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+
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+ “What I cannot create,
I do not understand.”
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+ - Richard Feynman
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Computers are amazing.
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Computing has changed our lives for the better. Computers allow us to learn, connect with each other, and express ourselves in amazing new ways. And every year our devices get more powerful, less expensive, and more accessible - computers today can do things we hardly dreamed of twenty years ago.
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Computing has changed our lives for the better. Computers allow us to learn, connect with each other, and express ourselves in amazing new ways. And every year our devices get more powerful, less expensive, and more accessible – computers today can do things we hardly dreamed of twenty years ago.
So why is software so terrible?
Why do high-end gaming PCs struggle to browse the web at 60 frames per second? Why does a simple calculator need a splash screen? Why does your phone's battery still die so quickly? And why does each update make the problem worse?
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So why is software so terrible?
We made it terrible.
We, programmers, have made it terrible through our thoughtless behavior. We rewrite our apps in new languages, and rather than measure anything, we just assume it will be better. We ship thousands of dependencies to our users to save ourselves a few minutes of effort. We build towers of abstractions, forget how they work, and then build new ones on top.
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This isn't engineering. We're building Rube Goldberg machines, and users are paying the cost.
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You may have learned that programming is about classes, monads, or type systems. You may have been taught to make your code clean, abstract, and future-proof. None of that matters when the end result is garbage.
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This isn't engineering. We're building Rube Goldberg machines, and everyone is paying the cost.
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You may have learned that programming is about classes, monads, or type systems. You may have been taught to make your code clean, abstract, and future-proof.
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None of that matters when the end result is garbage.
But there is another way.
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You can break out of this cycle. 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. When you run into a wall, rather than stop, you can dig under it.
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This is our mission. You don't have to be a genius to make your software better - you just have to be willing to learn and willing to go against conventions. We're here to teach you, to inspire you, to help you break free from the mess of modern software development and make software the Handmade way.
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You can break out of this cycle. 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. When you run into a wall, rather than stop, you can climb over it – or dig under it.
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This is our mission. You don't have to be a genius to make your software better – you just have to be willing to learn and willing to go against conventions. And you don't have to depend on AI – computers are not magic, and you can just learn how they work. We're here to teach you, to inspire you, to help you break free from the mess of modern software development and make software the Handmade way.
So join us.
We know how much better software can be. The industry needs to change, and we're going to lead the way. Join us, and learn to build software by hand.
diff --git a/src/templates/src/values.html b/src/templates/src/values.html
index 0c484f69..c8e98e97 100644
--- a/src/templates/src/values.html
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Our Values
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- “What I cannot create,
I do not understand.”
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- - Richard Feynman
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We love learning how things work.
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Many programmers are afraid of learning how computers work behind the scenes—but not us. We are driven to understand how systems work at every layer of the stack.
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If someone gives us JavaScript, we’ll dig deeper into the runtime. If someone gives us C++, we’ll dig deeper into the machine code. If someone gives us machine code, we’ll dig deeper into the microarchitecture. There is a real computer behind our magic abstractions, and we want to understand what makes it tick.
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Many programmers are afraid of learning how computers work behind the scenes, but not us. We are driven to understand how systems work at every layer of the stack.
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If someone gives us JavaScript, we will dig deeper into the engine. If someone gives us C++, we will dig deeper into the machine code. If someone gives us machine code, we will dig deeper into the microarchitecture. There is a real computer behind our magic abstractions, and we love to learn what makes it tick.
We like to reinvent the wheel.
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Many programmers think that writing software from scratch is a waste of time. They will criticize you for “reinventing the wheel”. They think that the hard problems have already been solved.
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But programming is a very young field. Much of the world’s software is a first draft. There is so much room to innovate, and the only way to innovate is by trying new approaches to familiar problems.
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As Casey Muratori said on day 1 of Handmade Hero, nothing we have developed in the past 30 years is a “wheel”. Our software today is like a bicycle with square wheels, awkwardly clunking along. To make better software, we must reinvent the wheel, and we love that challenge.
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Many programmers think writing software from scratch is a waste of time. They will criticize you for “reinventing the wheel”. They think the hard problems have already been solved.
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But programming is a very young field! Much of the world’s software is a first draft. There is so much room to innovate, and the only way to innovate is by trying new approaches to familiar problems.
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As Casey Muratori said on day 1 of Handmade Hero, nothing we have developed in the past 30 years is a “wheel”. Software today is like a bicycle with square wheels, awkwardly clunking along. To make better software, we must reinvent the wheel, and we love that challenge.
We don’t make excuses for bad software.
There is no excuse for bad software. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. If it’s slow, it’s slow. No amount of excuses can make up for software that doesn’t work the way it should.
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We value competence.
We like to be self-sufficient.
We like to build things ourselves. We don’t care if someone else has already made a library or a framework for us. We’d rather write the code that we need, when we need it, and learn from what others have built instead of using it blindly.
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We like to write the code ourselves.
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High-level programming wisdom is born from years of lower-level work. You don't know how to build a system until you've built it by hand a few times. It may be easy to use a library or prompt an AI, but by doing so you rob yourself of the understanding that makes it worthwhile.
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We question “best practices”.
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We don’t contort our code in weird ways, write useless tests, or type a bunch of boilerplate unless we understand why. We strive to be experts, not to blindly trust those who claim to be.
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After all, if the “best practices” still produce terrible software, maybe the “best practices” are wrong.
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We don’t turn our code inside out, write useless tests, or type a bunch of boilerplate unless we understand why. We strive to be experts, not to blindly trust those who claim to be.
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After all, if the “best practices” still produce terrible software, maybe it’s the “best practices” that are wrong.
We are not “language people”.
We are not “C programmers”, “C++ programmers”, “Rust programmers”, or “web programmers”. We are programmers, and languages are tools. What actually matters is how the software works, not how the software is created.
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We value the user more than the programmer.
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We value the user above the programmer.
The user doesn’t care about the code. The user is not impressed by how elegant our programs are, or how quickly we wrote them. They only care if their software works, and works well.
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We are happy when the user is happy.
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Users can feel when software was made with care and craft. They can also feel when it was made without. Nothing we do as programmers matters unless it produces actually good software.