The Handmade Essentials Jam is a programming jam where participants build simple programs they would use every day.
In the year 2026, even the basic software that comes with your operating system is a disaster. Camera apps can only record once. Calculators need a splash screen. Nobody seems to be able to reliably search your drive for files, and every app is half a gig for some reason.
But we are programmers! So this jam's topic is: rebuild an "essential" program from scratch.
The release of File Pilot last year had a large impact beyond Handmade, because it's literally incomprehensible how anyone could make software so fast and so fluid, and so small. (Two megabytes!) But anyone who has followed Handmade Hero knows that this is actually normal; computers are extremely fast and most software is extremely bloated. It doesn't take special tricks to make small, fast, high-quality software; it just takes care and craft and understanding of what the computer can actually do.
File Pilot is just one example of inspirational software made with the Handmade ethos, but there are many others. wcap is a 65KB screen recording program that responds instantly. Cactus Viewer is an image viewer that is at least 10x faster than the native Windows preview application. These programs are a joy to use and make your life better. We need more software like this.
Plus, in the era of AI, we want to encourage community members to keep making software, and to encourage new programmers to learn how to make software from scratch. There's no better way to learn than by making real software you will use every day.
Didn't finish &robotype within the jam itself but I thought it was worth finishing. It can be downloaded here: https://el-tejaso.itch.io/robotype
A shorter and better version of Demo for pencil.
Let this serve as the definitive showcase video for Unimap following the end of the jam:
Quick jam recap for &digitalpaper, my bitmap-based text editor: I managed to get all the bare essential features finished and I think it did a decent job at demonstrating a different paradigm for editing text. There are a few things I didn't get to implement, but the end result still feels fairly finished to me. I'm quite happy with how it turned out!
I did the whole thing without external libraries and without CRT, and only used my existing platform layer and UI library that I've been working on over the past few months. It's incredibly satisfying to have made a piece of software entirely by hand, but also the whole time I was really wishing I had a less bare-bones UI library. I spent a ton of time on things that should have been there already (scroll bars, dynamic string support) and I was definitely limited in the end by not having other features (text boxes). Also, digging through documentation for COM APIs to get PNG encoding working at the last minute was not fun.
Here are some things I wish I could have implemented:
(I'd recommend watching the demo video at 2x speed as it's just me typing in real-time, no talking)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2e4dwk6jvA
&zvideotrimmer Went a bit overtime but calling it there for the jam. Couldnt quite get encoding working well. But will definitely finish this up post-jam. Learned a bunch about the Media Foundation api and video encoding. Also that multithreading is super important in this domain as video decoding is computationally VERY expensive, even with modern hardware.
Also noticed how bad almost all video players scrub video, even high quality ones like MPV. I did not realize that pre-jam. Feel like its certainly doable to do better job and get close to what proper video editors like Davinci offer with scrubbing/trimming in a much lighter weight package. Even though I'm not encoding well, it is close, and the program is only 149kb with zero dependencies on windows. So even though this jam project was a fail, I really enjoyed diving into this problem domain, and look forward to improving it. Thanks very much Handmade Network admin, this jam was awesome.
Update, morning after Jam deadline: I switched back to an SDL3 backend, and that seems to have fixed
The downside is that the window is resizable again, which I don't want, but is less important than the above two issues. (This is because I'm having a hard time calling Win32 functions with the hWnd that the SDL backend gives me.) DVUI's different backends are buggy in a few ways, I've come to find out.
I created &overseer for the Handmade Essentials Jam. It's an attempt at improving on Task Manager. It was a fun project that took me deep into the weeds in some winternals stuff and I spent a lot of time learning about some poorly documented, or undocumented save for the work of reverse engineers, kernel interfaces (and not as much writing code as I would have liked). It has some interesting capabilities like history for plotting of the system, each process, and each thread. It's missing some much needed ones like Disk, Network, GPU, and grouping processes as apps like Task Manager does (turns out this is trickier than it appears). I'm considering continuing work on it to add these features, clean up the UI, and possibly port to Linux, especially if there's demand for it.
Sadly, I didn't make much past this yesterday. The only progress I made yesterday was an internal architecture decision on how to interact with Odin's nbio. I guess I didn't have the time I thought I would, and spent too long hemming and hawing on some design decisions. All I have at the end of the jam for &send-files
I do plan to continue on working this in some capacity after the jam though. I like where I am going with it
