iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 17/07/2026

Our sixth and final presentation from the Handmade Network Expo is now up. Andrew Varlamov demoed the second iteration of his live-programming editor for games, where N tiny processes can operate on the same shared state to make iteration easy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kb2...

youtube.com

Live coding games in a custom editor // Andrey Varlamov (Handmade Network Expo 2026)

YouTube video by Handmade Network

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 14/07/2026

Expo presentation number five! Cameron DaCamara is the creator of an editor called fred, which has a very powerful customization system and preserves the document’s entire edit history, even when you undo. youtube.com/watch?v=xz5a...

youtube.com

What if your editor shipped with a C compiler? // Cameron DaCamara (Handmade Network Expo 2026)

YouTube video by Handmade Network

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 09/07/2026

Time for our fourth Expo presentation! @leddoo.bsky.social has been working on a time travel debugger for macOS, and he used it LIVE to find a nasty (self-inflicted) bug in the Lua runtime. www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-UA...

youtube.com

What if your debugger could undo? // Leddoo (Handmade Network Expo 2026)

YouTube video by Handmade Network

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 07/07/2026

Time for the third presentation from the Handmade Network Expo! Gabriel Dechichi has been working on a custom game engine called Horizon Engine, and you can use it as a library, picking and choosing the layers you want. youtu.be/NTuLfB2ex5Q

youtu.be

A game engine you can use as a library // Gabriel Dechichi (Handmade Network Expo 2026)

YouTube video by Handmade Network

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 03/07/2026

The second presentation from the Handmade Network Expo is now live! @frogtoss.bsky.social has been building a real-time metaprogramming system with a custom IDE called Grain DDL. Zero dependencies, runs everywhere, small enough to check into source control. youtu.be/qfEzUnZlMIo

youtu.be

Live metaprogramming for games // Michael Labbé (Handmade Network Expo 2026)

YouTube video by Handmade Network

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 30/06/2026

The first video from the Handmade Network Expo is finally going live in just 15 minutes! Nic Barker and Anton Mikhailov have joined forces in a game studio called Ostrich Effect, and today they're ready to show their first game: an RTS with a programming twist. youtu.be/ibN3t5ahAF8

youtu.be

New game reveal! // Nic Barker and Anton Mikhailov (Handmade Network Expo 2026)

YouTube video by Handmade Network

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 03/05/2026

Today at 1pm CDT we will have a live recap show to celebrate the Handmade Essentials Jam from last month! It was our biggest jam ever and I’ll be interviewing several project creators + airing lots of demos. Join us at twitch.tv/HandmadeNetw...

twitch.tv

Twitch

Twitch is the world

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Reposted by Ben Visness

Ray @raysan5.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

I'm very excited to announce `raylib 6.0`! 😄 With +2000 commits and +200 contributors, this is the biggest release ever!💯 - Release details: github.com/raysan5/rayl... - Discord: discord.gg/raylib - Webpage: raylib.com **code once, play everywhere!**

raylib 6.0 release! code once, play everywhere!

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Reposted by Ben Visness

Ryan Hunt @eqrion.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

We’re building a user-friendly WebAssembly language reference on MDN! Want to help make Wasm more accessible? We’re looking for technical writers and reviewers to join the project. Start here if you're interested: github.com/mdn/mdn/issu...

github.com

Create a WebAssembly language reference · Issue #821 · mdn/mdn

WebAssembly has a work-in-progress language reference. It documents 1.0 instructions, reference-types, and nearly all of SIMD. I'm filing this to track the remaining gaps to get caught up to the cu...

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Reposted by Ben Visness

Michael Labbé @frogtoss.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

We are fortunate to have a Handmade event in Vancouver. The format is a mix of presentations and conversations -- if striving for great software is your thing, this is worth checking out.

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 14/04/2026

On June 6 we are hosting the Handmade Network Expo in Vancouver, BC, an event celebrating software made from scratch. Among the lineup: a new game from Anton Mikhailov & @nicbarker.com, a time travel debugger by @leddoo.bsky.social, a language and IDE from @frogtoss.bsky.social, and more. (1/2)

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Reposted by Ben Visness

Niklas Lundberg @datgame.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Ark VCS has finally reached 1.0! 🎉 youtu.be/XSnIw4siQ6U get it from ark-vcs.com

youtu.be

Ark 1.0 - Version Control is about to change

YouTube video by Nuno Afonso

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 07/04/2026

Next week we are hosting the Handmade Essentials Jam: a one-week jam where we build essential software from scratch, by hand. If you like building simple software, or want to get better at coding without AI, then sign up and join us next week: handmade.network/jam/essentials

handmade.network

Handmade Essentials Jam

Build simple programs you would use every day, from scratch, by hand. April 13 - 19, 2026.

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 27/02/2026

We at Mozilla feel that WebAssembly has been a second-class citizen on the web for long enough. You shouldn't have to go through JS to do everything. This is probably a lot of what I will be focusing on for work in 2026! hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/maki...

hacks.mozilla.org

Why is WebAssembly a second-class language on the web? – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog

This post is an expanded version of a presentation I gave at the recent WebAssembly CG meeting in Munich. WebAssembly has come a long way since its first release in 2017. The 1.0 version of WebAssembl...

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 03/07/2025

Inspiring words from the Handmade Network Discord today

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 02/07/2025

the one time git asks for my permission first is the one time it absolutely does not matter

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 16/06/2025

Oh also I forgot to post my jam project here on Bluesky - here's Buongiorno, my tool for mapping out mDNS and DNS-SD services. It captures mDNS packets to show a graph of services being requested and advertised, e.g. printers, AirPlay, Handoff, and more.

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 16/06/2025

The X-Ray Jam is complete! I had a great time and we have 10 lovely submissions you can look through: handmade.network/jam/x-ray-2025 We're planning a recap live show in the near future, so stay tuned for that.

handmade.network

X-Ray Jam

A jam to find out how software works on the inside. June 9 - 15 on the Handmade Network.

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 12/06/2025

Behold! A list of mDNS services in my house. (This is basically just the output of `avahi-browse`, so nothing too novel yet.)

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 11/06/2025

The things you learn from reading specs

The DNS-SD spec with the following highlighted: “a web server typically has multiple pages”

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 10/06/2025

The X-Ray Jam is underway (handmade.network/jam/x-ray-2025) and I am exploring mDNS. First step: testing if mDNS works on my printer. It does.

Highlighted printouts of mDNS-related articles and specs.

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 02/06/2025

The X-Ray Jam is just a week away! If you are interested in tools that dig into software internals then you should participate or at least follow along. handmade.network/jam/x-ray-2025

handmade.network

X-Ray Jam

A jam to find out how software works on the inside. June 9 - 15 on the Handmade Network.

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 19/05/2025

I have started to go down the compression rabbit hole. The compressor and decompressor are handwritten WASM. Uncompressed: 52MB Very stupid RLE: 182KB Slightly smarter RLE: 65KB

"Very stupid RLE", where runs of zeroes are collapsed but individual letters are spaced out by four bytes each

"Slightly smarter RLE", where long runs of unique characters are contiguous

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 26/04/2025

Sometimes you spend weeks on a performance optimization to get 0.5% faster. Other times you spend a day tweaking your GC code and get 15%+ faster.

Spreadsheet showing results from a Flutter benchmark, showcasing a 15%+ performance improvement.

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 08/03/2025

We're doing a Handmade podcast again! Our first episode of 2025 is an interview with aolo2, a web dev turned CPU engineer, about several apps he has made from scratch: a collaborative whiteboard, a Handmade Slack alternative, and a CPU trace viewer. www.youtube.com/watch?v=b74I...

youtube.com

How does a web dev become a CPU engineer? // Unwind Ep. 8

YouTube video by Handmade Network

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 19/02/2025

A file explorer called File Pilot just released in open beta yesterday: filepilot.tech It is so insanely fast that it makes you question how all other software is developed. The Handmade community does good work.

filepilot.tech

File Pilot - Next-gen file explorer

File Pilot is a file explorer built from scratch for light-speed performance, with a modern and robust interface.

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Ben Visness @bvisness.me · 15/01/2025

After working hard to get 64-bit WebAssembly released in browsers, I would now like to discourage most people from using it 😛 (My first post on the SpiderMonkey website btw, which is a fun milestone) spidermonkey.dev/blog/2025/01...

spidermonkey.dev

Is Memory64 actually worth using?

After many long years, the Memory64 proposal for WebAssembly has finally been released in both Firefox 134 and Chrome 133. In short, this proposal adds 64-bit pointers to WebAssembly.

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