Anniversary Rebrand

Dear Handmade Friends,

Notice the new logo? There’s more to share about our rebrand below.

However, let’s discuss the conference next month first.

Handmade Seattle 2024: Anniversary Edition 🌟

We’re a little over a month away from Handmade Seattle, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Handmade movement. Thanks to everyone who’s shown interest to participate!

If you haven’t heard from me or my staff yet, you should get a response by Monday Tuesday. Worst case, send me a ping on Discord (@abnercoimbre) in case Monday Tuesday passed by and you still didn’t hear from us.

It’s never ideal for us to take a long time responding to all emails and submissions. Please forgive us.

Twitch marathon for ticket sales

This Monday, October 21st Tuesday, October 22nd. I’ll kick off a multi-week Twitch stream running through November 1st. It’ll be my side-project Terminal Click while keeping an eye on how conference registrations are going.

Loris Cro offered to help me port my terminal site from Hugo to Zine. If he’s around I’ll collab with him during one of the streams!

Full website rewrite ⚡

handmadecities.com is getting a much-needed upgrade too. This self-hosted WordPress site is slow and clunky—not great for a community that’s all about software quality!

Thanks to staff member Devon along with the Handmade Network team, I’m switching to a static site that’s lightning-fast by comparison. I won’t promise an exact release date, though it’ll ship well ahead of the conference.

As part of this overhaul Jes Chuhta also designed amazing new logos. You saw the Cities one at the top. We also have a version for Handmade Meetups:

The conferences gets fresh logos too: one for Handmade Boston and Handmade Seattle. Dude there’s even a cute favicon! She did incredible work, so keep an eye out for all of them soon.

Note: With everything going on with WordPress lately, it was a good time to ditch it and build our own site anyway. Ben Visness will cover the drama in a Handmade Network newsletter soon—be sure to subscribe there!

From Vimeo to YouTube

By popular demand, from both my staff and the audience, I’m mirroring our Vimeo catalog to YouTube. As a matter of principle I’m keeping monetization off and will always point people to handmadecities.com to support us directly.

You’ll get updates through the newsletter when the uploads begin.

Revolt replaces Matrix 🥳

I’ve switched our chat server from Matrix to Revolt. Complaints against Matrix kept mounting every year, and after a lot of feedback (and some near ticket-holder boycotts), Revolt is now self-hosted live at chat.handmadecities.com. It’s not as feature-rich as Discord yet, but it works really well for short-term events like Handmade Seattle:

Revolt is our private chat server for conferences: where ticket holders join live Q&As and official discussions. During the off-season we use our public Discord instead.

Note: Read more about my decision to drop Matrix (and their CEO’s reaction) in this blog post.

Note note: Jamie Brandon of HYTRADBOI fame dropped Matrix too. He’s trying Zulip instead, so we both challenged each other to write post-mortems after each conference!

Speaker lineup coming soon ⏳

We’re aiming to have most of the Handmade Seattle speaker lineup ready by November 1st (the last day of my Twitch marathon.) It’s been tough locking in speakers due to the current economic climate, but like Boston, we’ll deliver great talks and demos even if the final list comes in late.

Slimming down the conference

Conferences, big and small, have been shutting down since COVID and this year saw even more go under. Deconstruct, O’Reilly, E3, Strangeloop, XOXO and bang bang con, to name but a few.

Like so many, I’m really feeling the squeeze this year. 2024 is a survival year, and we’re making some cuts:

• No hotel assistance: We tried, but the terms I’d have to sign to secure mass discounts are too financially risky. Our Discord server is your best bet for advice on where to stay in Seattle for cheap.
• No free merch this time: We’ll be selling shirts if we can. However, if you registered for both Boston and Seattle, send proof and the merch is yours. (Physical tickets only.)
• No in-person trade show: Seattle Center’s new booth fees make it prohibitive, so we’re going virtual for the trade show and job fair (using Revolt.)

We still convene at the Seattle Center as always, at the Nesholm Family Lecture Hall:

The talks and demos on stage are happening here. And we’ll still have group lunches, dinners, and official hangouts.

Register ASAP 🎫

It’s frankly such a delightful miracle that we’re alive and kicking. The community likes to joke that we’re playing Last Con Standing.

Tickets and donations need to pick up a bit to keep Handmade Cities going, hence the Twitch marathon next week. If you’re thinking about attending, please consider registering early—even if the lineup isn’t finalized just yet.

Handmade Cities and what the future holds

Once we make it through this year, I see a new business model for conferences emerging: community-driven, 100% indie, and making juuust enough profit to cover the basics—rent, groceries, healthcare, and the occasional night out. That’s it. I’ll never get rich doing this, and that’s fine. In fact, I think the big, sponsor-heavy conferences are fading out, while indie events like HYTRADBOI are making a comeback (they were inspired by Handmade Seattle.)

So how am I still here? The people supporting Handmade Cities point to one thing: community.

When we’re not running tech conferences, Handmade Cities is quietly growing monthly meetups around the world. Handmade Australians met for the first time this month. We’ve just added Vienna and Tokyo, and in Seattle my technical producer Phil pioneered co-working sessions, which are now a community staple: they happen every other week. I also started weekly hangouts on Sundays—a third place where people gather and do whatever they want; new friendships and a couple of job offers have already come out of them! (Although job networking isn’t the goal.)

At these meetups I’ve met founding engineers from multiple high-profile startups who are burned out by the impact their companies have on society—whether it’s software quality degrading, endless mass layoffs or immoral business practices. They’re starting to come to us. These reliable, growing interactions among very competent programmers who care are sparking… something.

Handmade Cities, not accountable to any company or investor, will galvanize this energy after I’ve muscled my way through 2024.

See you on Twitch,
Abner

Your indie organizer