Hello everyone! It's been a busy couple months around the network and we've got lots of exciting news to share.


The podcast is back!

After a bit of a hiatus, the Handmade Network Podcast is back! We're now publishing new episodes on a monthly basis, with each new episode coming out around the first of each month.

Our latest episode is an interview with Cancel, most widely known for Ripcord, an alternative Discord and Slack client that is written directly for native platforms. We're so excited and honored to have Cancel as a guest, so give the full interview a listen!

As always, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or directly to the feed via your favorite podcast app.


Handmade Seattle 2021

We are very excited to share that Handmade Seattle is returning for its third year! After one event in person and another event online, the conference will this year be a hybrid of the two, streaming live from the Seattle Center.

Abner is working incredibly hard to make sure that both in-person and online attendees get a rich conference experience. As with last year, all attendees will get access to a private chat server for the duration of the conference, and this year, all Q&A questions will be asked through the chat. I personally am very excited about this—not only will speakers be able to pick the questions they find most valuable, but it puts online and in-person attendees on equal footing, and makes sure I don't have to hear someone's life story before they ask a question 😅

Early bird tickets for both tracks (with a 20% discount) go on sale May 15th. As always, Abner takes no corporate sponsorships for this conference and remains truly independent. This conference is a labor of love, and I strongly encourage you to support Abner and help the conference grow.

You can read Abner's full announcement post for more details—and don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter!

(Also, if you have a mature project you're willing to speak about, or any project you'd like to demo, consider reaching out to Abner about a speaker or demo slot at the conference!)


Around the network

Lots of wonderful things have been happening that I'd love for you to check out:

  • Abner was interviewed on Zig Showtime, where he introduced the Zig community to the Handmade community, and dug into his history as a programmer, his time at Thekla, his personal values, and what he's working on now. Watch the whole thing here.

    And speaking of Zig Showtime...

  • The host of Zig Showtime, Loris Cro, gave us a nice shout-out in this wonderful article about the state of open-source, and software in general. Loris has also been at several of our weekly coffee chats on Discord, and always brings a fresh perspective to the community.

    And speaking of weekly coffee chats...

  • We are doing weekly coffee chats on Discord! Grab your hot beverage of choice and join us for an hour or two (or three?) of random conversation. Right now the schedule is Thursdays and Saturdays at 10am PDT (5pm UTC), but for up-to-date times, follow the announcements channel on Discord.

    And speaking of Miblo... 👀

  • You may be familiar with Miblo, the founding community member who tirelessly maintains the Handmade Hero annotated episode guide. What you may not know is that he is now offering his video annotation services for any videos you want!

    Miblo's annotations elevate Handmade Hero from a great video series to an invaluable resource on game development, and now he can do the same for you. Go on, hire him.

    And speaking of wonderful people and projects...

  • Ramón Santamaría of Raylib has received the Google Open Source Peer Bonus Award again this year! You can read the announcement post here. It's wonderful to see handmade projects getting this level of recognition, and Ray is a very deserving recipient.

    Also, if you haven't seen Ray's talk from last year's Handmade Seattle, check it out!



And finally, some housekeeping

We've been wanting for a long time to make the network's website open-source. Not only would we love for the community to be able to contribute, but we want the network website to be a shining example of how web development can be done - no bulky frameworks, no crazy abstractions, just good simple server design.

Unfortunately, the old codebase has some issues that prevent us from open-sourcing just yet. But we're well into a cleanup and rewrite effort that should leave us in a great spot for future development.

We have big plans for the website, some of which you've seen in the recent community showcase integration. This is a significant step toward making those plans a reality. To follow along with this effort, follow me on Twitch.


Until next time!

Thank you all for being such a wonderful community. See you around the website and Discord, and I'll see you again in the next news post!