[News] Handmade Efforts Growing

Abner Coimbre —
Hello Handmade Community!

abnercoimbre
All exciting Handmade news will be arriving shortly, no later than July 4th.

Did I say no later than July 4th? I meant no later than the day after said American celebratory holiday. Easy mistake. (I do apologize, though. Thank you for your patience and support)

Handmade Dev Site Released

We have made a landing page for Handmade Dev—the parent organization behind this network and the show. Handmade Network is being managed by the Handmade Dev Team, and we've always wanted a proper page for the organization and now we have it. In addition, members of the community have always been intrigued about how it all started, so we plan to add a History page here once we have some extra time. In the meantime, we wrote about our origins informally not long ago.

Handmade Dev Show Released

We've released a proper home for the Handmade Dev Show. Visit handmadedev.show and follow the news on this site for the upcoming interviews. We also have a site-wide RSS feed here to help you spot announcements. There is also our @handmade_net Twitter account if you're always in that part of the social media world.

Credit to the team for helping me get the site outside of the prototype stage, as well as AsafGartner and Insofaras for their contributions.

Quick Background

If you don't know about the show, it began in 2016, and is comprised primarily of interviews that, to the best of the team's knowledge, will help the community dig into the mindset of interesting programmers. Most guests are well-known low-level programmers, but we've had higher-level developers who care about Handmade and leverage the engines or frameworks they use in fascinating ways as they exercise more control over them.

It's important we expand our viewpoints and listen to the critics, so I'm up for interviewing naysayers.

Archived Interviews should look like Episode 1

Take a look at the pilot



Notice how the interview is fully annotated with timestamps, references, and a link to the episode thread (containing a summary, press material, and an opportunity for Handmade users to comment: whether on the thread or by selecting "Contact").

Our plans is for all interviews to follow this format, and indeed, some episodes are already fully-annotated and we are working so that every single one of them follows the Episode 1 format. It's quite a bit of work even if it doesn't look like it. The "player" surrounding the embedded YouTube video is still waiting to have more features added to it, an effort lead by Miblo. Once again I thank the collaboration of AsafGartner, Miblo, and Insofaras for the player's inception.

We believe this type of archiving will be important for the educational value we want Handmade to provide (more on this front later).

GPU Font Rendering Stream (feat. Ripcord)

The latest Handmade Dev Show had Demetri Spanos (an elusive intellectual who dwells on our Handmade Discord chat), and Mr. Barrett AKA nothings. The discussion centered around GPU Font Rendering and how far it has come. The audio setup was particularly terrible that night, and I do apologize, but the content in there should still hopefully be golden.



We also pre-streamed the development of Ripcord, a modern native desktop chat client. I'll tease you no more so you check the stream out yourself!

Handmade Education Continues

Educational efforts has been our primary focus this year, and if you've missed the podcast on it, I suggest you take a listen.

Our beta testers are currently in the heat of testing out content. I am now willing to take on a second batch, so e-mail me at [email protected] or [email protected] if you wish to volunteer and shape the way Handmade education will look like. This is especially recommended for those who want to take a sneak peek at things but haven't been able to. Who knew, writing lessons with authors around the world takes a long time.

Matrix Server Testing

You may have been missing my Fractal Friday streams, but these streams are showcasing a project that evolved from my Ave software project last year (which was an e-mail client). It is a modern native desktop chat client, and I compare and contrast my early prototype with the more mature Ripcord (see the GPU Font Rendering pre-stream).

This side project has been to personally explore Matrix, an open standard to implement modern chat clients (think typing events, read events, and other things you see from FB Messenger, Discord, and Slack) with bridges to IRC, Discord, or Slack. The team is currently using Matrix internally and developing the policies that could govern the self-hosting of a modern chat server. Ideally we will uphold our MatterMost goals and unite the Discord / IRC communities once again.

Expect more updates on this front.

NASA Programming Philosophy

I am working on this live Twitch lecture more fruitfully now that I've released handmadedev.show. The lecture is slated to happen sometime this month. As always, I'll post any announcements here and on Twitter.

If you miss it, it will live on (you guessed it) the show's page :)

Engage with us!

We hope you engage with the community by posting more on our threads, joining our chats, or supporting us on Patreon with any dollar amount. This organization means the world to us, and we hope you find it valuable too!

Yours,
Abner
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Comments

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Simon Anciaux
Thanks for the news.

I'm a bit confused: why isn't handmadedev.org a simple page on handmade.network ? The only information it contains is "Parent organisation to Handmade.Network", the rest are just links to handmade.network. And I suppose that people that want to know who is behind HMN mostly come from HMN. And why isn't handmadedev.show just a project on handmade network ? It would be easier, in my opinion, if all the informations were at the same place.

What happens to the forums and blogs of projects that were removed from HMN. Is there a way to get access to them (read only) ? It also maybe a good idea to announce that they were removed. I was still waiting for AVE.

And what about TracerX that never got any update ?
Mikael Johansson
I am confused to... What is it you do on handmadedev.org that you cant do here?
Abner Coimbre
Edited by Abner Coimbre on
Good questions so let's have a crack at 'em.

  • Handmade Dev is a static landing page but will, eventually, be a full-blown website. HMN is the team's biggest endeavor and shall remain so. However, just as Canonical delivers Ubuntu, Handmade Dev delivers Handmade Network. We're a landing page right now, but with it we're alerting you to where the network's meta information will live.

  • The projects you can't see any more were hidden at the author's request when we inquired their status or were considered stale. Projects listed are now active ones following the Monthly Updates, and those you can't see any more are inactive (or in hiatus). I am okay with releasing a list of those that were hidden, and have a process in place to announce inactive projects. I've added this to our agenda. This could be further remedied by implementing a lifecycle for projects...

    • On this second bullet point you could maybe see another reason for Handmade Dev. We can document meeting notes, plans, and discussion about managing the network without actually cluttering the network.

  • Evolving the Ave codebase into Fractal should have been properly announced, although I did discuss it on the chats and Twitch streams at length. I agree that all the projects that were hidden, including mine, should have been mentioned on the site. Like I've said I'm taking this issue to the meeting.

    • As for TracerX, it should have also been hidden (indeed now it is), since at the moment, we are only allowing active projects to live on the network. Could change with the idea of lifecycles.

    Hope this reply was helpful? Let me know if anything.
    Abner Coimbre
    Edited by Abner Coimbre on
    I forgot to address the handmadedev.show question.

    Since I wrote the site to simply serve static content, we can develop the system on a separate codebase until it's ready to integrate on HMN. The domain could very well resolve to handmade.network/show one day.
    Matt Mascarenhas
    Interesting question about accessing (read-only?) the forums and blogs of projects that were removed. The notion of a project lifecycle alluded to by Abner will probably help matters in that projects need not necessarily be removed in their entirety (by which I mean made inaccessible) at all, but only be removed from project listings. So the listings will end up consisting of active projects, while the inactive ones will remain accessible provided you know their URL.

    Really heartening for me to see the new annotation system in action here. Definitely worth stressing that this is a super pre-release version, that needed way more stuff doing on Abner's part to deploy it than I'd want from an actual release (indeed, I'd barely touched the deployment side of it before Abner asked me (clamoured?!) for the player for https://handmadedev.show). If you fancy seeing what's still to come, you can check out the repo and, once I'm finally off this failing laptop and on a new desktop system, follow development live on stream.
    Simon Anciaux
    @abnercoimbre: Thanks for the clarifications. I think that making announcement in a stream (e.g. for AVE) isn't "user friendly" because it's hard to find information afterward (unless the streams are annotated) and it generally takes a lot of time. I follow several projects on the site, but I can't and don't want to spent time watching all streams. So a short post or a small organized video seems more effective for me.

    @miblo: If you need to know the URL to go back to a hidden project it's not that helpful. Maybe they should be listed in an "Archived" page ?
    Abner Coimbre
    Yeah we've come to agree: Any announcement, no matter how big or small, should not be stream-only. We'll make sure it doesn't occur again. As an aside all of my official streams will end up annotated, and at a faster rate once we got this whole annotation system nailed down.
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