What we’re about
Meetups are 1st Saturday of the month!
Welcome to Handmade Meetups DC, a part of the Handmade Cities Initiative. Our mission is to deepen our understanding of the underlying platforms our code runs on, because we've found that this knowledge helps us create better software. We use different programming languages and work on different platforms, but we all share an insatiable curiosity for details often overshadowed by abstraction.
At the heart of our community is a passion for learning that is realized through the 'handmade' approach to project creation. This means engaging directly with the platform our software runs on, favoring a foundational understanding of programming instead of an over-reliance on libraries and frameworks, and/or choosing our dependencies deliberately.
Our meetups are designed as forums for knowledge exchange and collaboration. They feature presentations, project demos and discussions. Common topics include game development, graphics, operating systems, network programming, compilers, embedded systems, and beyond.
We aim to expand the collective expertise in low-level areas, increasing opportunities for innovation in these spaces.
We want to use our knowledge to:
- Innovate in lower-level spaces
- Help our colleagues outside of the group
- Give end users the best possible software
- Develop easier-to-understand systems so that knowledge can be transferred more effectively
