Handmade Seattle 2024
The largest indie conference for low-level programmers: fully hybrid
Seattle Center
Nov 20-22nd, 2024. Private hangouts on Friday the 22nd
This Year’s Stars
Andrew Kelley
Speaker
President at Zig Software Foundation
Abner Coimbre
Host
Indie Organizer
Project Salarybot
Demo
What’s it feel to work as a robot for a living?
This Could Be You
Open Slots
Wish to be a speaker, demoer, or fireside guest?
Job Booth
Open Slots
Are you a company looking to hire Handmade people?
More On The Way
Join the newsletter or check out last year's speakers below
Register Early
If you trust our track record, an early-bird ticket goes a long way for us, especially in this climate!
Previous Year (2023)
Andreas Fredriksson
Speaker
Lead Engine Programmer at Insomniac Games.
Jes Chuhta
Fireside Chat
Professional UX/UI Designer who is passionate about making ethical software.
TB
Demo
The future of compiler backends, by Yasser Arguelles
MobileCode
Demo
Code editor for phones.
WhiteBox
Demo
Watch how your code behaves as you write it.
Conference Exclusive
Podcast
Allen Webster sits down with the head of Ink & Switch, an independent research lab.
Handmade Reflections
Podcast
Abner Coimbre and Ben Visness discuss Handmade’s goals for 2024, with fun shenanigans along the way!
Serenum Computing
Demo
Solving the Thirty Million Line Problem. Not affiliated with Molly Rocket, Inc.
ShapeUp
Demo
SDF 3D Modeler
Dante's Cowboy
Demo
A Neo-Western town is simmering with conflict.
Nikita Lapkov
Speaker
Database engineer.
Disk Voyager
Demo
Unleash the thrill of warp-speed file discovery!
Cactus Image Viewer
Demo
Lightweight image viewer for Windows.
Opticks
Demo
RGB thats easy to program and use.
Violations of User Trust
Audience Poll
Ticket holders submit evidence of egregious abuse in software.
K&C
Job Booth
Science & Engineering for the most challenging problems.
Fully-Hybrid Event
Live Streaming
Presentations streamed in HD, with closed captioning when possible
Private Chat Server
Physical and online tracks communicate under the same server
Encrypted DMs
Direct Messages (DMs) are automatically encrypted. Ping anyone with peace of mind
No Vaults
We don’t lock recordings behind a paid vault.
Conference Schedule
Registration
9:00 - 9:45 AM
Opening Notes
9:45 - 10:00 AM
Fireside Chat
10:00 - 11:00 AM
Talk
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Lunch & Podcast
12:00 - 1:30 PM
Trade Show
1:30 - 3:00 PM
Demo
3:00 - 3:20 PM
Demo
3:20 - 3:40 PM
Demo
3:40 - 4:00 PM
Talk
4:00 - 5:00 PM
Demo
5:00 - 5:20 PM
Demo
5:20 - 5:40 PM
Demo
5:40 - 6:00 PM
Trade Show
6:00 - 7:30 PM
Closing Time
7:30 - 8:00 PM
Registration
9:00 - 9:45 AM
Opening Notes
9:45 - 10:00 AM
Talk
10:00 - 11:00 AM
Fireside Chat
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Lunch & Podcast
12:00 - 1:30 PM
Trade Show
1:30 - 3:00 PM
Demo
3:00 - 3:15 PM
Talk
3:15 - 4:00 PM
Demo
4:00 - 4:20 PM
Demo
4:20 - 4:40 PM
Demo
4:40 - 5:00 PM
Talk
5:00 - 5:45 PM
Closing Notes
5:45 - 6:00 PM
Trade Show
6:00 - 7:30 PM
Closing Time
7:30 - 8:00 PM
Friday Hangouts
Visit Private Chat for details. Opt-in Handmade city hangouts for the physical track.
Watch Previous Years
Staff Members
Morgan Rammell
Event Coordinator
Phil Homan
Technical Producer
Devon (Tek256)
Editor
Project Salarybot
An arcade action platformer that really makes you really feel like you work as a robot for a living.
Project Salarybot is a love letter to 90s arcade games bolstered with modern features. The game is meant to capture that hectic feeling of dropping a few coins into a machine with friends and frantically trying to claw yourselves to victory. An engaging combat system, different threats and objectives with every mission and an unsettling corporate history all await you and up to 3 friends in Project Salarybot.
Opticks
Opticks is an RGB project that demonstrates how cool RGB products can be if they dont ship with the most invasive, inefficient, opaque software/firmware.
Creative Exercises at the Low Level
An exploration of untapped potential.
Starting off we’ll map out the toolchains we use for creating and running executables on desktops. Then we’ll flesh out that picture with some low level details. And finally we’ll see how we can play with the pieces that exist to see new possibilities.
Handmade Reflections
An in-depth convo among two good friends.
Ben Visness, head of Handmade Network, and Abner Coimbre, founder of Handmade Cities, sit together for the first time on a multi-hour podcast.
From unraveling the mystery of Abner’s Majora’s Mask obsession to exploring Ben’s projects and life interests, you’ll catch an entertaining glimpse into these leadership figures at Handmade.
Get an inside look at their goals for 2024 with (at times) spicy commentary on the software world. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill discussion – it’s a spirited exchange.
Violations of User Trust
Has modern software let you down?
A few days before Handmade Seattle ticket holders will receive an invitation to tell a personal story of how a game, app, or piece of software has made them lose trust. It could be due to constant crashing, sluggish behavior, bad caching, invasive notifications or anything that makes them feel angered or frustrated.
Your story has a chance of getting featured live on The State of Software UX fireside chat with Jes Chuhta. Chances go up if it’s accompanied by screenshot, video, or any kind of evidence!
Serenum Computing
A self-hosting system free from traditional constraints.
I have made a desktop computer system that shares no code or language with existing software. Everything can be understood by one person, no bug is unfixable. Everything is written in my language Brevis and the system is self-hosting without any ties to C or existing toolchains.
Founder of Handmade Cities
… and organizer of Handmade Seattle since 2019
Abner is hyper-social, having started the Handmade Network when Casey Muratori needed a community for the viral Handmade Hero series. He then took charge of the conferences when Casey passed him the baton.
A programmer in his own right, Abner’s worked for NASA, Jonathan Blow, the creators of Myst, and is rethinking terminal emulators from scratch.
The State of Software UX
A survey of user-hostile games, apps, and software.
In this fireside chat, designer Jes Chuhta sits with Abner Coimbre to explore dysfunction in the software industry in terms of user experience. Jes will dissect examples from the real-world and comment on stories submitted by ticket holders.
We then turn our eyes to the rare examples that we consider good, wrapping it all up with a careful look towards Handmade software* and how we might further improve in the UI/UX department.
* With permission from the creators!
Embers of Insight
Fireside wisdom with Bill Hall of JangaFX (Makers of EmberGen)
In this exclusive session, Abner and Bill delve into the heart of the software industry’s challenges and aspirations, touching on the three fundamental themes that shape Handmade Seattle’s mission.
ShapeUp
Create 3D models by adding and subtracting shapes, instead of dealing with vertices and faces.
Traditional 3D programs are staggeringly complex and difficult to learn. I wanted to see what it would be like to use constructive solid geometry (CSG) to remove the need for the user to understand vertices, faces, and all the various operations you can do to them. By placing shapes in space, you can create both organic and mechanical shapes, the way a child might play with blocks.
Cactus Image Viewer
A native image viewer for Windows, written in C/C++ (single-file)
Cactus supports most common image formats, cropping, basic editing, blur effects, rotation, histograms, togglable linear filtering, and loading sorted folders, packed in a custom immediate mode UI engine, with a D3D11 backend.
Notably, Cactus offers Animated GIF and WebP support with play/pause and seek controls.
Dante's Cowboy
AI-driven characters act and speak in dramatic concert with the player.
A unique narrative emerges on every playthrough: build or break relationships that directly affect the outcome of the game. Expect lightning-quick load times on mobile, desktop and the web!
Dante’s Cowboy is written from scratch in C. Development is done on native desktop with native tools: RemedyBG and MSVC, while production in the web leverages Emscripten. We are cross-platform thanks to the Sokol headers.
Karagozian and Case, Inc.
We’re an internationally recognized science and engineering consulting firm founded in 1945. K&C supports a broad range of clients across different sections of defense, transportation, manufacture, aerospace, energy, and construction industries, for technically challenging and complex problems.
Wombat Studio, Inc.
Wombat Studio is on a mission to make 3D creation easy for everyone. Our product, Magic Poser, is the #1 art app that allows artists to easily pose 3D characters and create 3D scenes.
Our focus on building the best 3D creation tool with exceptional engineering quality of our custom engine has helped us build an amazing product that is greatly loved by the creative community.
Our app is highly recommended by concept artists from Star Wars, comic artists from Marvel, top webtoon artists, and so many more. We’ve gotten great traction since launch: accumulating 12+ million downloads on Android and iOS and 700K monthly active users.
System Era Softworks
System Era Softworks is a small development studio led by veteran game developers headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Established in 2014 out of shared passions for interesting gameplay systems and inspired by optimistic space-age futurism, we strive to build games that can serve as motivation for future generations of spacefarers.
Disk Voyager Demo
Next-gen file explorer, built from the ground up, with the following design goals:
⦁ Modern and minimal interface that puts your files in the spotlight
⦁ Fast disk operations that deliver results in a split second
⦁ Simple yet versatile user experience through panels & tabs, commands, GoTo window and much more
⦁ Personalized with your colors, hotkeys, layouts and default actions.
⦁ Small & portable program that fits on your floppy disk
Eon: An Amiga 500 Demo
What can we learn from demo groups trying to coax 40yo hardware into doing things its designers never imagined?
Eon is an Amiga 500 demo by the group The Black Lotus, which took home first price at Revision Party demo combo. Andreas had his hands all over this demo and will share the mindset and approach that led to the demo to be completed after four years of work. Many of the lessons stem from embracing constraints and not settling for the obvious.
High-level is the Goal
Why “Handmade” means more than “low-level.”
Why does the Handmade community focus so much on low-level programming? What’s the point? Do we simply reject new things to return to the good old days? Or is there more than that? Let’s dig into the current state of computing and talk about what sets the Handmade ethos apart.
The Ethics of Psychological Manipulation
A look at how video games make money.
Learn an easy way to use ethical thinking to improve your decision making. Uncover how parts of the video game industry are exploiting their players.
Disassembling Impostor Syndrome
Understand the mechanisms behind how we see ourselves (and others) in communities that focus on building competence.
I’m going to explore some of the mechanisms that might lead us to feeling like an impostor.
This talk is not meant to be a cheap “just believe in yourself” self-help guide, but rather an investigation of how social dynamics interact with engineering processes (e.g. evaluating our code against someone else’s) and in fact I will spend a good chunk of the talk on the analysis of situations where the same mechanisms lead to completely different outcomes.
I’m a software engineer, not a trained psychologist, so caveat emptor, but in my role of VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation I’ve had the pleasure of observing these dynamics from multiple angles and hopefully will be able to bring you some insight that would otherwise be hard to procure on your own.
SQL's Inner Workings: The Truth About Query Engines
An exposé by a whistleblower investigating the marketing claims of “It’s just the same old SQL you know.”
Most databases nowadays provide an SQL interface to query your data. After all, if one knows SQL, they can easily write queries to any database, right? Right?
In this talk we will dive into how SQL queries are actually executed and try to unmask trade offs and complexity hidden by a familiar syntax.
Encrypted DMs
Not even the admins can see them
Private messages are automatically encrypted meaning our staff can’t inspect them. Ping any speaker, demoer, job booth rep or ticket holder with the peace of mind you deserve.
⚠ Warning: Please follow any backup instructions that pop up while you’re in the chat server! If you don’t back up your encryption keys you’ll lose your old chat history.
Live Streaming
High-quality experience for the online track
Our technical producer, Phil Homan, works alongside Seattle Center A/V staff to stream all our presentations live.
Stream is free, chat server is not
Handmade Seattle streams for free at handmadecities.com and our Twitch channel as backup. VODs are made available immediately.
All the actual chatter, however, occurs on the private chat server—you’ll want a ticket for that!
The Library Of Babel in which every book is a program
We’ll wander through a corridors of a very special library, in which every book is one of the permutations of 64kb of ram.
The world’s only live timeline debugger.
This year, we have hugely expanded and generalized WhiteBoxs inspection & visualization engine.
Previously, WhiteBox’s main focus has been to make writing code an exploratory conversation with the computer by visualizing feedback about code’s behaviour immediately as you write it.
In this demo, we’re showcasing our first steps towards a new way to understand production-scale codebases.
Pontoco
We design and build thoughtful, approachable experiences that seek to enrich the lives of people across the world.
The Last Clockwinder is a VR game about building contraptions out of your own clones. It was Meta’s Game of the Year for 2022.
No Vaults
Download conference recordings straight from Vimeo
We polish and publish presentations to our Media Page, using Vimeo as a platform.
You can freely watch or download Handmade Seattle recordings under a Creative Commons license. (CC BY NC-ND)
Private Chat Server
Self-hosted to protect your data
Attendees communicate at chat.handmadecities.com thanks to the open-source Element platform.
Online attendees as first-class citizens
During Q&A all audience questions are sourced from the chat server, whether you’re at the venue or watching the stream from a Japanese temple.
Chat moderation done right
During the event we have a moderator to keep the environment fun yet professional.
MobileCode
A Handmade code editor designed for mobile phones.
The developer is confident that he has coded more on a phone than any other human in history. In fact, MobileCode itself was entirely written on a phone. Born out of 7 years of pain using apps which cram a desktop paradigm into a small screen, MobileCode rethinks the entire editing experience.
Orca
WebAssembly apps without the Web
Orca is a brand-new stack for cross-platform, sandboxed applications. It uses WebAssembly modules as a portable program representation and bundles them with its own runtime to produce self-contained applications for each operating system. Orca also provides APIs to interact with the underlying platform, and comes with a support library to help build graphics and UI applications.
TB
The future of compiler backends.
TB is a compiler backend built to address problems I and many others have had with LLVM, the hope is to fill the same niches such as integration with languages, optimization, and flexibility without incurring the same compile time costs or code complexity.
Approaching Local-First Software
Learn how local-first software can be simple (and better) for users
Allen sits with Peter van Hardenberg to dig into the work of the Ink and Switch research laboratory. Their discussion ultimately leads to local-first software, some of the difficulties with creating it, and concluding with the concepts behind CRDT and AutoMerge: the Ink and Switch library for creating CRDT application state.
Decode Dysfunction
Unearth Software’s Anomalies
At Handmade we always say software quality is going down a cliff, not just technologically but also ethically: our industry is forcing everyone to consume McSoftware—the digital manifestation of wolfing down Big Macs. At this conference we’ll show you the ugliest incentives that generate dysfunction and harm the health of users.
Achieve Competence
Wisdom Requires Technical Acumen
We’re not elitist, but digging deeper into how computers work bolsters our wisdom. Armed with hard-won technical insights we can expose exploitative software and make alternatives with the consideration our users deserve. We aim to build better software for humanity.
Antidotes in Action
Heal our Industry
Handmade is not just diagnosing issues—we’re working on possible cures! Our speakers and demoers will show you their very own roadmaps to heal the software landscape. We hope you become inspired to brew up your own solutions. Better yet: join one of our causes (there is strength in numbers!)