I apologize for the extended period of silence. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy. I've gathered a number of very exciting announcements!
HMN Lisp Jam
Recently, on the Handmade Network Discord, we've been having some discussions about metaprogramming and using code as data. It should come to no surprise to those familiar with the topic that Lisp has come up. Lisp offers tools for this idea to a much stronger degree than, say, C. Treating code like ordinary data is an immensely powerful technique that is helpful even when doing C programming, and allows one to compress ideas in their code down to a very small area, allowing for faster iteration, smarter features, and less maintenance.
To provide an opportunity for the community to gather around, collaborate, and develop in this area, we are hosting a Lisp Jam! This Lisp Jam will be taking place this week, beginning tomorrow (Monday, July 6th). It will last for 1 week, ending on Sunday, July 13th.
We've gathered a list of topics that participants can use to direct their jam projects:
- Make a Lisp variant
- Develop interesting metaprogramming experiments with Lisp
- Make an interesting product with Lisp
- Any combination of the above
We will be taking up the #jams channel in the Handmade Network Discord to collaborate and discuss as we work on our projects.
Source code sharing is encouraged but not required by jam participants. Writeups are also encouraged but not required. We'll be selecting a few jam projects to showcase once the jam is over, but for a project to be showcased, we'd like it to have at least a writeup or source code sharing (at least one is necessary to be showcased).
We really encourage jam participants to hop onto the Discord server to communicate while the jam occurs and to submit jam projects for showcase, but in any case we will be taking Lisp showcase submissions at [email protected] also.
Here is a list of platform layers, frameworks, or libraries we've gathered that may be helpful in getting a visual program up and running to have your Lisp run on top of (if you'd like your own platform layer added to this list, let me know!):
I am so excited to see what everyone comes up with!
Handmade Seattle 2020
Handmade Seattle 2020 has been announced! It will be a completely online two-day event with podcasts, streams, lectures, interviews, and more. Much of the conference's content will be available for free, but buying a ticket gets special perks (and, of course, helps support the conference). Handmade Seattle 2019 was an amazing experience, and it is great to see that Abner (Handmade Network founder) is continuing the tradition.
Check out the conference website here!
Allen's "Looking At" Streams
Allen Webster, creator and maintainer of 4coder, has started doing streams that check out Handmade projects, show the creators of the projects live/real-time feedback and usage of their programs, and showcasing the work of the project creators. The first stream's VOD is below, which shows Allen checking out a visual programming project named "Vizzcode". If you'd like your project checked out by Allen on stream, hop on the Handmade Network Discord and ping or DM him at @Allen4th.
Podcast Episodes 2-5 Live
The podcast has a few new episodes! Check them out here.
Community Showcase
As always, I've gathered a few highlights from the #project-showcase channel on the Handmade Network Discord server. Keep in mind that, per usual, I cannot gather all possible showcase posts, so please go to the server and check them all out for yourself!
Chen's Path-Traced SDF-defined Worlds
Chen showed off his project where the world is defined by SDFs, or signed-distance-functions. This allows for interesting consequences not easily possible with traditionally-defined worlds; for example, the presence of theoretically-infinite spheres.
rxi's TileKit
rxi is known throughout Handmade Network for being a brilliant designer, a skilled programmer, and a talented musician. He recently released his TileKit tool, which he has been showcasing for months; it is a tile-map editing tool with built-in support for autotiling and entities. You can check out TileKit here.
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azmr's WhiteBox
azmr, creator of WhiteBox project (a live code debugger/prebugger/data-visualizer that aims to help programmers understand their code in realtime), shared some progress on WhiteBox.
"The code in the box in the top right is providing arguments for and calling the code in the editor to the left. The bottom-right section is a mutant debugger-like data-tree. The values highlighted red are those that changed just before the "breakpoint" on the position of the cursor. There are 2 values for the last 3 elements of array because both are seen at some point in the run when the instruction pointer reaches the cursor."
Closing Remarks
That's all for now. I am looking forward to the work you all continue to do, and the projects that you make for the Lisp jam! Take it easy and stay safe!
Ryan
