from scratch

Andrej Karpathy builds a GPT from scratch in code, following Attention Is All You Need and GPT-2/3, in about two hours using PyTorch. He connects it to ChatGPT and assumes familiarity with his earlier makemore videos.

Ben Eater starts a series building a working computer on breadboards around the 6502 microprocessor. In this first part he gets a 'hello world' running from scratch.

The first stream in the Emacs From Scratch series, building a custom Emacs configuration from zero while teaching basics. It covers a usable baseline setup and the packages for completion, themes and productivity.

The first episode of a screencast series building djb's redo build system from scratch in Haskell. It explains the purpose of redo, writes initial code and sets up a GitHub repository.

Tsoding live-codes a JSON parser from scratch in Haskell in about 111 lines, using only the standard library. It is an edited Twitch stream that explains the intuition behind parser combinators, functors, applicatives and monads.

A walkthrough of installing Synapse, Riot and Jitsi from scratch on Debian to run your own Matrix communication service. The description warns it is now quite outdated and links to updated material.

Ben Eater shows how to build logic gates out of transistors, including NOR gates. It is part of his clear hardware-from-scratch teaching style.

David Beazley's PyCon 2019 tutorial derives the lambda calculus from the ground up in Python, using only single-argument functions. He builds booleans, numerals and more with no other language features.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make radiative sky cooling paint from grocery and hardware store materials, including a novel calcium carbonate microsphere synthesis. The paint can cool a surface below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight without electricity.

Big Clive shows how to pick up discarded disposable vape devices from the roadside and extract the rechargeable lithium cells inside. He explains why these devices contain the same circuitry as rechargeable ones and how to reuse the cells.

Day 21 of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, which covers loading game code dynamically from a DLL on Windows. He builds hot reloading of C game code from scratch in about an hour and a half.

Dodoid gives an in-depth look at an SGI Onyx RealityEngine2, a $250,000 graphics supercomputer from 1993, covering its history, a physical overview, a teardown and some demos and games.

Loopop reviews the Polyend Tracker hardware tracker-style sequencer and walks through a tutorial from sampling to finishing a song. It covers most of the device's features.

Ben Eater explains how VGA signals work and builds a breadboard circuit that produces correct sync timing so a monitor recognizes the signal. He then builds toward displaying an image from simple logic chips.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.

Inigo Quilez live-paints a mountain landscape using only math in a shader, building up from a basic polynomial noise surface through fractal terrain, lighting and atmosphere. The code runs in real time on Shadertoy so viewers can edit it as they follow along.

Bisqwit builds a Doom or Duke Nukem 3D style software-rendered 3D engine in C from scratch, supporting non-Euclidean geometry. It covers vector rotation and portal rendering with sped-up, tool-assisted coding.

Day 1 of Handmade Hero's introduction to C on Windows, covering setting up Visual Studio, creating a Win32 project, the WinMain entry point and writing a first function. It is the starting point for Casey Muratori's from-scratch game series.

Jim Pavloff rebuilds the Prodigy track Smack My Bitch Up in Ableton, identifying the samples used and recreating the track by hand.

Day 1 of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, a live-coded game built from scratch in C on Windows. It reviews C on Windows, sets up a minimal build system and WinMain entry point, and shows a first MessageBox.

David Beazley's workshop screencast builds asynchronous programming in Python from scratch, starting from callbacks and continuations and replacing threads to show how concurrency works underneath.

Ben Vallack walks through designing a custom keyboard PCB from scratch using Ergogen and KiCad, ending with a gerber file ready to order from a PCB fabricator. The example is a split keyboard.

Bisqwit writes a raytracer from scratch in C++ for DOS, rendering in the 16-color VGA palette at 640x480. The video also covers color quantization and ordered dithering.

Andrej Karpathy builds a bigram character-level language model from scratch, introducing torch.Tensor and the framework of training, sampling and loss evaluation. It is the first step toward a GPT-style Transformer in his makemore series.

Inigo Quilez live-codes the "Happy Jumping" animated scene in a Shadertoy GLSL shader over about six hours. He builds the raymarched character step by step, explaining the math and procedural techniques, with checkpoints linked for each stage.

Kenneth Finnegan shows how USB-C Power Delivery trigger boards like the ZY12PDN negotiate 5V to 20V so you can power projects from a USB-C charger, including the color coding for each voltage.

Jon Gjengset's roughly four-hour live stream implementing part of a BitTorrent client in Rust, following CodeCrafters' test-guided challenge. He builds from scratch and shows idiomatic error handling along the way.

Russ Cox gives a 23-minute tour of the Acme text editor from Plan 9, showing its mouse-driven interface, executing commands from text, and its filesystem-based interface to other programs.

A 1930s Chevrolet training film explaining the principles and development of the differential gear. It builds the idea step by step from first principles to the finished mechanism.

A reupload of Joel Spolsky's talk teaching spreadsheet users the Excel features they are probably missing, such as keyboard navigation, named ranges, tables and lookups. The original disappeared and this copy comes from the Wayback Machine.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

A short video of stretching and hand exercises for preventing and easing tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome, from a percussion teacher. The exercises were shown to him by a doctor.

Imphenzia's 83-minute tutorial covers the low poly modeling techniques he learned over five years of Blender use, with timestamps from navigation and extrusion onward. It uses Blender 2.83 with default keys.

A University of Michigan Medicine demonstration of building a cheap DIY air purifier from a box fan and a HEPA or high-MERV filter using hardware-store parts. It explains why this helps against dust, smoke and viruses and ties it to local air quality readings.

A roughly 90-minute film of John Dobson building a Dobsonian telescope step by step, including hand-grinding the mirror.

The first episode of Clickspring's series building a John Wilding skeleton clock from raw stock in a home machine shop. It covers making the frames along with the tools needed for the job.

Ian Hubert shows quick, unconventional tricks for greenscreen compositing in Blender, as a follow-up to his motion tracking video.

George Brocklehurst of thoughtbot demonstrates Vim's built-in completion mechanisms, from word, line and block completion to ctags. The aim is to type less and make fewer typos.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build flat panel speakers from exciters and foam board, with construction guidelines, measured SPL comparisons and a complete system playing music.

Jon Gjengset's long live-coding stream explains Rust's Pin and Unpin types: why they exist, how they work, and how they connect to futures and async/await. It also covers moving from pre-pinning code to the new model.