Casey Muratori on Legendary Handmade Hero!

Episode Overview

• This episode provides a deep retrospective on Casey Muratori's influential programming series, Handmade Hero, exploring its accidental origins, its intended purpose as a real-world development record, and its unexpected impact on the programming community.
• Casey shares the profound personal cost of the decade-long project, revealing his long-held regret and negative feelings, which were dramatically reversed after receiving powerful in-person validation from developers he had inspired.
• The conversation delves into Casey's core philosophies on programming education, game design, and software quality, critiquing modern practices that prioritize abstraction over problem-solving and lead to degrading software.
• It also covers the practical realities of creating educational content, from the limitations of livestreaming for deep work to the economic viability of a subscription-based model like his "Computer Enhance" series.

Key Concepts

• Origin of Handmade Hero: The series was not a pre-planned educational effort but an "academic exercise" created in response to audience demand after Jonathan Blow began streaming his compiler development. Its famous "Intro to C" segment was merely a test for the streaming setup.
• Purpose vs. Reality: The initial goal was to create an unedited dataset of a professional programmer's process for analysis, contrasting with polished conference talks. However, it evolved into a significant educational resource.
• Game Design vs. Programming: A clear distinction is made between the skill of programming (the focus of Handmade Hero) and the skill of game design, which involves a daily process of making small, meaningful creative decisions.
• The Library Dilemma: The series intentionally avoided external libraries to teach fundamentals. The key programming skill taught is not to avoid all libraries, but to develop the wisdom to discern which ones are beneficial versus those that become long-term liabilities (like Boost).
• The "Pair Programming" Effect: The livestream format, while limiting deep focus, benefited from the collective knowledge of the community chat, with experts providing esoteric information that accelerated development.
• Online Discourse and Personal Toll: The discussion highlights the mentally draining nature of online technical debates, which Casey found miserable due to his personal investment in the topics.
• The BSC 2025 Turning Point: Casey's perspective on Handmade Hero transformed from a decade of regret to a sense of profound accomplishment after developers of major projects (Odin, RAD Debugger) told him in person that his series was their direct inspiration.
• Critique of Modern Programming Education: Casey argues that modern education inverts the proper learning process by teaching heavy abstractions first, rather than focusing on solving a concrete problem and letting abstractions emerge naturally.
• Viability of Educational Content: The success of the "Computer Enhance" project proved that full-time, high-value educational programming content can be economically sustainable through a subscription-based model.
• Declining Software Quality: A lamentation on the current state of the software industry, where updates frequently degrade functionality and performance, attributed in part to flawed educational and development methodologies.

Quotes

• At 0:00 - "Like I felt like this this series was like all lost for me and no gain really... I felt strongly negative about the series I would say." - Casey expresses his personal negative feelings and sense of sacrifice regarding the Handmade Hero project.
• At 0:40 - "If that really is true... then probably Handmade Hero is the most important thing I'll ever do." - Casey acknowledges that despite his personal regrets, the series' positive influence on other developers and their projects might make it his most significant life's work.
• At 4:48 - "People started asking me when I was going to do a Twitch stream. That's actually what happened. So if anyone wants to know why there's any Handmade Hero at all, it's because of John." - Casey explains that the series only began because Jonathan Blow's audience started asking him to stream as well.
• At 5:48 - "My idea for it was really just so that if you wrote something... you could go back and see, okay, what mistakes did I make and like how could I have optimized that process?" - Casey clarifies that his original motivation was to create a real, unedited record of the development process for analysis, rather than a tutorial.
• At 11:13 - "No, actually. That is not what happened. I started with Intro to C because I needed to test the streaming setup." - Casey reveals that the introductory C programming episodes were not part of the original plan but were created simply to ensure his streaming technology was working.
• At 23:55 - "So the behavior that you need to train if you wanted to be a great game designer is how do I do something meaningful every day that resolves some of this decision making and pushes the game in a correct direction towards being great." - Casey defines the core, practical skill of game design as a daily, iterative process rather than a retrospective analysis.
• At 25:47 - "There's really no way to get around the fact that the way I actually develop those things is I'm programming for many hours at a time, fairly uninterrupted." - He contrasts the choppy, one-hour-a-day format of the stream with his real-world, more effective workflow that involves deep, sustained focus.
• At 33:07 - "You need to be someone who knows that you don't use Boost... you need to be someone who knows the difference between a library that will save you time and one that won't." - Casey clarifies that the important skill is not a dogmatic refusal to use libraries, but the wisdom to evaluate them and avoid those that become a long-term burden.
• At 37:23 - "You gain this extra ability that you don't have because some really great programmers... it's the same as if you happen to work at a company... and one of your team members is really great at that thing you're doing, they can help you do a better job." - Casey explains the benefit of the stream's community, which effectively acted as a form of pair programming, with experts providing valuable insights in the chat.
• At 54:30 - "I think I'm just too close to it. Like, I care too much about whether people know these things and get them right." - Casey reflects on why he finds online discourse so draining, stating that his personal investment in the topics makes it impossible for him to be detached.
• At 56:40 - "The percentage of programmers nowadays who like care about not having, you know, 800,000 assembly language instructions get run just to add two numbers together is actually much higher today than it was, I think, when Handmade Hero started." - Casey acknowledges that despite the negative aspects of the discourse, the collective effort to promote performance-aware programming has had a positive, tangible effect on the community.
• At 1:01:06 - "For... almost 10 years, I would say that the cumulative effect of Handmade Hero was largely negative... I felt like it was all loss for me and no gain." - Casey candidly shares his initial, long-held negative feelings about the personal impact of running the Handmade Hero series for a decade.
• At 1:01:51 - "It's the one thing I wouldn't do. Like if I went back in my career, I would not have done Handmade Hero." - Casey emphasizes the depth of his previous regret over starting the project, stemming from the draining and negative experiences associated with it.
• At 1:03:04 - "If it really, if somehow I'm really supposed to believe that all of these people would have made different choices in their life had they not... watched that series... then probably Handmade Hero is the most important thing I'll ever do." - Casey reflects on the immense impact of his work after realizing it inspired foundational projects like the RAD Debugger, File-Pilot, and the Odin language.
• At 82:45 - "Don't call memcpy. Always call memcpy. Or whatever. You find like complete— and it's like, that's not how we deal with performance, people, right? Like, that's not how this works." - Casey Muratori mocking the contradictory and overly simplistic performance advice often given to programmers.
• At 90:17 - "I would pick something very simple with a spec... we are re-implementing X, where X is just a known game that we pick... so there's no game design." - Describing how he would approach a "Handmade Hero 2.0," focusing on a predefined project to streamline the educational content.
• At 98:46 - "I think really that is the value of Handmade Hero, is that demystification. It's just saying, 'Oh yeah, like if you're a capable person, you can just learn this stuff.'" - Casey Muratori identifying what he believes is the most important takeaway from his programming series: empowering people by showing the process is understandable.
• At 101:42 - "It inverted the order in which you're supposed to do things... You don't start by conceptualizing a ton of objects and having them talk to each other... You start by figuring out what it is you need to do." - Criticizing modern programming education for teaching abstractions first, arguing that programmers should start with the problem and let abstractions emerge naturally.
• At 112:51 - "Things are breaking, they're degrading. When you get a new version of Windows, you expect it to work worse than the version you had before, but you don't have a choice." - Expressing frustration with the declining quality and reliability of modern software, using Windows updates as a prime example.

Takeaways

• Approach programming by focusing on the concrete problem first; allow abstractions to emerge naturally from the solution, rather than starting with abstract frameworks.
• The greatest value in teaching a complex craft is demystification—showing that the process is understandable and achievable for any capable person.
• When creating educational content, consider choosing a well-defined, classic project to clone. This removes the burden of design and allows for a pure focus on the implementation process.
• True game design skill is not retrospective analysis but a daily practice of making small, meaningful decisions that move a project forward.
• Learn to critically evaluate third-party libraries. The goal is not to avoid them dogmatically but to identify which tools save time versus which create long-term technical debt.
• The most impactful projects can arise from unexpected origins; don't wait for a perfect plan before starting something that could be valuable.
• Avoid dogmatic, "always/never" rules when it comes to performance optimization; context is crucial, and the correct approach is situational.
• Be mindful of the significant personal and emotional cost of engaging in online technical debates, especially if you are deeply invested in the subject matter.
• Direct, in-person feedback is invaluable for understanding the true impact of your work, as online discourse often obscures positive influence.
• Leverage the collective intelligence of a community when working in public; the "pair programming" effect can provide crucial insights you might have missed alone.
• For creators, a subscription model can make niche, high-value educational content economically sustainable and accessible to a wider audience.