2018 is coming to an end! Over the past month, the community has been doing amazing work as always, and there are additionally some very exciting things happening for the software development community at large.
Community Showcase
Handmade software development is about making quality things from scratch, with minimal dependencies and maximal understanding of the real, physical problems found in software engineering. Handmade Network community members have the opportunity to share some of their own projects developed in this style in the Handmade Network Discord showcase channel. As I did last month, I'd like to show some of these posts, as they remain extremely impressive and interesting.
Community member Martin Cohen wrote a game with his own engine written in C for Ludum Dare 43!
Community member bach showed off a GIF from his team's project Pathway, which displays its engine's impressive lighting capabilities. You can check the game out here.
Community member Chen continues to wow us with his rendering experiments. In this image, he was approximating skylight ambient-occlusion with a low-resolution and heavily-filtered shadow map casted from directly above the scene.
Community member nakst continues to show off his Handmade operating system Essence, with his showcase of many of his operating system's features.
Every day, members post examples of impressive software that is developed without extensive use of libraries and reliance on external technologies. You, too, can show off some work you're doing in the Handmade Network Discord showcase channel. Come join us there!
Jai Wednesdays
Something that many members of the community have been keeping their eyes on has been the development of the language Jai, being developed at Thekla, Inc. under the direction of Jonathan Blow. Jai has proven to have some interesting and unique ideas about how programming can change to be more joyful, and how programmers can be empowered when writing software. It has the philosophy that programmers should be empowered to both write flexible low-level code, but also have the ability to reason at a higher level as well.
Handmade Network founder Abner Coimbre is on the Jai team at Thekla, and has begun streaming what he calls "Jai Wednesdays". These are weekly streams in which Abner showcases Jai and works in Jai to demonstrate its different features and capabilities for Jai testers and those interested in the language. I highly recommend checking it out here. You can also catch them live on Wednesdays around 5:00 PM PST here!
I recommend following Abner on Twitter so you can keep up-to-date with the streaming schedule.
The Next Handmade Network Stream
In accordance with the vote I sent out last month, the next Handmade Network stream will occur on December 23rd at about 12:00 PM PST. I'll put out another announcement post a few days before the stream with a link to the proper Twitch channel and an exact time. I hope to see you there!
That's all I have for now. Take care, everyone, and see you soon!
Ryan