---
title: "About Handmade Cities"
meta_title: "About"
layout: "about"
description: "About Handmade Cities"
draft: false

features:
  - title: "About Handmade Cities"
    title_class: "mb-20 text-center text-white"
    image: ""
    side: "center"
    content_class: "mt-16 mb-12"
    bg_img: 
      parallax: true
      img: "/images/starry_night.png"
    grid:
      - title: "Sponsor-free tech events"
        content: "**100% indie.** We reject sponsorship because we must be allowed to criticize anyone’s software. Accepting “free” bags of money destroys our ability to change the software industry."
        color: "#FC6D36"
        content_class: "text-white"
      - title: "An obligation to software quality"
        content: "The industry’s incentives erode ownership to extract rent from consumers. We’ve abandoned the love for our craft, the user's quality of experience, and their right to privacy."
        color: "#A456EA"        
        content_class: "text-white"
      - title: "Self-host wherever possible"
        content: "Essential services for our conferences and meetups are processed in-house. For example, our servers personally generate your conference ticket—removing spying middlemen like Ticketmaster."
        color: "#6B8EE8"        
        content_class: "text-white"
      - title: "Direct funding approach"
        content: "We grow through obvious means, funded primarily through ticket sales, followed by independent donations and fixed-rate job booth rentals: straightforward, mom-and-pop transactions."
        color: "#60E3C4"                
        content_class: "text-white"
    button:
      enable: false
      label: "Founder's Vision"
      link: "/founders-vision"
      icon: "fa fa-ticket pl-2"
      class: "btn text-white meetups-bg"

  - title: "Abner Coimbre"
    title_class: "text-white -mt-2"
    subtitle: "Founder"
    subtitle_class: "!text-[#F7CE3B]"
    image: "/images/people/abner_2024.png"
    section_class: "text-white"
    transition:
      start: "/images/transition3.svg"
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    content_class: "mt-4"
    content: "[Abner](https://abner.page) is founder of Handmade Cities and the sole organizer for our conferences.<br><br>At a young age he was mentored by Kennedy Space Center on how they make software. After winning NASA’s Intern of the Year, Abner penned an essay on their programming philosophy: featured in the [news](https://observer.com/2017/07/a-look-into-nasa-coding-philosophy-kennedy-space-center-programming/). He was subsequently promoted to launch control engineer.<br><br>Abner started the [Handmade Network](https://handmade.network/), an online community learning to make quality software. He went on to work under Jonathan Blow for several years and finally Cyan Worlds to ship the [Myst remake](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1255560/Myst/).<br><br>Now in his early thirties, Abner's mounting concern of declining software standards—both ethical and technical—pushed him to run conferences and grow meetups full-time. (He still loves [programming](https://terminal.click) though.)"

  - title: "Mr. Perkins"
    title_class: "text-white"
    subtitle: "Secretary"
    subtitle_class: "!text-[#F7CE3B]"
    bg_color: "#060610"
    image: "/images/people/perkins.png"
    image_class: "rounded-full"
    content_class: ""
    section_class: "!pt-16 !pb-32 text-white"
    content: "Mr. Perkins is Abner's year round part-time assistant, usually plowing through the backlog of texts, emails and invoices."  
---