For those of you who follow our Kickstarter backer updates for Firmament, you may remember when we introduced you to Abner Coimbre. Abner joined the Cyan crew as a senior engineer, bringing a wealth of programming experience, after stint at Thekla Inc. (the studio that created “Braid,” and “The Witness”) as well as NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
In his spare time, Abner was running Handmade Seattle, a systems programming conference with a mission to promote a particular ethos of software development:
It’s not a technique or a language or a management strategy, it isn’t a formula or a library or an abstraction. It’s an idea. The idea that we can build software that works with the computer, not against it. The idea that sometimes an individual programmer can be more productive than a large team, that a small group can do more than an army of software engineers and *do it better*. The idea that programming is about transforming data and we wield the code, the tool we use to bend that data to our will.
It doesn’t require a degree, or a dissertation, or a decade of experience. You don’t need an expensive computer or a certificate or even prior knowledge. All you need is an open mind and a sense of curiosity. We’ll help you with the rest.
(From the Handmade Manifesto, by Andrew Chronister)
Well, today we have both happy and sad news to report… Cyan is saying goodbye to Abner so he can focus on running his Handmade Seattle conference full-time! While this is obviously a bittersweet transition for us, we are really excited to see what he is able to accomplish, and are grateful to have benefited from his talents and skills in the time he was with us!
We know there are a lot of y’all that are members of the software development community, and we encourage you to check out what the Handmade Conference is all about. Abner is committed to keeping Handmade Seattle free of corporate sponsorship, so if any of this resonates with you, I know he would deeply appreciate your support of what he’s up to.
You can read more about Abner’s announcement here, and Handmade Seattle here. We are super inspired by Abner’s new adventure and can’t wait to see what he is able to accomplish!