We’re pleased to announce that ticket sales for the Handmade Network Expo are now open!
The Handmade Network Expo is our first-ever in-person event. We didn’t want to just run another “conference”; after all the years of Abner running Handmade Seattle (and our subsequent split), we weren’t interested in having a typical lineup of tech talks. Our favorite part was always the demos: real Handmade software made by members of the Handmade community. So in that spirit, we decided to make an event that was all demos, all the time.
You can find all the details on the event page, but the short version is that it’s one day in the heart of Vancouver, with a flexible schedule full of small demos, and plenty of opportunities to show off your own work, learn from others, experiment with new ideas, and generally celebrate Handmade software. Tickets are just $100, but space is limited. If you’re in the Pacific Northwest, or just willing to travel, we’d love to see you in person.
And by the way, the ticket system is 100% custom. We depend on Stripe for payment processing, but besides that, the rest was all done by Asaf and myself. This means lower fees and no unpleasant data practices or upsells. It was a lot of fun to build and I hope you find it pleasant to use. (If you do run into any trouble, please contact us at [email protected].)
Our first jam of the year is…
The Handmade Essentials Jam, from April 13-19! The theme: Build software you would use every day.
It’s no secret that we’ve been heavily inspired by File Pilot recently. (I mention it in nearly every news post.) But the reason it sticks with me personally is that it continues, on a daily basis, to make my life better. It is so nice to pop open a program that loads instantly, saves my place from last time, and does every single action with speed and polish. I wish all software was like this.
For the past few years we’ve also focused on “visibility” as the topic for our early-year jam. We have now had two Visibility Jams and one X-ray Jam. While I love that topic, I feel right now that we should just be building more software. We have the Wheel Reinvention Jam every year, yes, but hey, why not just focus on the absolute basics? A community member suggested an “essentials” jam, and I knew immediately that that was the right topic.
Like last year, we’re giving you a whole week. Since we know you all have lives, the expected cadence is to jam in the evening during the week and for the whole day on the weekend. If you only have the weekend free, no worries—just participate as much as you can.
We’ll post more information about this jam in the coming weeks. For the most up-to-date info, join the Discord and make sure you have enabled notifications for the #announcements channel.
Update on our use of Discord
Discord recently announced that they are rolling out age-verification policies worldwide. Certain components of Discord will be restricted to those whom Discord has verified to be adults via one of three methods: one, a mysterious machine learning algorithm; two, a face scan; three, uploading a government ID.
For many in the community this is a bridge too far, and some community members have already left Discord entirely in protest. While Discord pushed back the timeline for these policies, we still expect them to go into effect later this year.
For a long time people have asked when we were going to leave Discord for something better. My answer has always been that we will build ourselves a better platform someday when the need arises, and now seems like the right time to start exploring alternatives.
We’ve already had quite a lot of conversation about this over on the Discord. I think that we have a unique opportunity to build a platform that is not only a great Discord replacement, but that can improve upon Discord for many communities beyond HMN. We have many talented programmers with the capability to build dramatically better chat software, and we also are literally a Network. There are dozens of Discord servers for Handmade and Handmade-adjacent projects and communities; I believe we can therefore overcome some of the challenging network effects of a new platform.
As of yet, there is no official new-Discord initiative, but I and other community members are prototyping bits and pieces. We also have an amazing example to build from: community member aolo2 (Alex) built and open-sourced a Handmade chat program for his previous employer that is stunningly fast and pleasant to use. We’ve set up an instance of it and have been inviting community members to try it out. Alex doesn’t believe it would be wise to use it as is, or even to fork it, due to some design decisions he thinks are inappropriate for our use case. But, the knowledge he gained from building it is absolutely invaluable, and he has been sharing that knowledge freely.
We’d love to see more experiments from the community, and the upcoming jam might be the perfect time. Maybe make a chat client, or a screen-sharing app, or a voice relay, or whatever else seems like a useful slice of Discord! (Or just make a calculator app or something. Can always use those.)
Look forward to more info about the Expo, the jam, and hopefully a Discord replacement in the coming weeks and months. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to these news updates by email too.
-Ben