Hi all,
I'm new to these forums and this community, but I have been following for a while. I've watched the first 50 or so episodes of Handmade Hero, and I greatly enjoyed Handmade Con last year. However despite that, and having read the Handmade Manifesto and Abner Coimbre's #001 news bulletin, I'm still fairly unsure what exactly a handmade dev is. I feel sure this conversion must have been had before, but I looked through the threads on the forum and I didn't spot anything. However as I say, I'm new around here, so if I'm missing something obvious, please just point me over to it.
With that said, I do have a few questions about handmade development and what it entails, and I wonder if anyone in the community here could help me understand what it means? For one thing, I'm having trouble discerning which aspects of handmade projects make them "handmade" and which are purely co-incidental. As an example, Handmade Hero is developed in C without any libraries or build system. My impression from the show was that this was to facilitate education, rather than as a preferred way of developing software in general, but I notice a lot of the projects here seem to follow suit. How important are these kind of traits to handmade development?
More personally, I was attracted to the handmade manifesto by, among other things, the feeling that a lot of software development is like wading through a thick treacle of ungainly legacy code, or trying to use those 18 square pegs the last programmer left on his desk before he left to fill the round hole letting water into your sinking ship. However I'm conscious that there are many aspects of my programming style which seem (at least from the outside) to fall well outside of the norms of this community. For example, I practice OOP, and to a lesser extent TDD. I use a lot of modern C++ in my development, as well as higher level languages like Python. I use libraries all the time, and build systems, and IDEs. And most importantly perhaps, despite my frustrations, I don't think the majority of existing software is terrible and ought to be scrapped and rebuilt. I suppose what I'm driving at here is how much room there is for programmers such as myself within this community? The last thing I want is to just come in here and piss everyone off!
I have plenty of other questions about handmade development, but I think I'll leave it at that for the moment.
TLDL; can anyone explain to a total newcomer what handmade development really entails?
Many thanks in advance.