Handmade Seattle 2024

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.