Dear Handmade Reader,

This is a significant month for the Handmade Dev team! It marks the end of the website's beta; if you find any bugs with our stable site, report them ASAP.

At the start of this year, we made it a priority to wrap up essential features to complete v1, and the team performed admirably and worked doubly hard to finish on time. Most noticeable is the final look-and-feel of the site, but very important security / backend measures were implemented too. In this blog post, we outline what was done to consider the site stable, as well as some of the things that might come for v2.0. If you like how things are progressing, consider supporting us on Patreon. We wouldn't be here without your support, and we unfortunately lost some pledges (as it happens at the start of every year); consider helping us out!

Wrapping up backend work

I'll let Jeroen van Rijn, our lead

Happy New Year!

With 2016 behind us, I want to lay out the Big Picture for Handmade Network 2017. The core activities such as hosting software projects, doing the Handmade Dev Show, and engaging in the forums will not go away; we're merely expanding on what we do. Let's actually start off with things we've completed in just this first week of January:

Submit a Project

This was developed by our very own chronaldragon, so I'll let him discuss the new feature:

[quote]On Handmade Network, one of our goals has been to build a virtual space that allows the breadth of software development occurring in our community to shine forth. Until this point, access to that space has been limited by an opaque and somewhat inaccessible submission process that involved individual correspondence with a member of the staff and an ad-hoc set of criteria that fluctuated as our own notions of what our platform should be have changed.

Happy Holidays!

It is now freezing cold for many users this December, but the Handmade online community remains warm and cozy (at least I'd like to think so!) Let's see what's been happening.

TheHappieCat Interview

A talented developer, Anne, will be with me on The Handmade Dev Show live on Twitch this Saturday at 5PM EST. Please join in!

EDIT: Post your questions for TheHappieCat here :)

Handmade Con 2016

I still ask people to post their pictures here (hundreds of you took lots; don't be shy!). It was a great conference and the talks will be uploaded to YouTube at some point.

Please be aware that Casey Muratori has permanently disabled Twitch Auto-Saves of his broa

Code of Conduct v1.0

Communication Guidelines v1.0

EDIT: Commenting period now closed.

This Sunday at 5:00PM EST I will be programming live on twitch.tv/abnercoimbre as well as making important Handmade Network announcements. I hope you may join me then.

-Abner

Greetings, everyone,

It's no secret that the current site style suffers from a few issues (slow repaint time in some browsers, visually distracting backgrounds, and a fair share of strange behaviour/bugs with resizing). We've been hinting at a redesign in the works for a while, and though we are still waiting on consultation in terms of design direction for that, I have decided to go ahead and start iterating on the design now rather than put off changes much longer.

Starting tomorrow, I will be pushing design iterations to the site, live. Comments, suggestions, and tips should be posted to the Feedback forum, which I'll be monitoring as I work on the design. We've opted to do it this way rather than deploy the iterated design to a subset of users because of two main considerations. [ol] [li]We don't yet have infrastructure in place to deploy alternate versions of the entire site to certain users or over a different URL/port.

The team and I have looked at how to provide an enriching chat experience for our existing users (and incoming ones). I found many competing services, each with their tradeoffs, and we've chosen MatterMost

Why Mattermost?

It didn't have to be this one; anything that met the following five criteria would've worked:

I surveyed the handmade community, and these are the core desires that bubbled to the surface. Stable services like Slack, Gitter, [url=https://rocket.chat/]rocket.chat[/url

Dear reader,

With Hurricane Matthew threatening my state and having to stabilize again afterwards, October has been terrifying even before Halloween. Thankfully we are good to go; the team and I met this past Thursday and our news await!

Handmade Network on the News

You may have seen Handmade Network on the news, with the piece still on their front page. We thank them, and what I can say confidently is the Handmade Dev Team will continue its prime directive to support personal handmade software projects. If you're interested in posting your work without becoming an official project, go here. If you feel ready to become a proper project, e-mail us at [email protected]

[center][img]http://imageshack.com/a/i

Fellow programmer,

As you saw from my Monday tweet, we Floridians survived the hurricane. It was rough, but not nearly as catastrophic as predicted. This week I'm getting back in the groove of things.

We're having a meeting this Sunday, after which I'll post the monthly site news (albeit a couple weeks late). See you soon!

I live near Orlando, Florida and hurricane Matthew approaches. My friends were already evacuated and I may be next. Expect the Handmade Dev Monthly after this all passes. Sorry!

I hope everyone's enjoying the start of the spooky month. Expect the Handmade Dev Monthly News in the coming days. Keep programming, project owners! And to those contributing to the site with pledges, written content, or even just lurking, we wouldn't exist without you :-)

Space exploration, you say?

Abner and Andrew recently wrote space exploration themed blog posts, and as such I couldn't really stay behind. Thankfully I'd already planned to do a write up on a new feature.

As you may have noticed, a long-awaited feature has recently emerged: the indication of whether or not a thread contains new posts. You might think this a trivial feature to add, but you'd be mistaken. Let me take you through the considerations, (some of) the possible ways to do it, and the way I ended up implementing it and why I did it this way.

So, without much further ado I explore the problem space in this Behind the Scenes post, hopefully the first of many. A word of warning, though: it's 14.5kB worth of text and there's no illustrations, yet.

First, let's state the problem so that we might explore its space.

T

Hey folks, Andrew here. Gonna depart a bit from our usual site updates and do a longer form post. Hold onto your hats!

If you're a regular in the Handmade community, you might have noticed I've been a bit less active over the last few months. And if you follow me or abner on Twitter, you probably got a glimpse at what I was doing in that time. So I'll confirm right now, all the stories are true -- I was down in Florida, working at an internship for NASA.

Let me give you a little background on NASA's internship programs. There are One Stop Shopping Initiative (OSSI) opportunities, and there are Pathways opportunities. OSSI internships are what you might think of as a more typical internship, lasting for a semester or summer (or occasionally a whole year), where you work in one

Greetings community,

Jeroen has done amazing work, as well as the rest of the team. The new projects have gained some traction as well. Let's go in-depth as to what's been happening.

Site Improvements & Future Plans

• Post Previews

• Context posts, showing you the forum or blog post you're replying to and up to 4 other older and newer posts

• Read/Unread status

• Blogs' new post button and pagination are now more conveniently located.

• Blog posts can now be quoted.

• Aesthetic improvement on quote tags.

• Sort posts on HMN landing page by date only.

• Registration verification mistakenly disallowed some characters in a name that were accepted when signing up.

• Nested quote tags didn't work.

• A regression that stripped certain characters from post titles.

• BBcode

We're excited to give you the news from the Handmade Dev Team this month. They should be posted sometime tonight (EDT).

At this point, each project owner should have received an e-mail from me about the upcoming roll-out of handmade gitlab accounts. Your login credentials should be the same as the one you use here, and they will be integrated in the project page so visitors can quickly access it just like with your Patreon!

Our goal is to provide the whole community access to git.handmade.network so everyone can follow along all of the open-source goodness on the same site.

Lastly, if you are a regular member who wants a repo with us, e-mail me at [email protected]. Stay tuned for more updates.

-Abner

Hi all,

I think we can count ourselves lucky in having only seen around 10 spams so far in the lifetime of this site. For some peculiar reason only known to spammers, our little community is held to be part of the demographic eagerly in search of new Nike sneakers. Hardly Handmade* merchandise, as I think you'll agree.

Thoughtful as they are, these spams usually come in pairs: a post in English and one in French. Just like sneakers if you will. I'll leave it to the reader to determine which of the two languages is the left and the right shoe.

Nevertheless, as site admins we don't feel these shoes fit. For that reason we're working on a patently obvious system and a method ;-) to combat these nuisance posts. First I'll outline what this will look like initially, then I'll outline how we want to improve on this going forward. Lastly there's a few questions to project owners and the community at large.

Sometime soon, hopefully next week, posts will gain a new button letting

Handmade Community!

Roughly a year ago, we sprang to life as a result of being inspired by Handmade Hero. Even though The Handmade Dev Show has been in hiatus, it should be back on the air nearing the end of this month, especially since we need to celebrate Handmade Dev's 1-year anniversary! Stay tuned for more updates on Twitter.

On with the news.

Improvements to Site

Completed

o You no longer lose a post if no title is set o Thread titles are updated when editing original post o Fixed wrong link in breadcrumb when editing or replying o Quote button would sometimes not work o Quoted text now links to original post o Enabled some nested quotes functionality o Better redirects from old Handmade Hero forums

As we all know, NASA retired the shuttle, and so Kennedy has been transforming into a commercial spaceport, partnering with private space companies to lease the land, "rent" launch pads, and provide launch operations support. The workforce model has been updated too, allowing us civil servants to shift around different jobs (that we prove we're qualified for) rather than being tied to a specific role. These recent endeavors have changed the face of NASA here on Florida. The organization and its day-to-day operations is not the only thing transforming—buildings and launch pads are getting their share of facelifts, and that includes our main headquarters building. Let’s have a look at the one we have right now:

Fig. 1 - Current Kennedy HQ

As you can see, old bricks are not the future, and the architects knew this. After apparently watching some good scifi movies, a new concept for the central building emerged.

[img]http://i.imgur.co

I've gotten pokes from viewers asking about the Handmade Dev Show. It's awesome to have awesome viewers, thank you for that. There's an uncomfortable but necessary transition happening in my life, and in the spirit of ongoing transparency (which was further fostered by approaching strangers with #PokemonGo), my story follows:

This summer of 2016 is an important rotation at work because I have to fulfill many obligations by the end of it. I've been away from school for a couple years, pursuing internships until getting into the NASA co-op program. Now I need to return (Monday, August 22nd) for a year and finish my degree so that full-time conversion can occur. Before returning, there are panels, showcases, and infamous government forms to fill out, as well as performance reviews. That's the reason I haven't been streaming... I'm exhausted by the weekends. In addition, the one and only [url=https://handmade.network/m/ChronalDragon]Andre

Public Beta

Yes folks, it continues. I always joke that the only time you can be sure a deadline is met by Handmade Dev is if there's a countdown timer behind it (because that is how we launched the beta site by a set date). It will continue to be that way, because we don't want to mess this up.

Incidentally, at the staff meeting our lead developer has said it's a pretty safe bet the bugs will be dwindling to the point of officially moving to a stable version by the end of this month. Take that with a grain of salt, but his level of certainty was inspiring.

New Projects to be Added Tomorrow

Yes folks. Approved projects will be coming in by the end of July 7th, 2016! We generally expect all the new projects to provide monthly updates, and I will disclose what that means in details with the project owners. I ask the community to please support these new handmade projects with feedback and support, as w