.

View original message on Discord
clementb October 2, 2024
Dragonflly - a web browser from scratch


&dragonfly
I added the Inspector tool! I needed a way to debug the rendering of the web
pages. I have a lot of problems with the margin and padding.
Now, it's easy to have the value and to understand that's happening?
There's also a responsive mode. I can set the viewport size and flip it.
Last thing, the inspector tool can manipulate the DOM and duplicate remove nodes

View original message on Discord
Ben Visness October 2, 2024
Bret Victor's Worst Nightmare


Added rotation to objects, finally, so now I can actually use the third
dimension properly. &ar

View original message on Discord
Meese October 2, 2024
Meese Engine


&meeseengine
Flying at 3 times the speed of sound (3690 km/h), hitting nearly 60 FPS, with a
64-chunk render distance.

View original message on Discord
Colin October 2, 2024
clock


&clock Finally working well enough that I can auto-ingest most of my calendars,
and get all my events in.
Tomorrow is apparently slammed. yay.

View original message on Discord
Ben Visness October 1, 2024
Bret Victor's Worst Nightmare


My final demo video for my AR jam project, inspired by Dynamicland. This system
allows you to build apps that are a natural part of your physical space,
anchored to real physical objects. The apps can be stored inside QR codes and
can be copied from tag to tag for easy collaboration.

The apps are collaborative by nature, and the physical tracking codes allow
anyone to participate and collaborate. My hope is to extend this system and use
it with my robotics students this year. &ar

View original message on Discord
Brian Maher October 1, 2024


Have been busy recently due to starting a new job and preparing for incoming
parenthood...

Getting back into streaming habit. Kicked it off today with a new puzzle
element: cross bridge to allow for lasers to cross where they previously
couldn't!

View original message on Discord
Kartik Agaram October 1, 2024


Simple computation in my notebook app.

https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/notebook.love

View original message on Discord
Voran October 1, 2024
ComputerTop


I finally got a bit more time to actually write out part of the description of
&ctrpg , and I'll probably have time to finish the rest tomorrow. As for the
program itself: I managed to get this simple dynamic background done, which is
pretty neat! Hopefully I'll find more time for the rest of it soon, at least
enough to finish the basic demo I wanted to get done last week.

If you're wondering how this relates at all to tabletop character sheets, the
short version is that the character sheet is really just something to render;
it's the rendering I'm really interested in.

View original message on Discord
Meese September 30, 2024
Meese Engine


I ported &meeseengine to the PC, and even in its unoptimized state, it runs at
60 FPS with a minimum render distance of 64 chunks on my laptop -- double the
maximum render distance of Minecraft: Java Edition. Powerful hardware won't be
necessary for the game to run smoothly at long render distances.

The PC port will streamline the debugging process, allowing for faster
improvements across all platforms, including the Gamecube, Dreamcast, and Wii.

View original message on Discord
clementb September 30, 2024
Dragonflly - a web browser from scratch


&dragonfly
I'm adding the HTML inspector in my browser!

View original message on Discord
VoxelRifts September 30, 2024
Active Slides


The final demo slide for &active-slides is done. And that's a wrap for my jam
project. Originally my idea was to have an actual editor for slides but I didn't
really get enough time this week to finish something like that. so I just
decided to see how easily I could make slides with many dynamic elements using
the project

View original message on Discord
xeon September 30, 2024
ScalyPlot

&scalyplot finally now working on the project page description and demo videos
https://assets.media.handmade.network/cd2c9a90-7ae8-4543-be4a-971541728eee/2024-09-30_13-03-12.mp4

View original message on Discord
Josh L September 30, 2024
CrispyFont


&crispyfont I went a bit farther down the path of generating sizes from a single
glyph definition, but the code is kind of a mess. I may work on this idea more,
but I enjoy drawing the atlases more, so I went back to that and drew a 12px
size to finish out the jam. Not sure I made anything useful, but I had fun 😁

View original message on Discord
debater_coder September 30, 2024
benchide


Final update for the jam.

 * Added ability to save and open files

Ejektaflex September 30, 2024
TokaCard


I finished my flashcard app prototype, &tokacard tonight! There's still a lot
that needs to be done, but today I added a main menu, an about page and
navigation between each screen. Additionally, I added little touches here and
there (an app icon, different pointer cursors, and an "I don't know" button) and
managed to export to a release jar file. There's still a lot to be done before
this is 'usable' in the long term sense, but it feels really good to have this
finished, and I learned a lot about Jetpack/Jetbrains Compose along the way!

View original message on Discord
otone September 30, 2024
AABB Level Editor


&aabb level editor, made a lot of progress during the last day:

 * added camera controls: normal mouse rotation and orbit around the cursor
 * more customization: camera input sensitivity, grid colors, grid alpha, grid
   fade distance, clear color etc.
 * Ability to create and select/deselect brushes
 * import textures and generate texture array
 * Assign textures to all faces / only the selected face of a brush

If there was more time I'd tackle:

 * Rendering is messy, I would combine each renderer into one draw call and
   write to a big buffer
 * TexCoords editing and maybe a toggle to switch between world space uvs and
   texcoords
 * deform aabbs with planes (similar to boolean operations)

All in all I am quite happy with the results, considering I only spent 3-4 days,
learned a lot about odin and really like the language so far.
Thanks for organizing the jam and good rest everyone! 👋

View original message on Discord
Andreas September 30, 2024
Astro


&luggen-astro
7th and final day of the Wheel Reinvention Jam 2024.

Most of the day was spent on memory allocation and introducing more particles.
The particle allocator (linked free-list) was fragmenting a lot so I ended up
re-implementing most of it.

Particles was the main goal of the day. I had difficulties coming up with a
scheme that allowed parenting emitters to ships (trail effect). In the end I
just wrote something that works without introducing any entity systems or what
have you, which I'm glad for.

Somewhere around midnight I realized that packing the emitter array was causing
bugs due to them now being referenced by "entities", so I had to implement a
pool allocator. The packed array is still in use for iteration purposes but now
it's an array of pointers to the pool data.

Green blocks show available particle memory. Orange blocks show available
emitters.

What can I say? This jam was great. I feel like I've passed some sort of
milestone. Big thanks to the Handmade team for organizing this! While I didn't
quite reach my my goal of making a complete game loop I now have a foundation to
work from. And some parts of the code will see their way into other projects.
It's almost 4 am now. Good night!

View original message on Discord
sugrado September 30, 2024
Drawn Comments


&drawn-comments the images get saved as descriptions inside comments so that
their positions don't get too messed up when editing the files with other text
editors.

View original message on Discord
nabbo. September 30, 2024
MakeC

&makec A simple C/C++ build system written in C that uses C as a project
specification language
https://handmade.network/p/629/makec/
https://github.com/UnNabbo/MakeC

View original message on Discord
Martin Fouilleul October 2, 2024
Babbler

I finally published my end of jam writeup about &babbler here:
https://forkingpaths.dev/posts/24-10-02/wheel_reinvention_jam_writeup.html
I explain the motivations of the project, how it works, how it differs from the
wheel it's trying to reinvent, what insights I got from it and the new questions
it raised.

View original message on Discord
clementb October 2, 2024
Dragonflly - a web browser from scratch


&dragonfly
I added the Inspector tool! I needed a way to debug the rendering of the web
pages. I have a lot of problems with the margin and padding.
Now, it's easy to have the value and to understand that's happening?
There's also a responsive mode. I can set the viewport size and flip it.
Last thing, the inspector tool can manipulate the DOM and duplicate remove nodes

View original message on Discord
Ben Visness October 2, 2024
Bret Victor's Worst Nightmare


Added rotation to objects, finally, so now I can actually use the third
dimension properly. &ar

View original message on Discord
Meese October 2, 2024
Meese Engine


&meeseengine
Flying at 3 times the speed of sound (3690 km/h), hitting nearly 60 FPS, with a
64-chunk render distance.

View original message on Discord
msmiley October 2, 2024
mmkay


&mmkay command line arguments with sensible defaults

View original message on Discord
Colin October 2, 2024
clock


&clock Finally working well enough that I can auto-ingest most of my calendars,
and get all my events in.
Tomorrow is apparently slammed. yay.

View original message on Discord
Ben Visness October 1, 2024
Bret Victor's Worst Nightmare


My final demo video for my AR jam project, inspired by Dynamicland. This system
allows you to build apps that are a natural part of your physical space,
anchored to real physical objects. The apps can be stored inside QR codes and
can be copied from tag to tag for easy collaboration.

The apps are collaborative by nature, and the physical tracking codes allow
anyone to participate and collaborate. My hope is to extend this system and use
it with my robotics students this year. &ar

View original message on Discord
Brian Maher October 1, 2024


Have been busy recently due to starting a new job and preparing for incoming
parenthood...

Getting back into streaming habit. Kicked it off today with a new puzzle
element: cross bridge to allow for lasers to cross where they previously
couldn't!

View original message on Discord
Kartik Agaram October 1, 2024


Simple computation in my notebook app.

https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/notebook.love

View original message on Discord
Voran October 1, 2024
ComputerTop


I finally got a bit more time to actually write out part of the description of
&ctrpg , and I'll probably have time to finish the rest tomorrow. As for the
program itself: I managed to get this simple dynamic background done, which is
pretty neat! Hopefully I'll find more time for the rest of it soon, at least
enough to finish the basic demo I wanted to get done last week.

If you're wondering how this relates at all to tabletop character sheets, the
short version is that the character sheet is really just something to render;
it's the rendering I'm really interested in.

View original message on Discord
Meese September 30, 2024
Meese Engine


I ported &meeseengine to the PC, and even in its unoptimized state, it runs at
60 FPS with a minimum render distance of 64 chunks on my laptop -- double the
maximum render distance of Minecraft: Java Edition. Powerful hardware won't be
necessary for the game to run smoothly at long render distances.

The PC port will streamline the debugging process, allowing for faster
improvements across all platforms, including the Gamecube, Dreamcast, and Wii.

View original message on Discord
clementb September 30, 2024
Dragonflly - a web browser from scratch


&dragonfly
I'm adding the HTML inspector in my browser!

View original message on Discord
VoxelRifts September 30, 2024
Active Slides


The final demo slide for &active-slides is done. And that's a wrap for my jam
project. Originally my idea was to have an actual editor for slides but I didn't
really get enough time this week to finish something like that. so I just
decided to see how easily I could make slides with many dynamic elements using
the project

View original message on Discord
xeon September 30, 2024
ScalyPlot

&scalyplot finally now working on the project page description and demo videos
https://assets.media.handmade.network/cd2c9a90-7ae8-4543-be4a-971541728eee/2024-09-30_13-03-12.mp4

View original message on Discord
Josh L September 30, 2024
CrispyFont


&crispyfont I went a bit farther down the path of generating sizes from a single
glyph definition, but the code is kind of a mess. I may work on this idea more,
but I enjoy drawing the atlases more, so I went back to that and drew a 12px
size to finish out the jam. Not sure I made anything useful, but I had fun 😁

View original message on Discord
debater_coder September 30, 2024
benchide


Final update for the jam.

 * Added ability to save and open files

Ejektaflex September 30, 2024
TokaCard


I finished my flashcard app prototype, &tokacard tonight! There's still a lot
that needs to be done, but today I added a main menu, an about page and
navigation between each screen. Additionally, I added little touches here and
there (an app icon, different pointer cursors, and an "I don't know" button) and
managed to export to a release jar file. There's still a lot to be done before
this is 'usable' in the long term sense, but it feels really good to have this
finished, and I learned a lot about Jetpack/Jetbrains Compose along the way!

View original message on Discord
otone September 30, 2024
AABB Level Editor


&aabb level editor, made a lot of progress during the last day:

 * added camera controls: normal mouse rotation and orbit around the cursor
 * more customization: camera input sensitivity, grid colors, grid alpha, grid
   fade distance, clear color etc.
 * Ability to create and select/deselect brushes
 * import textures and generate texture array
 * Assign textures to all faces / only the selected face of a brush

If there was more time I'd tackle:

 * Rendering is messy, I would combine each renderer into one draw call and
   write to a big buffer
 * TexCoords editing and maybe a toggle to switch between world space uvs and
   texcoords
 * deform aabbs with planes (similar to boolean operations)

All in all I am quite happy with the results, considering I only spent 3-4 days,
learned a lot about odin and really like the language so far.
Thanks for organizing the jam and good rest everyone! 👋

View original message on Discord
Andreas September 30, 2024
Astro


&luggen-astro
7th and final day of the Wheel Reinvention Jam 2024.

Most of the day was spent on memory allocation and introducing more particles.
The particle allocator (linked free-list) was fragmenting a lot so I ended up
re-implementing most of it.

Particles was the main goal of the day. I had difficulties coming up with a
scheme that allowed parenting emitters to ships (trail effect). In the end I
just wrote something that works without introducing any entity systems or what
have you, which I'm glad for.

Somewhere around midnight I realized that packing the emitter array was causing
bugs due to them now being referenced by "entities", so I had to implement a
pool allocator. The packed array is still in use for iteration purposes but now
it's an array of pointers to the pool data.

Green blocks show available particle memory. Orange blocks show available
emitters.

What can I say? This jam was great. I feel like I've passed some sort of
milestone. Big thanks to the Handmade team for organizing this! While I didn't
quite reach my my goal of making a complete game loop I now have a foundation to
work from. And some parts of the code will see their way into other projects.
It's almost 4 am now. Good night!

View original message on Discord
sugrado September 30, 2024
Drawn Comments


&drawn-comments the images get saved as descriptions inside comments so that
their positions don't get too messed up when editing the files with other text
editors.

View original message on Discord
July 2024: A new website, just in time for the Visibility Jam!
Ben Visness — July 6, 2024

Hey there, Handmade Network. Since you’re reading this on the website, you may
have noticed that things look a little different around here. As I talked about
in our last news post, we’ve been working for the last couple months to redesign
the Handmade Network website. Today I’m pleased to finally roll it out!

The new site design comes courtesy of Jes Chuhta, a wonderful UX designer who we
came to know through Handmade Boston and Handmade Seattle last year. The new
website is designed to reflect the new shape of the Handmade Network as it has
evolved over time. A quick summary of the changes:

 * Showing off activity from Discord. The website forums aren’t used much these
   days. The Discord, on the other hand, is thriving. With well over 7,000
   users, thousands of messages sent per week, and a steady stream of
   #project-showcase posts, the Discord is the most active part of the community
   right now. The new website design puts that content front and center. The new
   feed-focused design prominently features the work being shared on Discord,
   right alongside the other content typical of the website.
 * Your own customized feed. If you’re logged in, you can now follow users and
   projects here on the website. The home page will show you a new Following
   feed of just the content that matters most to you. In the near future, we’ll
   add RSS support for this feed as well, enabling you to keep up with community
   activity in whatever way you prefer.
 * Tons of improvements to projects. Handmade Network projects have been
   overhauled, making important information much more prominent and totally
   redesigning the project-editing experience. The new link editor replaces the
   confusing old textual format, and the distinction between primary and
   secondary links enables project authors to highlight the actions that are
   most important. Plus, projects now support header images, allowing you once
   again to show off what your project is capable of outside the long
   description.

In addition, the new design is actually much simpler to work with! Programmers,
trust me, you have no idea how valuable it is to work with a good designer. Our
HTML is so simple now, our CSS is so simple now, we have a third of the
variables we used to have. It is so easy to slap designs together and they look
good because they are consistent and aesthetically pleasing and please
programmers listen to me please

Because we needed to get this announcement out, the website is still a work in
progress. Several pages are still somewhat broken or need a little more
attention. But we hope that you all enjoy the new foundations, and we look
forward to expanding the site to highlight even more of the great work the
Handmade Network community is doing.


THE VISIBILITY JAM IS JUST TWO WEEKS AWAY!



That’s right, just two weeks! Our second annual Visibility Jam is coming up on
July 19, two weekends from the time of this posting.

The topic of “visibility” is critical to Handmade goals. To understand our
systems we have to see our systems. The underlying realities of computers cannot
be known unless programmers like us go to the effort of building tools,
visualizations, and editors. Making systems visible is the first step toward
improving those systems.

I covered this in my talk from Handmade Seattle last year. We don’t need to be
stuck forever with the towering pile of complexity that is modern systems. We
can learn how systems work, tear down the layers, and build new systems that are
just as nice to use but have a fraction of the complexity. If we are going to
build a new kind of “high-level” software, we first have to understand the low
levels, and the Visibility Jam is your opportunity to take that first step.

Plus, we’ve now made tons of improvements to projects on the website, so
submission should be much more pleasant this year. There’s no better time to
join the community and try jamming with us! Check out the jam page for more
details.


Read more »
May 2024: Focusing on projects
Ben Visness — May 20, 2024

Hello Handmade Network! 2024 has been great so far. Most notably, we held our
first-ever Learning Jam in March, in which participants learn about a topic and
share that knowledge with the rest of the community. We had great turnout for an
experimental jam in its first year, and I’m excited to revisit it in the future.

But looking back, not everything we’ve done over the last couple years has been
quite so successful. We’ve excitedly kicked off projects like our education
initiative, Time Machine, even a 501c3 behind the scenes. Sadly, none of these
have panned out. Making good educational resources with a Handmade flair is hard
(really hard) and requires a huge time commitment from a rare type of person.
Time Machine was a fun idea, but was never destined to succeed as a large
community project. And the 501c3…we’ll save that for another time.

Community members did great work on these projects, and we learned a lot, but as
time passed it became clear that we were neglecting the heart of the Handmade
community: projects, and the people who author them.

Handmade software is literally the point of the Handmade Network. Communities
that talk about programming are a dime a dozen. But Handmade software are
different. It is so fast, so capable, so lightweight, so simple, that it shocks
people with what modern computers are capable of.

At the end of the day, Handmade projects are what brings people to the
community. This is not just me being nice; our Google Search analytics show that
RemedyBG is by far the #1 source of traffic to handmade.network.
#project-showcase is also the most popular channel on the Discord, and we
frequently hear that it inspires people to dig deeper into their own projects.
And ultimately, if we’re not making quality software, what’s the point?

So this year, we are 100% focused on projects. Our sole goal is to promote and
boost the amazing work being done by the Handmade community. To that end:

 * We’re doing more jams. In addition to the Learning Jam, we’ll bringing back
   both the Visibility Jam and Wheel Reinvention Jam for another year—and plan
   to keep doing so indefinitely. The Visibility Jam will be in July, while the
   Wheel Reinvention Jam will be September. See this page for all the details.
 * We’re doubling down on Unwind. Our monthly Twitch show Unwind is an
   opportunity to dig deeper into technical details with the authors of various
   projects. The first few episodes have been a great time, but there’s so much
   more we can do with the show, and we hope to increase the show’s reach so
   that even more people can be aware of the great work being done by members of
   the community.
 * We’re redesigning the website. The current website design is very old, and
   doesn’t do a good job highlighting the actual work people are doing.
   Additionally, although the project system has been working pretty well for
   jams, there are many quality-of-life issues. The wonderful Jes Chuhta has
   been crafting a new design for us, and Asaf and I have been implementing it
   this month. In fact, I’m streaming the work every Monday and Friday this
   month over on Twitch.

As for our previous initiatives, we’ll be sunsetting them and archiving their
content as necessary. Nothing will be lost except our time and our pride, but
we’ll recover. 🙂

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Before I close, a few key project updates:

 * Disk Voyager is coming along beautifully and already has dozens of very happy
   alpha users. He recently added a bookmarks / quick access panel, which I am
   very excited about. It will soon enter open alpha, so go to
   https://diskvoyager.com/ and sign up to make sure you get access.
   
   

 * Cactus Image Viewer has been receiving lots of quality updates recently, with
   more on the way, including a gallery of other images in the folder. You can
   download the latest version from GitHub.
   
   

 * Orca is on the cusp of another major release. Shaw and I rewrote the Python
   tooling in C to reduce dependencies, Reuben added a complete libc
   implementation (no more shim!), and Martin rewrote the vector graphics
   backend in WebGPU. Make sure to subscribe to the Orca newsletter to be
   notified when it releases.

And finally, Abner has started a Discord server for Handmade Cities. You can
read more about his rationale in this blog post, but if you are interested in
meetups or coworking with Handmade folks, I recommend you go join.

Looking forward to many more great things this year! We’re just getting started.

-Ben


Read more »
December 2023: Handmade meetups all year round
Ben Visness — December 20, 2023

I'm pleased to write this final news post of the year together with Abner
Coimbre!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Handmade Community,

Warm holiday greetings! Abner Coimbre and Ben Visness here, teaming up to
announce that the Handmade Cities Matrix server will remain online permanently.
In past years, it has been shut down at the end of conferences, but now it will
remain active year-round!

This might surprise you, since most of you are probably already members of the
(now rather large) Handmade Network Discord server. So why keep the Matrix
server as well?

The Handmade movement has grown an incredible amount in the past several years.
Importantly, it has grown both online and in the real world. Both domains are
vital to the health of the larger Handmade community - but there are some
critical differences between the two. Let's dive into it.


TWO COMMUNITIES? NOT QUITE.

The Handmade Network (HMN) is the online hub for the Handmade movement. Led by
Ben and his team, they run programming jams, Twitch shows, and online social
gatherings. They provide a place for community members to discuss programming,
learn from each other, and share what they're working on. The Handmade Network
is also the home of Handmade projects, including the Orca initiative and Abner's
own Terminal Click.

In essence, HMN is the online community - and it's accessible to everyone,
including those who prefer to remain anonymous.

Handmade Cities (HMC) brings the Handmade movement into the physical realm.
Headed by Abner and his own staff, HMC orchestrates tech conferences like
Handmade Boston and Handmade Seattle, which are venues to present to the rest of
the world our software and ideals. HMC also organizes monthly in-person meetups
worldwide.

In essence, Handmade Cities is all about in-person events. HMC emphasizes
real-world interactions; by its very nature, those who participate in these
events can't be anonymous!

For several years now, Handmade Cities has used a Matrix server for discussions
related to conferences and conference meetups. This server has always
complemented the Handmade Network Discord server, rather than competing with it.
And that is not going to change!

The HMN Discord remains open to all, while users on the HMC Matrix are tied to
real individuals participating in Handmade events: ticket holders, local meetup
members, and so on. The Discord is the hub for jams and other online events; the
Matrix is the hub for meetups and other in-person events.


WHAT ABOUT HANDMADE HERO? HOW'S THAT GOING?

At the start of the Handmade movement was Handmade Hero, a Twitch series showing
how to craft a video game from scratch. Casey Muratori, president of Molly
Rocket, started it in November 2014 and quickly found great success, forming a
huge community around its values that has lasted almost a decade.

So, what's become of our bouncy little friend? Casey's passions have expanded
beyond this project, reflecting Molly Rocket's commitment to multiple
initiatives. We're not privy to the specifics of Casey's plans with Handmade
Hero, but this year, we collaborated directly with him to shape the opening
blurbs for both Handmade Network and Handmade Cities:

> handmade.network:
> 
> Originally inspired by Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, we dig deep into our
> systems and learn how to do things from scratch. We're not satisfied by the
> latest popular language or the framework of the month. Instead we care about
> how computers actually work.

> handmadecities.com:
> 
> Inspired by Handmade Hero
> 
> Like Handmade Hero by Molly Rocket we believe in breaking software down to the
> bare bones and building back an understanding of how it all really works.

While Molly Rocket, Handmade Network, and Handmade Cities share a spirit of
mutual support, it's crucial to emphasize that we exist as separate entities,
and are not formally affiliated. You might instead see us as independent
stewards of the Handmade movement.

And at the end of the day, that's the way we like it. We each have our own
expertise, our own experiences, our own goals, and ultimately our own
businesses. We feel that we're at our best, and the Handmade movement is at its
best, when we are run independently but collaborate at every opportunity.

We look forward to bringing you improved conferences, jams, meetups, shows, and
projects in 2024. With our 10-year anniversary fast approaching (!) the future
of Handmade shines brighter than ever. 😊

All the best,

Abner and Ben


Read more »
September 2023: Orca MVP is out, Wheel Reinvention Jam on Sept. 25!
Ben Visness — September 16, 2023

With the Wheel Reinvention Jam just over a week away, we’re very pleased to
finally release the Orca MVP to the community!



For those unfamiliar, Orca is our new cross-platform runtime for WebAssembly
apps. It gives you a cross-platform app development system without all the
baggage of browsers. It’s a long-term project with ambitious goals, but we are
very excited to finally release an early MVP for the community to play with.

All the details can be found in the announcement post over on the Orca website.
There you’ll find how to access the source code, the list of features and
current limitations, and how to get help and provide feedback. If you’re
interested and think it would be a good fit for your project, we’d love to have
you try it out during the jam.


JAM! JAM! JAM!



Our third annual Wheel Reinvention Jam is less than two weeks away! The Wheel
Reinvention Jam is a week-long jam where we build software from scratch. Whether
you want to clone an existing app for fun or build something wild and ambitious,
this is your chance to try.

If you’ve never participated in a week-long jam before, don’t sweat the time
commitment - you can participate with however much time you have. Whether you
take days off of work or just participate on the weekend, we’re excited to see
what you create!

The jam takes place from Monday September 25 to Sunday October 1. For all the
details, visit https://handmade.network/jam.


WHY REINVENT THE WHEEL?

We owe the name “Wheel Reinvention Jam”, and its logo, to Casey. At the start of
Handmade Hero, literally in episode 1, a viewer asked the question: “Why not use
an engine? Why reinvent the wheel?”

Casey’s answer deserves to be watched in its entirety, but part of it is
shockingly relevant right now:

> If you start with an engine, then it changes what you’re learning from the
> fundamental truth of how to implement a game to someone else’s version of
> that. […] What you’re really learning is that engine. You haven’t learned how
> to make games, you’ve learned how to make games in Unity. Right? And if Unity
> were to disappear, for example, you would no longer know how to make a game at
> all. I’m not exaggerating this, that’s just the truth.

We could not have planned our jam at a more opportune time. Unity recently
announced a dramatic change to their pricing structure that leaves the future of
many game studios in doubt.

What Casey said back in 2014, at the very inception of the Handmade community,
has now come to pass. For many game developers, Unity is no longer an option.
And just like Casey said, their very existence in the industry has now come into
question. Will they be able to make games at all?

Casey’s reasoning holds as true today as it did then. The world needs engine
programmers! Programmers who understand how engines work aren’t constrained by
the limitations of the engine - they know what’s fundamentally possible and can
work around constraints to achieve anything they want. But more than that, our
current engines are not good enough! We need people making new engines, better
tools, better wheels.

This is not just true for game engines. It’s true of the entire software
industry. We need new video editors, new platform layers, new code editors, new
databases, new networking protocols, new compilers, new typesetting systems, new
presentation programs, new graphics APIs, new operating systems.

We will never make progress unless we reinvent the wheel.

See you on September 25.

-Ben


Read more »
August 2023: Handmade Boston recap + Orca updates!
Ben Visness — August 19, 2023

August has already been a big month for the Handmade community! The biggest
news, of course, was:


HANDMADE BOSTON!



Handmade Boston was the first of two Handmade Cities conferences this year and
the first ever held outside of Seattle. I have to say, despite it being the
first conference in a new city, in a new venue, the event was a huge success.
There were dozens of in-person attendees and hundreds more online, and six
fantastic long-form talks. I’ve been working through the homework and thoroughly
enjoying my time.

I also had the pleasure of meeting many people in person whom I had only ever
met online. For many of them, Boston was the first Handmade conference they had
ever attended. It warms my heart that so many people were willing to take a
chance on this scrappy first-year conference.

Abner tells me he will be publishing a recap of the conference soon, so if you’d
like to hear more from him (and buy your tickets to Handmade Seattle!) then head
over to https://handmadecities.com/.


ORCA IS NEARLY READY…



We’ve been hard at work on Orca, our new stack for cross-platform WebAssembly
apps. Think of it like Handmade Electron - a runtime that lets you ship the same
app on multiple platforms. Unlike Electron, however, we’re throwing away the
worst parts of the web stack and keeping the best ones. We’re building all the
systems from the ground up to make app development delightful while still giving
you the same cross-platform benefits of the web. And we’re doing everything we
can to give you freedom and flexibility, so you don’t have to use the parts you
don’t need.

We intend for Orca to be completely free and open source. For now, the codebase
is still private - but this will be changing soon! We’ve kept the codebase
closed since the project is at such an early stage - everything is getting
renamed, build tooling is changing, git submodules are being imported and
everything is breaking as a result. But we’re stabilizing it as fast as we can,
because of this goal:

Orca will be available for use during the Wheel Reinvention Jam in September. It
will be very MVP, a “vertical slice” of all the functionality we eventually
intend for Orca to have. It will also certainly have bugs. But it will have
enough to give you a real taste of our vision for the project. If you’re
interested, we’d love to have you give Orca a try.

For more information and updates, and to be notified when the codebase is open,
make sure to visit https://orca-app.dev and sign up for the newsletter. It won’t
be long until the next one, and in the meantime, you can listen to the latest
episode of Allen Webster’s podcast, which is an interview with Martin about
Orca:
https://conversations.mr4th.com/2204443/13420302-orca-with-martin-fouilleul


THE WHEEL REINVENTION JAM IS A MONTH AWAY!



As mentioned in previous newsletters, our third Wheel Reinvention Jam will be
held from September 25 to October 1. Now is the time to start brainstorming
project ideas! No idea is too big or too small. Whether you build a clone of
another app for educational purposes, or you try to reinvent programming itself,
you have a week to play with new ideas and stretch yourself as a programmer.

More details will be published next month. Stay tuned, start thinking of
projects, and consider joining the Discord so you can find others to collaborate
with.


AROUND THE COMMUNITY

Finally, I just wanted to highlight a few fun and noteworthy things that have
happened in the community over the past month:

 * We had a whopping 100 updates shared in our #project-showcase channel on
   Discord in the last month alone. And these are some high-quality updates!
   NeGate got an NES emulator to build using his new C compiler Cuik and backend
   Tilde, which is now being integrated into the Odin compiler. Saalty also got
   an NES emulator up and running, but on bare metal using his own custom
   bootloader and kernel. And after years of work, torogadude released a demo of
   his game Puppetmaster on Steam, and you can go try the demo and wishlist it
   now!
 * Programming YouTuber Tsoding published a video delving into the GDB frontend
   gf, made by our very own nakst, the creator of the Essence operating system.
   It’s a very entertaining watch - Tsoding crashes the debugger while debugging
   his own program, and in just an hour is able to debug the debugger using the
   debugger, isolate the issue, and submit a pull request to fix it. It’s a
   testament to the quality of nakst’s code that someone entirely new to the
   project is able to dive in and immediately fix their issue!
 * WhiteBox continues to receive amazing updates, now with concurrency support,
   and a disassembly view that gives you rich information about control flow at
   a glance. I love to see new ways of visualizing low-level programming
   concepts - programmers have deserved better UI for a long, long time.


UNTIL NEXT TIME…

…we’ll be working hard on Orca, jams, education, and other projects I can’t wait
to tell you about. This community is going stronger than ever, and I’m so glad
to be a part of it!

-Ben

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This newsletter brought to you by Ratatat.


Read more »
July 2023: Orca, Time Machine, and more
Ben Visness — July 15, 2023

Hello Handmade community! It’s been an exciting year for Handmade so far. Here’s
what we’ve been up to:

 * We announced Orca, a new toolkit for cross-platform WebAssembly apps.
 * We launched Time Machine, a community project where we collect video of old
   devices to see how the experience of computing has changed over time.
 * We hosted the Visibility Jam, a jam where we make invisible things in
   computing visible.
 * We held another fishbowl about software testing, and we’ll likely revisit
   this topic in the future.

And of course, Abner has expanded his conference efforts and is now hosting two
Handmade conferences, one in Boston and one in Seattle. Handmade Boston is less
than a month away, so check it out (and don’t forget there’s an online track!)

TL;DR: Orca and Time Machine have both kicked off, and our next Wheel
Reinvention Jam is coming in September!


ORCA



Orca has been in the works for a long time. Many of us were drawn to the
Handmade community because we were dissatisfied with the bloated, complicated
technologies available to us. The community has spent the last several years
learning to make UIs, compilers, debuggers, platform layers - everything you’d
need to make a compelling development platform. Now we’re finally putting it all
together into something real.

Orca is a whole new stack for making cross-platform applications. It’s designed
specifically for WebAssembly, so you can use whatever language you like instead
of being stuck with JavaScript. It has a new state-of-the-art vector graphics
renderer and we’re developing amazing UI tools that will blow the DOM out of the
water. And above all we’re designing the platform to be well-layered - you don’t
have to use the parts of Orca you don’t need, and most importantly, you don’t
have to ship them to your users either.

The Orca initiative is led by Martin Fouilleul, known in the community by his
handle forkingpaths. He originally prototyped Orca as his submission for last
year’s Wheel Reinvention Jam, and we’re thrilled to give him the chance to
develop his vision further. For more info about Orca, check out the announcement
blog post, and subscribe to Orca’s own newsletter while you’re there!


TIME MACHINE



When I attended Handmade Seattle 2019, I visited the (now-closed 😔) Living
Computers Museum. I had the opportunity to play with a huge range of computers,
from an ancient teletype to a Macintosh Classic to a NeXT cube. While I was
playing with Kid Pix on that Macintosh Classic, I was struck by just how fun and
responsive the program was, on hardware that pales in comparison to our
computers today. How was it possible that a program like that could run so
well…or that programs today could run so poorly?

Then in 2021, I found some old computers in our robotics team’s shop that had
been in hibernation since 2015. I booted them up and found that they were a
perfect time capsule of what we were working on at the time, with our old code
still open and everything. And they ran great, with the start menu opening
instantaneously (as it should) and programs launching quickly.

And then updates started running.

I watched this computer age five years in thirty minutes. Every Windows update
and Chrome update bogged things down more and more. The 4GB of memory that was
previously wide open was suddenly almost completely full. And it was slow. So
slow.

This is why we’re doing Time Machine. We need more people to remember what it
used to be like. And we in the Handmade community need to know exactly what has
improved about computers over the past few decades, and what has not.

If you have an old computer or phone lying around, please consider taking a
video of it and submitting it to the project! More details can be found on Time
Machine’s website.


WHEEL REINVENTION JAM: SEPTEMBER 25 - OCTOBER 1!



We’ll be hosting our third annual Wheel Reinvention Jam this September! This jam
is an opportunity for you to try out a new project, start something ambitious,
explore new ideas, or just learn to build something yourself. Unlike your
typical weekend game jam, this jam takes place over a full week so you have
ample time to explore a new problem space. (Last year I spent most of my week
implementing a toy TCP stack. I do not recommend this.)

This year’s jam will take place from Monday, September 25 through Sunday,
October 1. As always, you can participate for as much time as you have available
- some people can only participate on the weekend, while others will take entire
days off to focus on their jam project. We look forward to seeing what you all
submit!

For a recap of last year’s jam, click here.


FINAL REMARKS

There are even more things we’re working on behind the scenes that I can’t wait
to tell you about someday. Until then, we’ll see you around on Discord, and in
Boston in August!

-Ben Visness


Read more »
Three big initiatives for 2023
Ben Visness — April 13, 2023

Hello, Handmade Network! We’ve got big plans for 2023 and it’s about time we
shared them with you all. So let’s get into it!


EDUCATION: DIVING DEEP ON NETWORKING

Last year we launched a new education initiative. Our goal is to cover topics
that no one else is covering. And we’re not just making material for beginners -
we want to dive deep into each topic and provide a rich understanding that can
only come from real experts in the domain.

You see, we’re taking a different approach from most programmer education. We
recognize that there are tons of great resources on the internet for a variety
of topics. But if you’re new to a particular domain, there’s still an important
question: where do I start?

We want to be your guide. We’ll point you to the best books, the best articles,
the best resources that will help you gain real understanding. We’ll teach you
the jargon and give you the context you need to understand each piece. We’re not
just teaching you, we’re equipping you with the knowledge to learn for yourself.

We launched the education initiative with a focus on three topics: networking,
compilers, and time. The compiler series will come eventually, but this year we
want to laser-focus on one topic: networking.

There is almost no good networking education out there in the world. If you want
to learn about TCP, your best bet is an O’Reilly book, Wikipedia, or the RFCs.
The space is dominated by Cisco and other companies with expensive
certifications. The end result is that almost all programmers are dependent on
the network stack, and use it every day, but no one actually knows how it works.
This is insane.

We’ve already started the series with an article taking you all the way from
HTTP down to the Ethernet protocol, visiting TCP and IP along the way. This year
we’ll be expanding the series with two more articles covering NATs, firewalls,
internet infrastructure, and many other networking topics that affect
programmers every day. We’re very excited to dig into these topics with you!


TIME MACHINE: REMINDING OURSELVES HOW THINGS USED TO BE

The core of the Handmade philosophy is the idea that software has been getting
worse faster than hardware is getting better. Despite the incredible advances in
computer hardware, the user experience of computing today is worse than it was a
decade or two ago.

We believe this. But many people don’t. So let’s prove it.

This summer we’ll be launching a project called Time Machine. We’ll be asking
you, the community, to dig out your old devices and share video of yourself
using them. We want to go back in time and remind ourselves what it was actually
like to use these old devices. We’ll be tracking the specs of these devices too,
so we have an idea of how computing resources were used.

We hope this will be a fun project for the community and will inspire you all to
take advantage of the amazing hardware we have today. We’ll share more details
later, but in the meantime, get your hands on some old devices!

Also, if you have installers for old versions of popular software, please ping
us on Discord or contact us at team@handmade.network. When the project rolls
around, we’d love to test out old versions of operating systems, browsers,
office software, and anything else that represents the day-to-day experience of
computing.


****: THE HANDMADE ANSWER TO ********

We have an ambitious technical project in the works. It brings together all
aspects of the Handmade community, from low-level systems programming to
forward-thinking developer experiences, all designed to give real users a
computing experience hundreds of times better than what’s on the market today.

This project reaches far beyond what a single developer can do. It will only be
possible through the concentrated effort of a talented community of low-level
programmers, with a common goal, and an inherent desire to make things better. I
believe we are that community!

I’m excited to share more this summer. Until then, be intrigued >:)


COMMUNITY EVENTS

These are our new flagship initiatives for 2023, but of course we’re still going
strong with events for the community. The Visibility Jam starts tomorrow, and
we’re going to do our third Wheel Reinvention Jam this fall. Abner has expanded
Handmade Seattle into a new initiative called Handmade Cities, with conferences
in both Boston and Seattle this year. And we’re still doing weekly Discord
coffee chats, real-life meetups, fishbowls on various topics, and more.

I’m so excited for what this year will bring! Now let’s go jam 😁


Read more »
Torch Passing, Part 2
Ryan Fleury — June 9, 2022

Handmade Network is different from other software development communities. We
promote philosophies and projects that care deeply about software craftsmanship.
We criticize common dogma within the software industry that has produced a
computing world that is far too sluggish, too bloated, too poorly-designed, and
too unwilling to change. We stand for a better computing world.

In the past 4 years, we've done some big things with Handmade Network. The
community has grown dramatically, with thousands of (active!) users on the
Discord server (where a bulk of Handmade communication happens). We started a
podcast. We've had multiple Handmade-themed jams. We transformed the Handmade
Network website into a larger repository of Handmade projects and showcase
content, to serve as a bastion of Handmade ideas, and concretely demonstrate how
Handmade can improve us as builders of software.

Back in 2018, Handmade Network began a new chapter. I took over for Abner
Coimbre as the lead of Handmade Network. I was joined by Ben Visness and Asaf
Gartner, and together we replaced the original Handmade Network admin team. At
that time, Handmade Network had established itself as a large and self
sustaining community. It was the new team's job to continue to foster the
community, and to take it to new places. The original team was ready to move on
to bigger and better things, and they entrusted the keys to the community with
myself, Ben, and Asaf.

Today, Handmade Network begins another new chapter. I have decided to step down
from my role as Handmade Network lead, with Ben Visness taking my place. Ben has
been a great staff member since the beginning. He led an initiative to rewrite
and dramatically change the Handmade Network website into what it is today
(writing blogs is a lot easier now). He and Asaf are responsible for all of the
technology that allows the Handmade Network website to collect amazing showcase
material from the Discord server, allowing the website to serve as both personal
and project content repositories (in addition to the functionality that the
website offered before). Handmade Network would simply not be what it is without
Ben, and I know that moving forward, he'll do an outstanding job of leading the
community.

I love being a part of Handmade Network, and I will remain a member. It has been
an incredible resource to have as I've grown up. I joined Handmade Network in
high school as a young and naive programmer, and the community was instrumental
in transforming me into a much more capable and responsible engineer. I've
decided to step down because I believe that it will be best for both myself and
the community. I have found myself preoccupied with work, life, and some of my
other personal projects and initiatives. For this reason, I think it will be
most productive - not only for me personally, but for the computing world - for
me to give undivided attention to those things, and hand the reins over to Ben
to ensure that Handmade Network can be given the time and attention it deserves.
Ben will be a strong force in continuing to grow, foster, and shape the
community, and increasing its impact as a force for change in software.

It has been a thrill being a staff member, and I can't wait to see what the
community will do next. Let's all keep going. Let's continue to build new
projects, publish new educational material, do new research, and rethink old
assumptions. Through all of those efforts, we can change the computing world
into something a little better than what it was before.

-Ryan


Read more »
Three Announcements
Ben Visness — May 21, 2022

Hello everyone! Just dropping by to make three announcements of upcoming events
and projects here on the network over the summer:


1. FISHBOWL ON SATURDAY, MAY 28

Our next fishbowl conversation will be happening on the Discord on May 28! If
you've never joined us, a fishbowl is essentially a panel conversation held over
text chat, where a select few participants can hold a focused long-form
discussion on a specific topic. We're a big fan of this format because of the
way it allows participants to write thoughtful, long-form answers that would be
impossible in any other medium.

We've had fishbowls on the future of operating systems in the age of the
Internet, the relationship between simplicity and performance, "configuration"
and how to avoid it, and many other topics. This time we are excited to tackle a
subject near and dear to all our hearts: object-oriented programming.

We hope for this to be the definitive community conversation about OOP, since
it's such a frequent topic of conversation and such a confusing issue to
discuss. If you'd like a preview of the topic or would like to contribute
thoughts or resources, please check out the planning discussion over on GitHub.

The fishbowl will be held in the #fishbowl channel on Discord at noon CDT. To
see the time in your local timezone, and be notified when the fishbowl starts,
bookmark this whenisit page!


2. JAM IN AUGUST

We've held two jams as a community in the past, and they have both been smashing
successes. In particular, last year's Wheel Reinvention Jam produced tons of
great projects and introduced us to lots of amazing community members.
Naturally, we're going to do another jam this year!

We are still working out all the details, so a proper announcement and final
dates are yet to come. But we will confirm that this year's jam is happening in
August! Expect it to follow a similar format to prior years—so, one week, and
working in teams is allowed and encouraged.

More soon. 🙂


3. A NEW EDUCATION INITIATIVE

This project is still in its early stages, but too exciting not to tease.
Spearheaded by long-standing community member cloin, we are hard at work behind
the scenes on a new kind of education initiative for programmers. This new
initiative will subsume and replace the old library, which we know many people
sorely miss, and will also hopefully live up to the dream of the old wiki and
old education initiative.

We are very excited to share more about this project with you in the coming
months. For now, if you're interested, nag us on Discord and maybe we'll drop a
few more hints. 😉


A CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS!

These are just a few of the projects we have in the works for the coming year,
and there is even more we'd like to be doing. We'd love to get more people
involved in the following:

 * Helping maintain the website and build new features for the community
 * Developing and organizing starter projects for people to use (particularly
   for the jam)
 * Beta testing new initiatives

If you're interested in any of these, please reply to this post or hit us up on
Discord!


Read more »
Handmade in 2021, HMS2021, Wheel Reinvention Jam Recap, Projects 2.0, Podcast
Ryan Fleury — January 9, 2022

Happy New Year, Handmade Network! I hope you all had an amazing holiday season,
and I hope you're all looking forward to 2022 as much as I am.

The Handmade movement had a huge year in 2021. The Handmade Seattle conference,
hosted by former Handmade Network staff member Abner Coimbre, brought the
community together for yet another time, even in the face of the many changing
circumstances that 2021 held in store. We on the Handmade Network staff team
hosted the Wheel Reinvention Jam, and we had a number of very well-done project
submissions. Ben Visness and Asaf Gartner rewrote the entire Handmade Network
website backend in preparation for some huge features that are slowly making
their way onto the website.

This is, of course, only an incomplete list. The real list of all of the great
things that happened for the Handmade movement in 2021 is not enumerable. But
let's dig into these.


HANDMADE SEATTLE 2021

Abner Coimbre successfully hosted Handmade Seattle for a 3rd year in the face of
consistently changing circumstances - local regulations for COVID-19, traveling
restrictions for international Handmade community members, and many other things
I don't know about or understand. Handmade Seattle, in 2021, hosted 25 different
presentations, all being either talks, demos of Handmade projects, or podcast
episodes. The conference happened both live in-person and also virtually.

I'm not exactly sure how he manages it, but with each year, Abner has produced a
better conference, in the face of COVID-19 restrictions, all while staying
independent without any corporate sponsorships. I had the privilege of attending
in-person, and I was amazed with how smoothly everything went.

I'm here to tell you that the media - talk recordings, demo videos, podcast
episodes - from Handmade Seattle 2021 is starting to roll out, so you can enjoy
all of the content from the conference for free, even if you missed it
originally. To check it out, go here.


WHEEL REINVENTION JAM

As I mentioned, the Handmade Network staff hosted our "Wheel Reinvention Jam"
back in October. This was like a game jam, but instead of being for games, it
was all about taking existing "boring" software - the kind of stuff that we
regularly depend on as users, like file explorers, word processors, and more -
and innovating on it. To put it shortly, the jam was a huge success, and we got
a number of amazing project entries.

We on the admin team also did a stream to show off some of our favorite
projects. And then, something horrible happened: I lost the recording. Long
story short, I downloaded the recording, and unknowingly permanently deleted it
as I was cleaning off my desktop one day. In other words, I had a very important
lessons about backing up important data on my machine.

Hope was, as far as I was concerned, lost.

But I was mistaken - hope is never lost in a community with a hero protecting
it.



Martins Mozeiko, the resident programming wizard in the community, has an
automated system set up that records stream VODs so he can enjoy them at his own
pace after they air. He had a copy of the stream's recording!!!

So, I'm here to report that - because of Martins - you all have the ability to
watch the Wheel Reinvention Jam recap stream. Here it is:








PERSONAL PROJECTS UPDATE & DISCORD INTEGRATION

Ben and Asaf have been hard at work at the admin team's plan for projects on the
Handmade Network website. We realized that the #project-showcase channel on the
Discord server was so popular because so many projects didn't fit the original
model of projects on Handmade Network. These projects were smaller, sometimes
not intended to be finished, were experimental and not well-established, but
nevertheless demonstrated very great results that people love to see. We figured
that this prevalent force in the community - of those who are working on such
projects - should be reflected in the services we offer on the website.

Now, Handmade Network has two tiers of projects: Personal Projects, and Featured
Projects. Personal Projects can be created by anyone, and do not require
approval by the admin team. They give you a place to host media for your
project.

Featured Projects are similar to the old Handmade Network website projects; they
are like personal projects, but are upgraded with a number of features (forums,
episode guide, etc.), and they are presented as being featured (and thus
hand-picked by the admin team).

The most awesome part of all this comes with how media is managed for these
projects. For a while now, we've had the Community Showcase section of the
website - these are posts from the #project-showcase Discord channel of people
showing off work on their projects. We've upgraded this system to also allow
associating some of those posts with projects (and other things) through
tagging.

On each post, you can add tags: Here is a screenshot of my awesome work on &hero
for the &cooljam. Each word that follows a & symbol refers to one of these tags.
Each project gets one tag name, that it can use to pull in certain resources.
And, other things can have tags too (like jam events), that can categorize posts
in other ways.

Posts that are tagged will not only go to the regular Community Showcase section
of the site, but they'll also be pulled onto their respective project pages
(and, yes, a post can be tagged to multiple projects).

Ben is writing a more in-depth post about this. It'll be released shortly, so if
you're looking for more details about how these new features work, you'll want
to check that out when it's ready.

I am extremely excited for this new upgrade to the site's project features. Go
and try it out!


STATE OF THE NETWORK PODCAST 2021

I've just released a new podcast episode I did with community member Rudy Faile,
who interviewed me about the current state of Handmade Network, all of the
things in the Handmade movement in 2021, and where we are planning to go in
2022. Check it out here!


CLOSING REMARKS

One final remark I want to make is announcing a temporary hiatus for myself on
my side-projects, including Handmade Network. In short, I'm taking at least a
few months for self-improvement, to focus on some very important personal
matters. Thank you to all of those who have expressed support - I'll be back at
some point during this year, and I will keep my finger on the pulse of the
community, because I'm so excited for what is yet to come.

That's all for the news, for now. Here's to a prosperous 2022, and let's
continue moving the ball forward!

Best wishes, Ryan


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