About Handmade Cities
Sponsor-free tech events
100% indie. We reject sponsorship deals because we must be allowed to criticize anyone’s software. Accepting “free” bags of money destroys our ability to change the software industry.
An obligation to software quality
Our industry’s incentives destroy ownership to extract rent from customers. We’ve abandoned the love for our craft, the user’s quality of experience, and their right to privacy.
Self-host wherever possible
We operate our own chat server, mailing lists, and more. For purchases, payment processors ping our servers to process orders ourselves.
Direct funding approach
We grow through obvious means, funded by users purchasing our Handmade software. Zero investors.
Founder
Abner Coimbre
Abner is founder of Handmade Cities and full-time indie dev.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, he was mentored by Kennedy Space Center on how they make software. After winning NASA’s Intern of the Year, Abner penned an essay on their programming philosophy: featured in the news. He was subsequently promoted to launch control engineer.
Abner started the Handmade Network, an online community learning to make quality software. He went on to work under Jonathan Blow followed by Cyan Worlds to ship the Myst Remake.
Now in his early thirties, Abner’s concern for declining software standards—both ethical and technical—pushed him to become a community organizer.
Editor
Zac Nowicki
Zac is our editor who keeps us free of typos and fact-checks our writing. Outside of donating his time here, Zac is tech lead for Kagi Search. Opinions here do not represent his employer.
Server Admin
Mariano Uvalle
Mariano Uvalle is server administrator for Handmade Cities. He’s a former Microsoft engineer at Azure who stepped down to work for a smaller outfit. Opinions here do not represent employers.