Handmade Folks!

To the readers in the US—happy 4th of July weekend 🎊. I wanted to take this extended break to give you important updates on Handmade Seattle 2021.

The Venue: Nesholm Family Lecture Hall

As you know we are the spiritual successor to Casey Muratori's Handmade Con. Casey's last con took place at the Nesholm Family Lecture Hall and I thought we'd pay homage to his legacy by having everyone reconvene:

Handmade Con 2016 took place in this historic hall.

It accommodates about 400 guests with a private lobby entrance. We're also paying for faster Internet for the online track which requires fancy live video production and streaming. Phew! We're hiring a professional in the community to help us on that front. More details to come.

All that to say the year is shaping up to be something special!

⚠ There's A LOT of pent up demand to travel and meet fellow low-level programmers, so tickets are selling rapidly. We ask you not to wait 'til the last minute: take a leap of faith and register early!

💪 More Independence: The Invite System

Last time I gushed how Handmade Seattle personally consumes Stripe's webhooks to generate your ticket. Instead of exposing your purchasing actions to Eventbrite or Ticketmaster we just keep that stuff in-house.

Now we've gone a step further in independence: a command-line app that triggers an e-mail like this one:

The speaker would see their own e-mail address instead of mine.

This special invite takes the speaker to a private page to sign, punch in their info, and receive confirmation. It's worth repeating: it's backed by our own servers, bolstering Handmade's independence.

For some of you this operational work is a snooze, but make no mistake: it is crucial. A parallel threat to declining software quality is the depraved sharing of your online habits. I genuinely think this. And I'm hellbent to solve it for ourselves as the conference gets bigger.

🕰 Conference Schedule

Next time we meet will be to discuss the actual schedule—about our speakers, our demos so far, and how this 2-day conference will look like on the ground. I'm feeling pretty thrilled about it.

We're still looking for contributors: reply to this e-mail if you have a software demo or something you'd like to share with the world. Not everyone is guaranteed the "fancy" speaker slot, but demo slots are very popular too so there's a shot for you regardless.

Finally, I'm catching up to a lot of e-mail this weekend. If you haven't received a reply from me, you should get one very soon.

Yours,

Abner