We in the Handmade community have been, shall we say, slow adopters of AI. In a Discord post early this year, I wrote that the community has generally responded to AI with apathy—we like programming, so why automate the thing we enjoy? Some people use it, some people don’t, many people find value in it without compromising their programming values. But as time goes on, and more new members join the community, we are concerned about the erosion of community values, and long-time members are growing frustrated at the frequent appearance of outright slop in #project-showcase.

We feel it is time to clearly define what we see as acceptable and unacceptable use of AI in this community. We are not opening the floodgates nor banning it outright, but we are clearly defining some practices that we feel are unacceptable. The Handmade Network feels different from other programming communities; our goal with this policy is simply to keep it that way.

You can read the full policy in detail

It is crazy to think that the Handmade Network Expo was over a month ago already. The past few months have been a delightful whirlwind for us, full of new problems and quick decisions. It’s been a lot of work, but it has been very gratifying.

At the time of this writing, we have just finished publishing all the recordings from the Expo, and with that, I feel it’s time for a bit of a retrospective. This was a significant event for us, and it happened at an interesting time in the history of the Handmade community, and of the software industry in general. It would be a shame to let it go by without some reflection.

This post will be a bit long, but I hope you find it interesting and worthwhile. It just doesn’t feel right to move on too quickly.

The context

While far from the first-ever in-person “Handmade” event, the Handmade Network Expo was the first event ful

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Handmade Essentials Jam last month! It was our biggest jam turnout ever, and there was lots of energy on the Discord as everyone was sharing updates about their projects. We just published the recording of the recap stream, so give that a watch if you’d like to see several of our favorite submissions:

https://youtu.be/kcQN_uYbyjE

The Essentials Jam is yet another case of people really resonating with challenges that make them a better programmer. (I hate to use the term “tradcoding”, but, here we are.) Our Handmade Hero Replay group is going strong too (a Handmade Hero book club, basically). More and more people keep joining the Discord server (we’re over 10k members now!) and whether they are a seasoned programmer or a fresh college dropout, they are all eager to be part of a community that actually cares about the craft of programming.

There’s a moment in the early episodes of Handmade Hero that I particularly enjoy. On da

We’re pleased to announce that ticket sales for the Handmade Network Expo are now open!

The Handmade Network Expo is our first-ever in-person event. We didn’t want to just run another “conference”; after all the years of Abner running Handmade Seattle (and our subsequent split), we weren’t interested in having a typical lineup of tech talks. Our favorite part was always the demos: real Handmade software made by members of the Handmade community. So in that spirit, we decided to make an event that was all demos, all the time.

You can find all the details on the event page, but the short version is that it’s one day in the heart of Vancouver, with a flexible schedule full of small demos, and plenty of opportunities to show off your own work, learn from others, experiment with new ideas, and generally celebrate Handmade software. Tickets are just $100, but space is limited. If

TL;DR:

• The first-ever Handmade Network Expo will take place on June 6, 2026
• Join us in re-watching Handmade Hero! (starting February 7, 2026)
• A few thoughts about Handmade's position in the industry

We are very excited to announce the Handmade Network’s first-ever in-person event: The Handmade Network Expo!

2025 was a quiet year for us where we focused on the fundamentals of the community: jams, projects, a healthy community, and interesting discussions. But we love seeing other people in person, and were sad that we didn’t have the opportunity last year. So we decided it was time to bring people together again, and with our renewed focus on real, tangible Handmade software, a day of demos seems like the perfect fit.

So: Join us in Vancouver, BC on June 6, 2026, for a day packed with demos, discussion, socializing, and celebrating the achievements of the talented programmers of the Handmade community!

(By the way, don't miss more news at t

Hello Handmade Network, and happy new year! 2025 was a relatively quiet year for us where we focused on just running our jams and building relationships across the Handmade community. But we’ve got lots of plans for 2026 and we’ve already been at work kicking them off!

TL;DR:

• We are finally launching the Handmade Software Foundation and using it to support the development of more Handmade software
• We’re planning an in-person gathering for this spring, more details forthcoming
• We’ll be doing two jams as usual, dates TBD based on other events

Launching the Handmade Software Foundation

A few years ago we announced that we were creating a nonprofit to support the development of Handmade software. Well, it took some time, but I am pleased to announce that the Handmade Software Foundation is now officially a 501(c)(6) nonprofit corporation.

What does this mean? It means we are a nonprofit under the category carved out for business leagues, chambers of commer

Happy fall to everyone in Handmade! I hope you had a wonderful summer, and that you spent the perfect amount of your summer writing amazing Handmade software. Ideally you were actually outside enjoying the sun and the air while doing this, and ideally you climbed a mountain or jumped in a lake afterward—but if this is wishful thinking, then I hope you at least have some cool software to show for it.

Fall is a wonderful season for Handmade, because it means that we get to do another Wheel Reinvention Jam. And this is our fifth annual WRJ!

For me, the Wheel Reinvention Jam is one of the most important things we do as a community, because it reminds us that wheels do need to be reinvented, and that even the most ambitious projects need to start somewhere. I wrote this on the jam page, but whe

It's June 9, and that means that the X-Ray Jam has officially begun!

Participants have one week to make a project that exposes the inner workings of software. If this is your first time hearing about it, it's not too late to participate! Head over to the jam page to find more information about the theme, submission instructions, and inspiration to get you started.

After the jam, we plan to do another recap show like usual. The show is tentatively scheduled for Sunday, June 22, one week after the conclusion of the jam, but stay tuned for official confirmation.

We look forward to seeing all the updates this week!

-Ben

The official page for the X-Ray Jam is now online! Check it out, invite your friends, and join us on June 9 to dig into how software works.

The premise of the X-Ray Jam is to point an X-ray at software and see how it works "on the inside". It's a riff on the Visibility topic from previous years and a refinement of what made that topic interesting.

See, the original concept of "visibility" was not about "visualization"—the point was to make visible the invisible workings of the computer. To "visibilize" it, not necessarily "visualize" it. Obviously I love what the community chose to submit for those jams, but they admittedly did not stick to that topic very well. Even my own submission to the first Visibility Jam was a tool for automatically tracing a network, not really a tool to "make the pac

Hello Handmade! 2025 is moving right along, and Handmade projects along with them. But first:

Introducing the X-Ray Jam!

We are doing two jams this year, and the first is a new jam we’re calling the X-Ray Jam. This is a riff on the “visibility” topic from years past that I’m very excited about.

In short: point an X-ray at your software! The purpose of the X-Ray Jam is to explore our systems and learn more about how they work on the inside. It combines the best parts of the Visibility and Learning jams into one. Here’s the details:

• When: June 9-15, 2025
• Topic: X-ray some program and figure out what's happening inside.
• You submit: A program or tool, like previous years, or a blog post, like in the Learning Jam.

For example, maybe you'd build a program to record and replay all the window messages received by your program. Or you'd investigate why the Windows 11 right-click menu is so slow to open. (What is it doing?!) Or perhaps you coul

Hello Handmade community! I hope your 2025 is going brilliantly so far. I have a few key updates for you to kick off the year.

Unwind is back!

I am pleased to announce that, after a bit of a hiatus, our interview show Unwind is back. Our latest episode is an interview with Alex (aolo2), a web developer turned CPU engineer whose projects are a constant inspiration. We discuss the creation of his collaborative whiteboarding app, the Slack replacement he made for a previous job, and his latest project, a lightning-fast CPU trace viewer. You can watch the episode on YouTube.

For this re-launch of Unwind, we’ve changed the format of the show from live to pre-recorded interviews. It’s basically a podcast now instead of a live show, and we hope this will h

I regret to announce that the Handmade Network and Handmade Software Foundation will no longer be working with Abner Coimbre and Handmade Cities going forward.

This is obviously not a decision we made lightly. Since Handmade Seattle concluded just over two months ago, we have been attempting to come to an agreement that would allow us to continue working together. Unfortunately, it has become clear that Abner’s vision for Handmade has diverged from ours, and despite our best efforts, we have been unable to reconcile our differences.

This means that the Handmade Network will no longer support, promote, or endorse any Handmade Cities conferences or meetups. We disclaim all affiliation with Handmade Cities going forward. Community members are of course still welcome to attend Abner’s events if they wish, but with the understanding that we have zero influence over any content, logistics, or attendee experience.

How did we get here?

I realize this announcement may come as

This post has been co-authored by Abner Coimbre and Ben Visness.

On November 17, 2014, Casey Muratori went live with the first episode of Handmade Hero. The show was immediately electrifying: a game industry veteran sharing his knowledge with no coddling and no compromises. But Handmade Hero gave us more than just technical knowledge—it gave us an ethos for how to program.

10 years later, it’s clear that Handmade Hero was more than just a show—it started a movement. The Handmade community has grown to encompass thousands of people sharing their knowledge on Discord, attending conferences and meetups, shipping apps, and working to fix the mess that is modern software. In a world where most programming communities are built around a particular language or paradigm, the Handmade community is an anomaly, a place where brilliant programmers of all disciplines gather to help each other make truly great software.

This past July, we

The past few months have been a whirlwind. We hosted two jams: the Visibility Jam and the Wheel Reinvention Jam, almost back to back, each with an associated recap show. (We’ll schedule them better next year!)

In between was Handmade Boston, which was a delight—I met so many wonderful people, some of whom even submitted projects for the jam. And throughout it all, we made a slew of website updates, including an overhaul to our Discord integration.

Finally, we have been working with Abner and his team recently to improve the Handmade Cities website. The Handmade Network community scoured the internet to put together [this master spreadsheet](https://doc

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:

• Showing off activity from Discord. The website forums aren’t used much these days. The Discord, on the other hand, is thriving. With well over 7,000 users, thousands of messages sent per week, and a steady stream of #project-showcase posts, the Discord is the most active part of the community right now. The

Hello Handmade Network! 2024 has been great so far. Most notably, we held our first-ever Learning Jam in March, in which participants learn about a topic and share that knowledge with the rest of the community. We had great turnout for an experimental jam in its first year, and I’m excited to revisit it in the future.

But looking back, not everything we’ve done over the last couple years has been quite so successful. We’ve excitedly kicked off projects like our education initiative, Time Machine, even a 501c3 behind the scenes. Sadly, none of these have panned out. Making good educational resources with a Handmade flair is hard (really hard) and requires a huge time commitment from a rare type of person. Time Machine was a fun idea, but was never destined to succeed as a large community project. And the 501c3…we’ll save that for another time.

Community members did great work on these projects, and we learned a lot, but as

I'm pleased to write this final news post of the year together with Abner Coimbre!

Dear Handmade Community,

Warm holiday greetings! Abner Coimbre and Ben Visness here, teaming up to announce that the Handmade Cities Matrix server will remain online permanently. In past years, it has been shut down at the end of conferences, but now it will remain active year-round!

This might surprise you, since most of you are probably already members of the (now rather large) Handmade Network Discord server. So why keep the Matrix server as well?

The Handmade movement has grown an incredible amount in the past several years. Importantly, it has grown both online and in the real world. Both domains are vital to the health of the larger Handmade community - but there are some critical differences between the two. Let's dive into it.

Two communities? Not quite.

The Handmade Network (HMN) is the online hub for the Handmade movement. Led by Be

With the Wheel Reinvention Jam just over a week away, we’re very pleased to finally release the Orca MVP to the community!

For those unfamiliar, Orca is our new cross-platform runtime for WebAssembly apps. It gives you a cross-platform app development system without all the baggage of browsers. It’s a long-term project with ambitious goals, but we are very excited to finally release an early MVP for the community to play with.

All the details can be found in the announcement post over on the Orca website. There you’ll find how to access the source code, the list of features and current limitations, and how to get help and provide feedback. If you’re interested and think it would be a good fit for your project, we’d love to have you try it out during the jam.

Jam! Jam! Jam!

[![Wheel Reinvention

August has already been a big month for the Handmade community! The biggest news, of course, was:

Handmade Boston!

Handmade Boston was the first of two Handmade Cities conferences this year and the first ever held outside of Seattle. I have to say, despite it being the first conference in a new city, in a new venue, the event was a huge success. There were dozens of in-person attendees and hundreds more online, and six fantastic long-form talks. I’ve been working through the homework and thoroughly enjoying my time.

I also had the pleasure of meeting many people in person whom I had only ever met online. For many of them, Boston was the first Handmade conference they had ever attended. It warms my heart that so many people were willing to take a chance on this scrappy first-year conference.

Abner tells me he will be publishing a recap of the confer

Hello Handmade community! It’s been an exciting year for Handmade so far. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

• We announced Orca, a new toolkit for cross-platform WebAssembly apps.
• We launched Time Machine, a community project where we collect video of old devices to see how the experience of computing has changed over time.
• We hosted the Visibility Jam, a jam where we make invisible things in computing visible.
• We held another fishbowl about software testing, and we’ll likely revisit this topic in the future.

And of course, Abner has expanded his conference efforts and is now hosting two Handmade conferences, one in Boston and one in Seattle. Handmade Boston is less than a month away, so check it out (and don’t forget there’s an online track!)

TL;DR: Orca and Time Machi