hand tools

Tim Ewald's Clojure/conj talk uses furniture making with hand tools versus machine tools as an allegory for software. It explores how automation changes what we make and how we think about our work, and why Clojure's small set of simple tools matters.

A condensed film of Dick Proenneke's footage of building a cabin and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, using hand tools and local materials. It draws on the 8mm films he shot himself.

Stuff Made Here builds a handwriting robot and sends its output to a handwriting expert to see whether it can pass as forgery. It walks through the engineering trials and errors along the way.

Paul Irish and Pavel Feldman present the newest Chrome Dev Tools features at Google I/O 2011, including live CSS editing, saving changes, breakpoints and network analysis. It also covers remote debugging.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.

Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang, gives a GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on building fault-tolerant systems. He covers what to do and avoid when handling errors, arguing for letting processes fail and recover.

Primitive Technology shows building a cord drill from scratch and then upgrading it to a pump drill, using only primitive materials like a stone flywheel and cord.

Bret Victor's talk on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. It argues that visualization tools offer either the directness of hand drawing or the dynamics of programmed graphics, and shows a tool that combines both.

Pat Wyatt, a veteran game programmer who worked at Blizzard and ArenaNet, speaks at HandmadeCon 2015 in a conversation with Casey Muratori. He discusses network code and architecture in games he worked on, including mistakes on Diablo and the success of Guild Wars.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett visits Google to discuss his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, describing thought experiments and thinking tools across psychology, biology, computer science and physics.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Andy Matuschak on how he learns, why memorization matters for understanding, and why most learning tools fail. The conversation also covers handling confusion and the role of tutoring.

A spectrogram visualization of the sounds in a dial-up modem handshake, with an annotated image explaining each noise. It shows how the handshake's tones map to the negotiation steps.

A one-minute clip of Alexander Overwijk drawing a near-perfect freehand circle, one metre across, in under a second on a chalkboard. He is a repeat winner of the World Freehand Circle Drawing Championship.

The Primitive Technology channel shows the making of a stone axe (celt) using only primitive tools and materials, from shaping and polishing a basalt head to making the wooden handle and hafting it.

Max Brunsfeld introduces Tree-sitter, a parsing system for developer tools that offers incremental parsing and robust error recovery through a uniform C API. The talk explains the design, based on LR extended to GLR parsing.

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.

Chandler Carruth walks through tuning C++ performance, from writing benchmarks to analyzing results on real CPUs and compilers. It focuses on small-scale problems such as loop kernels, data structures and algorithms, and on keeping compilers from optimizing benchmarks away.

SuperfastMatt looks at how the Tesla Model S retracting door handles were redesigned over time, from many parts to a motor plus sensor, with a focus on engineering and reliability.

A three-minute demonstration of professional hand-soldering techniques for multi-lead surface mount parts, to IPC class 3 criteria.

A short clip of Casey Muratori from Handmade Hero explaining why he rejects the object-oriented mindset and how to move away from it. It is part rant, part programming philosophy.

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.

Max Brunsfeld of GitHub presents Tree-sitter, a parsing system for programming tools that supports incremental, error-tolerant parsing. He demos its integration into GitHub.com and Atom for syntax highlighting and code navigation.

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

A short demo from the Ishikawa Komuro Lab of a high-speed robot hand paired with a 1000fps vision system performing dexterous manipulation. It shows what very low-latency vision and actuation can do.

Mike Acton, in a HandmadeCon 2015 interview with Casey Muratori, discusses game engine development, hiring and learning on your own.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk on designing hybrid data structures for performance. He covers cache locality, working-set size and allocation overhead, and why standard C++ containers fall short.

A one-minute clip of Diego Maradona's 'Hand of God' goal against England at the 1986 World Cup. It is part of a ClassicEngland series of unforgettable moments.

A short Boston Dynamics demo of Handle, a wheeled mobile manipulation robot that builds and unloads mixed-box pallets in a warehouse. It uses vision to find boxes and force control to place them against neighbors.

The Godot Engine 2022 showreel of apps and tools built with Godot, with a timestamped list of each project. It shows the engine being used well beyond games.

A short animation that pairs the sound of a dialup modem handshake with a graphic explaining what each phase of the sound means.

A 47-minute restoration of a 1920s IBM computing cheese cutter, a machine with parts patented between 1901 and 1907. The video covers the restoration work and explains why it is a computing cheese cutter.

A beginner-focused tutorial on freehand knife sharpening with a single stone, aiming for a shaving-sharp edge in about five minutes.

Mark Handley of UCL looks at how SpaceX's November 2018 revisions to the Starlink constellation affect network behavior. The video visualizes the orbits and routing and estimates latencies, building on his earlier video and research paper.

Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.

Bret Victor's talk "Inventing on Principle" argues that creators should find a guiding principle to fight for. He shows demos of immediate-feedback tools, such as live-updating code and animation editors.

Stuart Halloway introduces REBL, a graphical, interactive tool for browsing Clojure data, extracted from Datomic tools. The talk is from Clojure/conj 2018.

A HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.

A 1936 Chevrolet promotional drama, 'Master Hands', showing car manufacturing from foundry to finished vehicle in Flint, Michigan. It is a National Film Registry selection and a record of early mass production.

Peter Hutterer's linux.conf.au 2020 talk on creating libinput, the unified userspace input library, and the difficulties of handling the many quirks of input devices.

A short video of a man moving a 20 ton stone block by himself using wood and levers. It is part of a pyramid-mysteries channel.