The past few months have been a whirlwind. We hosted two jams: the Visibility Jam and the Wheel Reinvention Jam, almost back to back, each with an associated recap show. (We’ll schedule them better next year!)
In between was Handmade Boston, which was a delight—I met so many wonderful people, some of whom even submitted projects for the jam. And throughout it all, we made a slew of website updates, including an overhaul to our Discord integration.
Finally, we have been working with Abner and his team recently to improve the Handmade Cities website. The Handmade Network community scoured the internet to put together this master spreadsheet of all Handmade Cities media since the first conference in 2019. Asaf has mapped out the full sitemap of Abner’s current site and has been working with Devon to prioritize and port the contents of the site to the new one. I’m very excited for the end result, but my excitement has been tempered by recent events—events which provide a stark reminder of why the Handmade ethos is so important.
How stable is your platform?
Here’s the thing: Abner’s site currently runs on WordPress.
Those following the tech sphere will know that the WordPress ecosystem is on fire. Matt Mullenweg, director of the WordPress Foundation and CEO of Automattic, has decided to wage war against a WordPress hosting company called WP Engine. He has publicly called the company "a cancer to WordPress", blocked them from accessing core WordPress infrastructure, and even seized one of their popular plugins. All of this stems from an ostensible infringement on WordPress’s trademark, but the details make it look more like extortion than a trademark dispute.
This is not just drama. Nearly a tenth of Automattic’s employees have already resigned, and I expect more will follow. Mullenweg’s dick-measuring contest with DHH surely won’t help his case. (The post used to say "We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?") WordPress's executive director has resigned, as has most of the company's ecosystem division. What does this mean for the future development of WordPress, or the health of the developer ecosystem surrounding it? Time will tell, but it's a very bad sign for those who have built their businesses on the platform.
The situation is still developing, and information online is constantly being edited or deleted. By the time you read this article, you might need to look up some of the links on the Internet Archive.
Oh wait. That's under attack too.
Until recently, if you wanted to throw together a website, WordPress seemed like a sensible, stable choice. I've personally made multiple WordPress sites that have held up for years, if not decades. But thanks to one man, its future is now in jeopardy, and even the services that would act as a backup are disintegrating too.
A safe haven
This website, on the other hand, is proudly Handmade. The whole codebase is a single application written in Go. It statically links its dependencies. Our data is stored in a Postgres database on the same server. We use a few libraries here and there for syntax highlighting and Markdown rendering, but for the most part we just depend on the standard library HTTP server.
This very post can be authored in Markdown, previewed in real time, and published instantly. It has a full revision history, permalinks, the works. We have a project system, a shadowban system to combat spam, and a robust Discord integration that powers the amazing showcase feeds across the site. The previous admin team did a great job building the foundation, and Asaf and I have rebuilt, extended, and refined it over the past several years. Every link to handmade.network still works, and will always work, for as long as we are around to maintain this site, and when someday we hand this off to another team, they'll have one simple database full of well-organized content.
Was this site hard to build? Kind of. Certainly it took us months to rebuild it from scratch back in 2021, and we've poured many more months into its development since. But this entire site was built by a mere handful of devs in their spare time. It's just a database with posts, threads, and projects, and a bunch of CRUD pages for managing them. Nothing about it is very complicated.
But thanks to our efforts, we are safe. Nobody can take away our platform, because we built our platform. As long as we can connect a computer to the internet, we'll be able to keep this site online.
Self-sufficiency is not selfish
So with Handmade Seattle approaching, we have redoubled our efforts. Being self-sufficient isn't just about protecting ourselves from the Matt Mullenwegs of the world. It's about empowering others to sustain themselves too.
What we have learned from building the Handmade Network website enables us to build websites for others. Abner's will be the first, but as we spin up the Handmade Software Foundation, we expect to make many more, each specifically tailored to each author's needs. There's no reason for a website to be complicated—each one can be straightforward and simple. And if a project author decides they don't want our help any more? They can just take our code and run it themselves.
We hope this is a model for the whole Handmade community: a group of self-sufficient programmers working together to empower each other. By taking the responsibility on ourselves, we can build better software and share what we learn with the world.
The first step to building a new future for the software industry is to build tools for ourselves. This is why we do jams, this is why we do Unwind, this is why we do conferences. Handmade programmers need to lead the way by proving how much a few programmers can do, and how much better your software can be when you build it by hand.
See you all at Handmade Seattle in November.
-Ben