We're putting the software industry back on the right track.

Software is bad and getting worse. Despite amazing advances in hardware, today's software has made computers slower and buggier than they were decades ago. People's computers are more powerful than they know. They deserve better.

The Handmade Network was founded by Abner Coimbre as a community for fans of Handmade Hero, a Twitch series where games industry veteran Casey Muratori teaches you how to make a game and engine from scratch. Since then, the community has grown massively, launched many careers, and spawned amazing projects that thousands of people use every day. Handmade Hero is no longer active, but Casey is still producing high-quality programming education through Computer, Enhance!

The Handmade Network is an initiative of the Handmade Software Foundation, a (soon-to-be) 501(c)(6) nonprofit corporation.

Leadership

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

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.

Key Contributors

Jes Chuhta

Designer

Jes is a UI and UX designer who is passionate about building high-quality software, in line with the Handmade ethos. She contributes her design expertise to all things Handmade, including website design, jam logos, and more.

You can view her portfolio here.