The Handmade movement, built around the idea of caring about the computer as a machine, and understanding it to make informed decisions about software with respect for the user, continues to excite me. It is always inspiring to see the hard work that the community does, and the ongoing discussions that help drive us all to be better.
I have a few short announcements this month, and of course the usual community showcase section, where I pull out a few highlights from the community Discord's #showcase channel and put them up on display so that everyone can see them.
Announcements
Handmade Seattle
I've been speaking about this for the past few monthly news posts: Handmade Seattle! If you're interested in Handmade software, its merits and disadvantages, and wish to converse with other programmers about such topics, see unheard-of low-level programming projects and their creators in-person, and even see larger industry names discuss software engineering issues in panel form, then Handmade Seattle is for you; it's a conference that provides these exact things! It'll be happening in (shocker) Seattle, Washington on November 16th, 2019. More details can be found at the actual Handmade Seattle website.
If you're interested, head on over to https://handmade-seattle.com and check it out. Tickets will go on sale soon; be sure to join the mailing list!
Wiki: Audio API Examples
Handmade Network community member nakst, with some contributions by Handmade Network staff member insofaras, generously contributed a Wiki page on audio API examples. As I've found, audio can be a bit of an adventure to wrangle on several different operating systems. While the educational series Handmade Hero wonderfully explains how to set up barriers within a project's code to make a clean separation between application code and interaction with native APIs (specifically within the context of games), actually dealing with the native APIs without guidance can be difficult. The new article goes through a few examples with PulseAudio, ALSA, and SDL. If you are interested in the issue, or if you think you're able to contribute, please go check it out
Community Showcase
If you're new around here, you might not know that Handmade Network has a Discord server (that you can join, by the way). In this Discord server, we have a #showcase channel, where folks can share their low-level programming projects so that everyone can see them, discuss them, and help improve them. This month, I've picked out more highlights. Here they are:
shwa's Scripting Language
Community member shwa posted a picture of his own custom scripting language hitting a classic programming language milestone: The ability to compute factorial recursively (while this isn't a great way to compute factorial computationally, it's a nice demonstration of a language's ability to use recursive procedures).
nakst's GDB Frontend
Debuggers are an example of a useful programming tool that can help programmers reason about what their software is doing. A popular one on Linux is gdb, though it unfortunately lacks a GUI to make workflow easier for the programmer.
...Or, should I say lacked? Community member nakst, creator of the Handmade operating-system Essence quickly wrote a gdb front-end to solve this problem. Here's a link to the GitHub if you're interested.
rxi's Sequencer
You didn't think there'd be a month without a video of rxi's sequencer program, did you? Not only is this program written from scratch, each video features usage of the program by showing music made within it! Awesome.
That'll be all for this month. See you folks soon!
Best,
Ryan