Founder’s Memo on Real-Life Camaraderie

Handmade Meetup ft. Walter Bright (Creator of D)

  • Abner Coimbre
  • Meetups
  • April 21, 2026

Abner Coimbre is our Handmade Cities founder. You may reach the author at abner@handmadecities.com

Seattle folks,

The last Saturday is upon us, which means our monthly meetup takes center stage. RSVP your seat at the earliest opportunity.

Note: The “Add to Calendar” button was fixed last month, thanks to our server admin Mariano!

The details:

We’re right next to Roosevelt’s Light Rail. We can’t miss it if we have Apple/Google maps:

  • Where: One Bite Cafe, Seattle WA
  • When: Saturday, April 25th, 2-4PM
  • Parking: There is street parking around the block. However, the most reliable place to park is “Green Lake Park & Ride”

The entire shop is reserved for Handmade, so let’s order snacks and drinks to support this family business!


Saturday’s Presentations (2-4PM)

We start with community news from yours truly, followed by our featured presentation. Time permitting, we wrap it all up with roundtable discussions.

Featured Presentation: Walter Bright

Walter is the creator of the D programming language.

We were fortunate, some years ago, to invite Walter to our Handmade conference. Indeed, his presentation on ImportC was well-received and is still relevant today.

I’m especially fascinated by Walter’s long-standing company Digital Mars: there he created a systems language which truly inspired (one way or another) the ones we often discuss today: Rust, Zig, Jai, Odin, C3 and so on. This is my favorite Wikipedia quote of all time:

“D resulted from Bright’s frustration with the direction of the C++ language and from his experience implementing it.”

I’m in awe at how Digital Mars managed to ship a production-grade C compiler. (My condolences for supporting C++ as well.) The company also made a video game which I’d love to learn more about!

I asked Walter to discuss anything that tickles his fancy: it’s important to listen to our veteran systems programmers, especially in our present climate. Naturally, I hope he doesn’t mind us peppering him with questions during our roundtable :)

Seattle After Dark (4-7PM) 🍕

As always, between 4:00 - 4:30PM we will wind down the official meetup and make our way to dinner and drinks. “After Dark” is optional, but during this time I moderate very little, which lets community members get spicier with their takes on our industry as a whole. It’s a hoot.

DON’T FORGET TO RSVP. SEATS ARE LIMITED.

See you Saturday at 2PM,
Abner Coimbre

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