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Hey there, Handmade Network. Since you’re reading this on the website, you may have noticed that things look a little different around here. As I talked about in our last news post, we’ve been working for the last couple months to redesign the Handmade Network website. Today I’m pleased to finally roll it out!
The new site design comes courtesy of Jes Chuhta, a wonderful UX designer who we came to know through Handmade Boston and Handmade Seattle last year. The new website is designed to reflect the new shape of the Handmade Network as it has evolved over time. A quick summary of the changes:
In addition, the new design is actually much simpler to work with! Programmers, trust me, you have no idea how valuable it is to work with a good designer. Our HTML is so simple now, our CSS is so simple now, we have a third of the variables we used to have. It is so easy to slap designs together and they look good because they are consistent and aesthetically pleasing and please programmers listen to me please
Because we needed to get this announcement out, the website is still a work in progress. Several pages are still somewhat broken or need a little more attention. But we hope that you all enjoy the new foundations, and we look forward to expanding the site to highlight even more of the great work the Handmade Network community is doing.
That’s right, just two weeks! Our second annual Visibility Jam is coming up on July 19, two weekends from the time of this posting.
The topic of “visibility” is critical to Handmade goals. To understand our systems we have to see our systems. The underlying realities of computers cannot be known unless programmers like us go to the effort of building tools, visualizations, and editors. Making systems visible is the first step toward improving those systems.
I covered this in my talk from Handmade Seattle last year. We don’t need to be stuck forever with the towering pile of complexity that is modern systems. We can learn how systems work, tear down the layers, and build new systems that are just as nice to use but have a fraction of the complexity. If we are going to build a new kind of “high-level” software, we first have to understand the low levels, and the Visibility Jam is your opportunity to take that first step.
Plus, we’ve now made tons of improvements to projects on the website, so submission should be much more pleasant this year. There’s no better time to join the community and try jamming with us! Check out the jam page for more details.