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Ben Visness

@bvisness.me

My help comes from the Lord. Handmade Network lead. WebAssembly engineer at Mozilla. Mentor for FRC Team 2175. bvisness.me Twitter (most active): @its_bvisness Mastodon: @bvisness@mastodon.gamedev.place

Posts Replies Media

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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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 · 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 · 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

Tweet from Fabian Giesen (@rygorous):

look, I'm sorry, but the rule is simple:
if you made something 2x faster, you might have done something smart
if you made something 100x faster, you definitely just stopped doing something stupid

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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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