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by Yokohiii 159 days ago
I assume you have absolutely no clue what it refers to.

Handmade Hero is a long running yt series by Casey Muratori. He builds a game engine from scratch, no cheats, no shortcuts, straight to the metal (from C-ish perspective). So you learn how to deal with computers to achieve things, fast and efficient, by understanding computers.

At some point Casey thought it was a failure and a waste of time. But to his surprise quite a fanbase evolved around it and it turned that it really helped people to go from zero to "hero". The handmade "movement" relates to this timeline and the aftermath of people thriving from it. My rough definition of "Handmade" dev mentality would be: Ignore the things that seem to make things "easy" (high level software) and learn the actual thing. So you learn what a framebuffer is instead of looking for a drawing api, applicable to different contexts.

That being said is that this foundation doesn't seem to be endorsed by Casey. Their mission goals seem quite shallow, if at all.

1 comments

> no cheats, no shortcuts, straight to the metal (from C-ish perspective)

Not the person you replied to but even when I stumbled over this (the network, not the game) for the first time, I was left wondering where the line is drawn.

> You can learn how computers actually work, so you can unleash the full potential of modern systems. You can dig deep into the tech stack and learn what others take for granted.

Just.. no libraries? Are modern languages with batteries included ok? What makes a library for C worse than using Python? Is using Python too bloated already? Why is C ok and I don't have to bootstrap a compiler first? (E.g. building with Rust is a terrible experience from a performance perspective, the resulting software can be really nice and small)

I'm not even trying to be antagonistic, I simply don't understand. I'm just not willing to accept "you'll notice when you see it" as an example.