Happy fall to everyone in Handmade! I hope you had a wonderful summer, and that you spent the perfect amount of your summer writing amazing Handmade software. Ideally you were actually outside enjoying the sun and the air while doing this, and ideally you climbed a mountain or jumped in a lake afterward—but if this is wishful thinking, then I hope you at least have some cool software to show for it.
Fall is a wonderful season for Handmade, because it means that we get to do another Wheel Reinvention Jam. And this is our fifth annual WRJ!
For me, the Wheel Reinvention Jam is one of the most important things we do as a community, because it reminds us that wheels do need to be reinvented, and that even the most ambitious projects need to start somewhere. I wrote this on the jam page, but wheel reinvention is in the very DNA of the Handmade community. It is also the value most commonly under fire from the rest of the software industry. Low-level programming—sure, that's important, that makes sense. But reinventing the wheel? How dare you? Don't you know how many smart people made those wheels??
My dream is to someday see a Wheel Reinvention Jam project grow and mature into a real product that changes expectations in the software industry. Handmade software can easily do that—just look at File Pilot or JangaFX. Maybe one of this year's projects will get there someday!
Anyway, I hope you join us in just a few short weeks. As usual, the jam is one week long, from Monday, September 22 to Sunday, September 28. All the details can be found on the jam's home page.
In other news, we are seeing an enormous surge in Handmade content right now—so much that I can't even keep up with it myself! Here are the big ones I'm aware of:
- The Better Software Conference in July was a smashing success, especially for a first-time conference. Their recordings are exceptionally well done and can be found on their YouTube channel.
- Nic Barker, best known for the Clay layout library for C, is releasing a programming fundamentals course called The Simple Joy of Programming. Unlike most programming courses, it builds its way up from assembly while still remaining extremely beginner-friendly. It is an absolute delight and I recommend subscribing to his Patreon for access.
- The Wookash Podcast continues to bring on amazing guests. Where else can you find a two hour long interview with Jimmy Lefevre about a Handmade replacement for Harfbuzz? Or a five hour long interview with Sean Barrett about software rendering?
- Casey himself is now a regular guest on The Standup, a show by popular programming content creator The Primeagen. It is a wonderful and very unserious thing, but also, Ryan Fleury was also just on the show to talk about the RAD Debugger, which is one of the most impressive pieces of Handmade software being developed today.
It's genuinely amazing to see so much of this content being put out into the world right now, and how much enthusiasm there seems to be for it. I know it will make a big impact on a lot of people!
Also, #project-showcase on the Discord is just crazy right now. Voxel engines, blog posts for SoME, indie games, videos on CPU microarchitecture, finger drumming trainers...this community is amazing as always. I never know what I'm going to see when I click into #project-showcase, but I'm always happy when I do.
There's one last thing I wanted to talk about: Abner Coimbre recently announced that he is shutting down his conferences. This means that Handmade Boston and Handmade Seattle are no more.
This was the right decision on Abner's part. Since we formally separated ourselves from Abner earlier this year, things have seemingly only gotten worse over there. His announcement post above only confirmed our decision to split, as the original version of the post was extraordinarily unprofessional. You can find my thoughts (and others') on the Discord in #network-meta if you prefer, but at this point, what matters is simply that Abner's conferences are over.
The obvious question that many in the community have been asking is: will the Handmade Network run its own event in 2026? The answer is: hopefully yes! At this stage, we are seriously considering it, looking into cities and venues, and discussing what such an event should look like. It will certainly look very different from a mainstream tech conference, for many reasons that I'll get into another time.
I hope to have more to announce soon. We want to make sure that this event is by the Handmade community, for the Handmade community, and a celebration of everything we stand for. And thankfully, the Handmade community is thriving. I'm glad to be a part of it as we go into Handmade's second decade.
See you all in a few weeks for the jam, and stay tuned for more news this fall!
-Ben