Handmade Boston
The first Handmade conference where speakers become instructors and the audience students. Aug 3-4, 2023.
District Hall Boston
Aug 3-4, 2023
75 Northern Ave
Boston, MA 02210
Restoring Mentorship culture
Mentor-apprentice relationships don’t seem to stick around in the software industry. We aim to change that.
Exclusive Masterclasses
Competent engineers will teach you a subject-matter they love and level up your programming skills.
Take-Home ASSIGNMENTs
For a limited time our instructors will support you as you work through the assignments they’ve created.
2023 Instructors
Learn The Way of The Kaze
The legendary Kaze Emanuar is famous for playing fire with Nintendo’s IP. Handmade Boston is 100% indie so we’ll take the risk and welcome his teachings with open arms.
Step Up Your Creative Game
Freya Holmér‘s deep expertise in tech art and math allows her to create stunning visuals and products. Join our math influencer and shader sorceress in a brand new masterclass.
Appraise The Classics
Jasper is renowned in the industry for breaking down large systems and understanding the ingenuity of creative work. Now it’s your turn to do the same!
Master Arenas
Ryan Fleury is among the few who’s cracked the code to write programs in C while virtually eliminating all memory errors. Come learn that superpower with us.
Enter Demoscene
Andreas Fredriksson, Lead Engine Programmer at Insomniac Games, will show you the way of the demoscene and what you can learn from this increasingly lost art.
Mārtiņš Možeiko
Martins is an engineer at Epic Games / RAD Game Tools, and a famous figure in the Handmade community. The majority of all technical questions are answered by him – often called a true programming wizard.
What does it take to troubleshoot issues like Martins?
The Path To Raylib
raylib became the second most popular repository on GitHub. This open-source library has received large grants, awards, and critical acclaim across the industry.
Ramón Santamaría now wishes to share his battle scars in the hopes you’ll adopt the tips & tricks used to ship Handmade software.
“This is awesome! I’m super excited for the conference in Boston. I’ll make sure to fly over this time! Thanks for all the effort you’re putting into this.”

Definitive Guide to N64 Modding
Calling Kaze Emanuar “well-known” in the modding space is the understatement of the century: legend has it he spends his days editing hexcode in Notepad.
With Kaze’s direct help you’ll learn to disassemble, modify and even improve the ROMs that ran on old hardware—using the N64 as our example.
This is a skill that will help us weather the software winter too.

Unleash Creativity On Your Computer Screen
Freya Holmér is the creator of Shader Forge and Shapes—the award-winning real-time vector graphics library. As a Twitch Partner and YouTube educator she teaches everything from math, shaders, procedural geometry all the way up to product design.
At Handmade we need guidance on skills that supercharge our low-level programming: specifically on the artistic and mathematical. Freya is more than qualified to help us out here.
P.S. We are actively preparing this masterclass. Come back a little later to find out exactly what Freya will be teaching.

The Decisions Behind raylib
There are important technical decisions about how to design raylib. There’s also other decisions required to succeed too: crafting the perfect README, thinking about logo design, doing user outreach, applying for grants, and other interesting angles we as programmers tend to miss.
Join the author for a deep dive on the technical (and non-technical) dimensions of shipping Handmade software!

Study Architecture behind Great Games
At Handmade we’re often building our own isolated apps, tools, or games. However it’s also important to explore the work of others to imitate the good and avoid repeating the bad.
Join Jasper on a very interesting tour to discover why engineering decisions are made in ways that seem foreign to us. You’ll gain new insights as we think hard about what software quality means in a messy world.
Psst, check out Jasper’s noclip site, it’s incredible.

The Wisdom of Demoscene Culture
Extreme constraints yield extraordinary ingenuity: nowhere is this more true in software than when you’re creating intros for Revision Party. Andreas Fredriksson and his group took home first price at the demo combo – with their masterpiece Eon by The Black Lotus. (It was supremely challenging to make it all work on a vanilla 7 MHz Amiga 500.)
Come learn how old-school demos are created and how those lessons will transfer to your daily work and projects.
Andreas, famous for his mantra “Low level thinking translates to high level wins”, is not a stranger to Handmade Cities. In Handmade Seattle 2021, he gave the talk Context is Everything, which sits comfortably in the top three most popular talks of all our conferences.

How Does One Know Everything?
When pressed for the secret sauce, Martins boils it down to F*ck Around and Find Out (not exactly in those words, but we like the meme here.) That answer, although accurate, may invite further questions from the audience.
Martins will show you the specific ways he plays around to figure stuff out, and to break the illusion that only special programmers can achieve wizardly knowledge.

Burn Down the Forest of Mallocs and Frees
The old-school way of managing low-level memory, in Ryan’s own words, “can easily lead to a rat’s nest of complexity.” This problem has plagued most C/C++ programmers for decades.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
With his recent | tours of arena-based memory allocators, Ryan is now poised to show you his solution in a mentorship setting! It’s time to level up your memory strategy and eliminate the common memory bugs in C.

District Hall: Boston's Home for Innovation
This unique-looking venue is managed by a nonprofit that takes pride in working with small business and indie audiences.
District Hall has everything we need to give you an amazing Handmade conference: giant assembly rooms, premium lounges, indoor cafe / restaurant and stable WiFi.
We’ll be located at the heart of the Boston Seaport which means you can book hotels a block or two away: with plenty of entertainment by the water!
We’re Hiring More Instructors!
Handmade Boston is looking for systems programmers that can teach our audience a valuable skill.
Reasonable Compensation
As a small business we can’t pay corporate rates but we still offer a decent amount for your time.
No Hand-Holding
Once we agree on what you’ll be teaching it’s off to the races. You’ll be granted autonomy never-before-seen in other conferences.
Travel And Lodging Covered
If attending physically, Handmade Cities will cover the costs of flying you to Boston along with a hotel at the heart of the city.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this conference for beginners?
No, Handmade Boston is not for beginner programmers. It’s a conference for developers who are already capable of low-level programming and are looking to push past their comfort zone.
As a rule of thumb, you should have zero issues with the first 25 episodes of Handmade Hero.
How will instructors teach their subject?
They each have their own style! Every instructor has a couple of hours to offer their masterclass. They may interact with you as if you’re a student, but you’re not required to do anything you’re not comfortable with.
By the end of the masterclass you’ll receive take-home assignments designed by the instructor themselves.
Do I need to bring any hardware?
Default expectation should be yes: a laptop with a fully-charged battery. That said, it’s not a strong requirement.
The masterclass is very much like a university lecture: professors interact with students and maybe they ask them to do a thing or two as a demonstration, but that’s about it.
The take-home assignments are where you’ll do any serious programming; our speakers will be available online to help you work through them (for a limited but reasonable period of time.)
I'm not interested in X or Y subject.
That’s understandable! Unfortunately we’re a single-track conference which means we all participate under the same set of instructors.
We encourage you to attend anyway, because there might be specific techniques you can make great use of in other areas.
How do we receive help with the assignments?
Before the conference begins you’ll be invited to a private forums site. You can post on the forums to receive help from instructors and fellow audience members.
Instructor support is officially available for a limited (but reasonable) period of time so everyone can complete their assignments.
Is this a hybrid event?
Yes! Just like Handmade Seattle, Boston has a physical track and an online one. Unlike Seattle, however, we won’t be live-streaming the event. We will record and make it available shortly after.
If you’re attending online you will still participate in real-time: most instructors will attend in person, but a select few are teaching virtually. In those cases online attendees will unlock masterclass recordings and take-home exercises immediately.
What's the conference schedule?
We’re smack in the middle of creating one. We are adding more instructors along with a schedule over the coming weeks and months. This is why early-bird sales are cheaper: there’s an element of uncertainty for you as an attendee. That said, we have a track record of delivering solid Handmade conferences (since 2019) and we ask that you trust us once again.
Can an instructor become my mentor?
That’s up to you and the instructor, but now you’re getting it! Our ultimate goal is for instructors to connect with one or more audience members, to the point that a mentor-apprentice relationship is formed beyond the confines of this conference.
It’s not something we can force though, only encourage. We hope to hear success stories.
Handmade Boston Awaits
A conference designed from the ground up to foster mentorships.