Ben Visness
bvisness.me
Ben Visness
@bvisness.me
Handmade Network lead. WebAssembly engineer at Mozilla. Mentor for FRC Team 2175. https://bvisness.me/

Twitter: @its_bvisness
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Inspiring words from the Handmade Network Discord today
July 3, 2025 at 8:51 PM
the one time git asks for my permission first is the one time it absolutely does not matter
July 2, 2025 at 5:30 PM
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.
June 16, 2025 at 3:50 PM
The X-Ray Jam is complete! I had a great time and we have 10 lovely submissions you can look through: handmade.network/jam/x-ray-2025

We're planning a recap live show in the near future, so stay tuned for that.
X-Ray Jam
A jam to find out how software works on the inside. June 9 - 15 on the Handmade Network.
handmade.network
June 16, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Behold! A list of mDNS services in my house. (This is basically just the output of `avahi-browse`, so nothing too novel yet.)
June 12, 2025 at 2:56 AM
The things you learn from reading specs
June 11, 2025 at 2:04 AM
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.
June 9, 2025 at 11:27 PM
The X-Ray Jam is just a week away! If you are interested in tools that dig into software internals then you should participate or at least follow along.

handmade.network/jam/x-ray-2025
X-Ray Jam
A jam to find out how software works on the inside. June 9 - 15 on the Handmade Network.
handmade.network
June 2, 2025 at 5:47 PM
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
May 19, 2025 at 10:24 PM
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.
April 26, 2025 at 2:30 AM
We're doing a Handmade podcast again!

Our first episode of 2025 is an interview with aolo2, a web dev turned CPU engineer, about several apps he has made from scratch: a collaborative whiteboard, a Handmade Slack alternative, and a CPU trace viewer.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b74I...
How does a web dev become a CPU engineer? // Unwind Ep. 8
YouTube video by Handmade Network
www.youtube.com
March 8, 2025 at 4:26 PM
A file explorer called File Pilot just released in open beta yesterday: filepilot.tech

It is so insanely fast that it makes you question how all other software is developed. The Handmade community does good work.
File Pilot - Next-gen file explorer
File Pilot is a file explorer built from scratch for light-speed performance, with a modern and robust interface.
filepilot.tech
February 19, 2025 at 1:35 PM
After working hard to get 64-bit WebAssembly released in browsers, I would now like to discourage most people from using it 😛

(My first post on the SpiderMonkey website btw, which is a fun milestone)

spidermonkey.dev/blog/2025/01...
Is Memory64 actually worth using?
After many long years, the Memory64 proposal for WebAssembly has finally been released in both Firefox 134 and Chrome 133. In short, this proposal adds 64-bit pointers to WebAssembly.
spidermonkey.dev
January 15, 2025 at 10:00 PM