Handmade Seattle 2023
The largest indie conference for systems programmers: in-person & online
Seattle Center
Nov 15-16th, 2023. A day of hangouts on the 17th.
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The Themes
This Year’s Stars

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.


Job Booth
Open Slots
Are you a company looking to hire Handmade people?

This Could Be You
Open Slots
Wish to be a speaker, demoer, or special guest?
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
97% of all Tickets Gone
Not a drill. Register for this indie conference today.
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
Coming soon. Opt-in Handmade city hangouts for the physical track.
Watch Past Content
Staff Members

Abner Coimbre
Organizer

Morgan Rammell
Event Coordinator

Phil Homan
Technical Producer

Devon (Tek256)
Content Editor

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.

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.
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 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!)