Ben Visness

Lead, Foundation President

Ben is the leader of the Handmade Network. Ben joined the community in 2016 while he was in college, and was thrilled to find a community of programmers who weren't blinded by "best practices". He has been an admin since 2018, and became the official lead in 2022.

As lead and foundation president, Ben sets the vision and direction for the Handmade community and writes a lot of web pages like this one. His goal is to foster the development of Handmade software and Handmade programmers, and to move the software industry toward a new future where our "high-level" tools are built on solid low-level foundations.

On the professional side, Ben works on WebAssembly at Mozilla within the SpiderMonkey team. Before this, he spent many years as a web developer building apps and backend services, with a focus on performance. He also acts as lead mentor of a FIRST Robotics team.

Asaf Gartner

Admin, Foundation Secretary

Asaf was there for episode one of Handmade Hero, and has been a pillar of the community ever since. He was drawn to the Handmade community by his increasing dissatisfaction with the web development world, and in 2018 he joined the admin team to help build the HMN website and move the network forward.

With a severe allergy to unnecessary complexity, he is constantly looking for ways to create software that doesn't frustrate the user.

Colin Davidson

Admin, Foundation Treasurer

Colin is a generalist systems engineer who likes to tinker with strange hardware and works up and down the tech stack for fun. He cares deeply about spreading mechanical sympathy, helping others write code that makes the computer happy, so that users can experience the joy of fast computers that is usually reserved for a few lucky embedded engineers.

Professionally, Colin has worked with embedded user and kernelspace networking, front and backend webdev, and hypervisor infrastructure. He also spends a fair amount of time plonking around on the guitar, working with the Odin team (a Handmade project!), and writing code instrospection tools to debug his hobby kernel projects.