The Social Fabric of Technical Communities

In-Person Track

Graham is also one of the most prominent organizers of indie meetups in Boston: he famously disbanded the largest Unity Gamedev Group in the world.

After two heavy technical masterclasses on the physical track, it’s time for a more relaxed session. Graham and I will discuss how to build successful communities and how to thrive in them, touching on opportunities for new careers, mentorship, friendships, and collaboration.

We’ll also take audience questions and workshop solutions to your social challenges in the programming world.

Terminal Click Under Scrutiny

In-Person Track

At this conference, Allen Webster will openly critique my uh, contentious terminal emulator, Terminal Click 🙂

You get to be a fly on the wall as Allen questions my codebase, gaining insights to improve your own software. You can also scrutinize my choices during the Q&A session… I think it’s important to embrace collaboration and criticism to advance our Handmade projects and ship faster.

Can The Web Become Handmade?

In-Person Track

Web development gets a bad rap in the Handmade community for embracing too much complexity or ignoring the lower layers of abstraction. Is every single criticism justified? Is there any hope for the web anymore? I want Zac to help us sort this out once and for all.

Together, we’ll diagram how I wrote my own Ticketmaster replacement for the conferences and compare it to how Kagi itself is architected (to my own surprise, there are similarities!) Since Kagi handles traffic several orders of magnitude larger than Handmade Cities, we get to consider how a web application can remain small and performant as it scales larger and larger.

How you enter the mainstream while staying true to your values.

Online Track

When I reached out to Billy he reminded me that he attended the first Handmade Seattle during Animal Well’s early development and we chatted for a while. I let out a gasp when I searched the ticket sales records from that year. Core memory unlocked!

In this exclusive interview, Billy reveals many of the programming strategies he used to create his game from scratch. He’ll also give us a sneak peek at his next project and explain why he isn’t reusing his game engine. Finally, Billy will offer advice on the skills needed to ship a game, beyond just programming.

Online Track

Ex-Optimization Lead at Epic Games for Unreal Engine 5. Nuno is a good friend who joined us when Handmade Seattle was forced to go online in 2020: his succinct presentation on modern CPU optimizations remains as relevant as ever.

Nuno has since founded a brand new company with employees: Nilo. We’re keen to reveal juicy details at Handmade Boston. I’ll investigate the technical choices behind his new vision, the ethics of his business model, and the bold moves I think he’s making for the future of game development.

Keep an eye on Nuno’s work even after Handmade Boston… he might be joining us for a certain job fair in Seattle 😉

Online Track

The legendary N64 game modder, also known as Nintendo’s worst nightmare, returns for an in-depth discussion about his most popular demo on drastically improving Super Mario 64’s performance. In this interview, we’ll expand and seek clarification on topics he couldn’t cover in his video.

Finally, we’ll hear Kaze’s takes on the future of N64 modding and what his next moves are now that static recompilation has come into play 👀

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.