The Wheel Reinvention Jam is a one-week jam to build software from scratch.
Inspired by Handmade Hero, we believe in the power of reinventing the wheel. It's an opportunity to grow as a programmer, to question long-held assumptions, and to discover how simple and effective software can be. The Wheel Reinvention Jam is a chance to start your own Handmade project and see where it takes you.
Reinventing the wheel is in the DNA of the Handmade community. First of all, it's fun! But there are so many reasons why reinventing the wheel is important, not just for individual programmers, but for the whole software industry:
Every important software project begins as a simple prototype. So take the opportunity to start something new!
I've been playing around with giving the &adaw waveform edit menu it's own timeline view. I liked the lower-frequency wave that I was drawing in previous versions because It's not so noisy, but I don't know If actually I want to display inaccurate visualizations. Zooming in on the wave is my compromise for now. There's definitely more work to be done on the wave drawing front though. I really like Audacity's LODs as you zoom in; I'm probably going to replicate that
I came back to working on &adaw throughout January. So far I've just ripped out CLAY and Raylib and replaced them with custom solutions. With the guts now exposed, I'm going to be working on a lot synth type stuff
Post-jam update for &pajama, it now supports loading basic midi files
[post-jam]: here's a rough demo of rendering the control flow constructs in the executed assembly code. it's very broken and very complicated right now, but it's good enough for a demo screenshot and for me to finally call the jam project done :P &asm-trace
&vxt
Did a write-up on the blog about my entry for the jam.
https://unlitart.com/Blog/Wheel_Reinvention_Jam_2025_Procedural_Tree_Growth_Simulator/
[post-jam]: rewrote the control flow analyzer. each structure now has a unique header (a basic block) that dominates everything inside the structure, which turned out to be a useful invariant. &asm-trace
At the end of the jam &adaw can export audio files that you create. Didn't get in everything I wanted, but this does feel good
Here's a 10-minute video demo showing off all the features of &flowshell as they stand at the conclusion of the jam! I had a ton of fun with this project, I think it turned out quite well, and I think I may have to continue adding more nodes. And undo and redo. And any kind of serialization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyqxUs1mUng
&pajama day 7 bonus content - No new functionality, but I did a small visual refresh with the last remaining minutes of the jam!
&pajama day 7 - That's a wrap! I got multi-track recording and playback working, complete with independent per-track instruments. There's still a ways to go before this is useful - I'd want midi export and at least some basic track editing - but it was a lot of fun to see how much progress I was able to make in a week. I'm also happy with my project choice for this jam, the immediate gratification of being able to (kind of) make music at increasing levels of sophistication kept me motivated. I'm certainly hoping to keep the momentum going and work on it further in the coming weeks.
