Hello Handmade! 2025 is moving right along, and Handmade projects along with them. But first:
Introducing the X-Ray Jam!
We are doing two jams this year, and the first is a new jam we’re calling the X-Ray Jam. This is a riff on the “visibility” topic from years past that I’m very excited about.
In short: point an X-ray at your software! The purpose of the X-Ray Jam is to explore our systems and learn more about how they work on the inside. It combines the best parts of the Visibility and Learning jams into one. Here’s the details:
- When: June 9-15, 2025
- Topic: X-ray some program and figure out what's happening inside.
- You submit: A program or tool, like previous years, or a blog post, like in the Learning Jam.
For example, maybe you'd build a program to record and replay all the window messages received by your program. Or you'd investigate why the Windows 11 right-click menu is so slow to open. (What is it doing?!) Or perhaps you could hack up a compiler to log information about various decisions it makes or heuristics it uses. The topic is open to whatever inspires your curiosity.
Note that this jam is a week long, just like the Wheel Reinvention Jam. After some discussion and reflection, we’ve come to feel that one week is the ideal amount of time for our jams—enough time to explore a new topic, get confused, iterate a bit, and put it all together for submission. The general expectation would be: during the week, work in the evenings, and on the weekend, spend the whole day jamming.
We’re still working on the home page for the jam, but hope to have it up fairly soon. We’re also working on expanding the blog post capabilities of the website to make the submission experience more pleasant. Stay tuned.
Orca is coming along…
Martin recently posted a new update over on the Orca website, with some exciting updates about the project’s progress. Most notably, Martin has been hard at work on the debugging experience, and has implemented both source-level and bytecode-level debugging.
Not only will this make for an amazing development experience, but in a funny twist of fate, Orca may already have one of the most sophisticated WebAssembly debuggers on the market. Besides that, multiple community contributors have made great progress on the standard UI library and the build system. Go give it a read.
If you want a good programming podcast…
Last month we announced that Unwind is back. It is, I promise—we have another episode recorded—but unfortunately our previous editor wasn’t available and we have yet to find another. If you know a podcast editor, please send them our way (via [email protected]).
BUT, luckily, Łukasz of the Wookash Podcast has been interviewing just about everyone the Handmade community could ever want to hear from. Since starting up the podcast just last year, Łukasz has interviewed: Casey (of Handmade Hero fame, obviously), Ginger Bill (creator of Odin), Ramon Santamaria (creator of Raylib), Ted Bendixson (creator of Mooselutions, in two separate episodes!), and many other programmers well loved by the Handmade community.
And in fact, Vjekoslav (creator of File Pilot) will be on the podcast this Saturday! Enjoy this teaser, and go subscribe to the Wookash Podcast on YouTube to catch the episode when it goes live.
A leadership update
Sadly I must close out this news post with some less happy news: Colin Davidson has chosen to step down from his position as admin, in order to focus on various life matters. Don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere—he’ll still be part of the community, and for that I am very grateful. He also remains the treasurer of the Handmade Software Foundation, a role which exposes him to much less Discord drama 😛
So, for the time being, Asaf and I are running this thing ourselves. We should be able to get by, but as we ramp up the Foundation and continue to run various community events, we will be looking for others to help us out. Luckily, we are surrounded by talented, thoughtful, capable programmers from all walks of life, so I’m confident that we’ll be able to find exactly the people we need for our community initiatives to succeed.
Until next time!
-Ben