I started watching handmade hero 4 years ago. I think I've learned more watching handmade hero streams than attending computer science college :D

a year later i started working for my current employer (medical imagery and dentistry stuff) where i worked on a big C++ codebase, with OOP, heavy inheritance, and design patterns, the whole shabang. it was very hard to reason about, very slow to develop and compile, and very slow in runtime as well

I started introducing the things I've learned from handmade hero and fast forward a couple of years. now we have mostly C style codebase which compiles from scratch in 2 minutes instead of 35 minutes

I started to talk about what we did to some of my friends in other companies and they were impressed by the simplicity and effectiveness of this style and started to introduce it in their work, we also started to meetup in late 2018

here's a picture from one of the meetups

Kudos for this initiative!

I have added my self into the spread sheet, don't know of anyone in my city following Handmade hero series, nor in the forum, but am open to start the community in my area.

I started using Granny3D and actually met Muratori (around the 2014 at GDC, he will likely remember the better that year).

Thanks for sharing and hoping the community gets more connected.

Yeah, I'd be more than happy to set up a chapter in Salt Lake City, I already have a few people I think would enjoy participating.

Just finished Handmade Detroit Gathering #2!

This one was a virtual meetup because of, ya know.. the pandemic..



Stay safe friends.


We used jitsi.org which I really recommend, as it doesn't require you to create a login or download anything on your laptop, and you can also call in via phone (if you're using a mobile device and it dies or something).

Discoveries:
Once people get going demoing their project and showing off code, it takes about 15-30 minutes per person. Fortunately we only have 3 people in our group, we'd definitely need to put a cap on it or limit the people sharing if we went much bigger than that.

We identified a bunch of different things that people can do at the meeting:

• Demo something you’re working on
• Bring a problem & ask for input
• Teach us how something works
• Deep dive on a particular coding practice you find yourself using.
• Just hang out, grab a beverage, and geek out with us.

Topics:

• Core war - Multiplayer Programming game
• littleman - Simple computer
• Tis-100 - Single player programming game
• hackerone - Bug Bounty
• A Slow Year - An Atari game by Ian Bogost
• Commodore 64
• Handmade Network Library - Collision Detection

Question we pondered:
• Learning vs. Length of Time - How/when do you decide between diving deep into something to make it the best you can make it vs. getting it working and moving on?

At the end, we set up a new date, and talked about what each of us were going to work on next.. Feels like a nice bit of accountability to make sure too much time doesn't slip away without making progress.

So all in all, was a good gathering!

Question for the thread:
Does anyone here have any ideas of what to do to make these gatherings as valuable with 5+ people? I can see how that would definitely be different logistically and keeping everyone engaged..

The link to jitsi should be https://jitsi.org/ I believe.

subtext
Does anyone here have any ideas of what to do to make these gatherings as valuable with 5+ people? I can see how that would definitely be different logistically and keeping everyone engaged..

Is there a reason to grow to more than 5 persons ? I feel (my opinion, not an objective observation) that often by growing a group to much you might loose more than you gain. The benefit of more people seems to be that you have a better chance to have someone knowledgeable about a particular thing, but maybe you can keep a small group and invite an "expert" on a particular meeting when necessary where you'd discuss the expert's field ?

An idea would be to spit the session in groups that would work on a particular task/issue/discussion for a set amount of time.

Allen Webster is handling our monthly Seattle meetups, and we had 8 locals this month (online-only too.)

It worked out because not everyone had a project to discuss; they were simply there to observe and give brief feedback. I'd imagine if next month everyone had something to show, then managing that becomes harder.

If I were the organiser, I would ask how many people have a project to show, and budget my time accordingly. I might announce something like: "Hey everyone, for this month, we have 6 people demoing a project, therefore everyone gets 15 minutes tops for a 90-minute meeting. I'm going to be pretty strict and use a timer :-)"

I think anywhere from 5-10 people is fine. In my experience, it is rare for 100% of attendees to have significant progress on a personal project on a monthly basis, so the timing just tends to work out.

Ah that sound like a good way to manage timing, I'll add that to the doc.. Good to hear about the Seattle meetings working out!

Handmade Detroit Gathering #3 complete! Here’s some notes:

Single File Libraries:

• https://github.com/gingerBill/gb/
• https://github.com/nothings/stb
• https://github.com/nothings/single_file_libs

The making of the markdown to html complier:

http://sethdetroit.com/markdown-to-html-compiler-in-c

Jonathan blow quotes:

"you can't be that far from the cpu,
but if you think every little cpu thing is super interesting
and rathole on doing the optimal job on that thing
you will never ship a large piece of software"

"having to code directly to metal, there's an element of reality there.
Caring what something looks likes to the end user is a different wall of the room of reality. Seeing both of those walls at the once is useful I think..."


On the Metal Podcast with Jonathan Blow:

https://oxide.computer/podcast/on-the-metal-9-jonathan-blow/

Updated:
https://docs.google.com/spreadshe...MOVfGWYZvhocnw/edit#gid=935172637