At Glitch, we know the web is better when everyone can express themselves, so we’re thrilled to see the community create projects during Pride as an opportunity to honor LGBTQIA+ history and help others show the world who they are.

The current rainbow flag was first popularized by Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco-based artist, in 1978. Since then, it’s been used at Pride events all over the world. Thanks to Glitch user Jack Preston (@unwitting), now you can change your Twitter banner to this famous flag. Connect the app with your Twitter account to get started!

There are many flag variations used to represent the spectrum of the LGBTQIA+ community, and this month is a great time to raise awareness about them all.

Glitch user Noelle Leigh (@noahleigh) created an app to add a circular transgender pride frame to your profile picture, which you can then upload to Twitter, YouTube, or any other website which displays your profile picture in a circle.

Noelle’s app was such a hit that it has also been remixed by other Glitch users to create frames for lesbian, bisexual, non-binary, and genderfluid people as well! Check them out below!

In the LGBTQIA+ community, transgender people can face an extreme degree of discrimination and bias when it comes to healthcare. Finding an understanding medical professional is important, and thanks to Glitch user Uve Avanto (@uveavanto), there’s now a resource which can make this process a lot easier.

Trans GP Finder uses Google Maps along with data pulled from Transfigurations — a transgender support group based in Devon, UK — to list trans-friendly doctors and general practitioners throughout the United Kingdom. According to Uve, The app was built during Trans*Code, the UK’s only hack event series focused solely on transgender issues and opportunities.

LGBTQIA+ Pride Month is in June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots in New York City and their impact on the world. We love this VR experience from Katie Huras (@katiehuras) which is a 360-degree view of Yonge Street, the location of Toronto’s annual Pride parade.

As you look around, you can interact with tiles which give you quick audio lessons on the Stonewall Riots, the Gay Activist newspaper from the Gay Activists Alliance, and Toronto’s gay pride parade. This type of visual storytelling allows users to become immersed in all kinds of locations and can really make history come alive!

Glitch is a friendly place for everyone, and these projects are just a sample of what our community is creating here. Remix any of these projects and show the world who you are! You got this! 😄

Show Your Pride!

Creative Expression with Omayeli "Yeli" Arenyeka: A Glitch Creator Profile

Omayeli Arenyeka, better known as Yeli, is a creative technologist. From Lagos in Nigeria, she’s currently “playing with data” at the Recurse Center in NYC.

Despite holding a Computer Science degree from NYU and having worked as a Software Engineer at LinkedIn, she doesn’t think of herself as a coder but “more of an artist that uses code as a tool”.

She deploys that tool to explore the intersection of art, design and technology — creating disparate projects that range from Twitter bots to data analysis and visualizations.

Let’s take a look at some of her projects!

Y-Under-Y
A bot that generates awards for everyone. Created as a response to youth-obsessed culture and a societal pressure to accomplish things by a certain age.

It borrows the syntax of the famed Forbes ‘30 under 30’ but lists awards for any age.

Art-Connoisseur
A bot that generates tweets interpreting art, juxtaposing those interpretations with images from Artsy.

Twit-Original
A project which analyses your tweets determining whether you’re a tweeter or retweeter. Try it out:

A common thread between these otherwise unrelated projects is creativity. Yeli’s side projects are how she expresses herself creatively. The goal of which is that expression, not necessarily perfection.

“Bypassing perfection allows us to create more”, says Yeli. “The projects we make, whether crappy, riddled with errors, or failures, have the added benefit of teaching us how to make the small fraction of our work that soars.”

For creators, the internet makes it easier than ever to get feedback on your work, to discover exciting new creations and to bring us all together to collaborate. But it’s not without its drawbacks.

Our social media feeds are awash with uninspired, derivative content, slapped together with virality in mind. The modern internet is built upon acquiring “likes”, “followers” and “page views”. Such measures of success hamper creativity. It can lead us to worry about perfecting something before publishing it, or to focus on superficial aesthetics rather than exploring creative ideas or tackling the hard, ugly problems that really need to be solved.

Creativity is fuelled when we can put our egos and insecurities aside and put ourselves out there. Both the design and product decisions we’ve made when building Glitch are in response to, and in furtherance of, the bold step taken by inspiring creators like Yeli to build and share her creations — warts and all — with the world! 💪🏿✨

You can follow Yeli on Twitter, learn more about her on her site, and see what she creates next on Glitch.

Creative Expression with Omayeli Arenyeka

On Monday, Microsoft announced their acquisition of GitHub, and it seemed like developers  had something to say about it. We’re excited about the news, and Fog Creek Software’s CEO Anil Dash thinks it will be good news for developers! He outlined his thoughts on a new vision for social coding by highlighting Glitch and our fantastic Rewind feature, which lets you roll back changes on a project as simply as rewinding a video on YouTube.

Ada Rose Cannon, developer advocate at Samsung, began streaming coding sessions on Twitch this week. She went over isomorphic rendering with HyperHTML and ES modules, and used Glitch in her livestream to illustrate these concepts in a format that is easy to follow. This is a great way to show just how powerful Glitch can be as a tool for teaching!

Speaking of using Glitch for education purposes, software engineer Omayeli Arenyeka recently held a workshop on dev.to where she taught developers how to build a Twitter bot in JavaScript using Node.js. Events like this are a great way to help others!

A photo roulette can be a fun way to learn about history. Glitch user @thurstanwork created an app using data from the State Library of Queensland which uses their API to pull images and prompt users to guess which year the photo was taken.

Can you find the right year without using all your guesses?

MIDI Ditty Notation uses a nice, compact notation to let you create small songs. MIDI is an industry-standard protocol, and this neat Glitch app from Glitch user @hYPotenuser allows you to make songs and apply transformations to them like changing pitch, direction, and transposing notes.

Give it a try and come up with your own jazzy tunes!

If you’re a heavy Slack user, connecting it to different services lets you handle a multitude of tasks. Glitch user @mikker created an app that cleverly lets you add to-do items to Things directly from Slack!

Remix the project and check out the readme.md for instructions for making it all work.

It’s been a really great week on Glitch, and these projects are just the tip of the iceberg. Show us your app and maybe we’ll feature it in a future post!

Social Coding, Making MIDI, and Doing It Live

We’ve made it easier than ever for you to get started with creating the app of your dreams. Here’s just a taste of what the community’s been cooking up! 👩🏽‍🍳🍲

We’ve probably all doodled in the margins of a notebook, but what if you could do the same thing on the Web? That’s where p5.js comes in — a flexible JavaScript library that lets you interact with HTML objects, including audio, video, webcam, and text.

You can get started with p5.js with this simple p5-base-project app from engineer and game developer Jack Preston. You’ll start out with a single line and a circle, but try remixing it and adding different shapes!

Eve Ahearn found a great way to use Glitch — listing upcoming events in her city! Her website DART shows any upcoming events which are at the intersection of data, technology, and art.

You can easily remix the project to add an event to the list, or change it up and make your own directory of events!

Glitch works great when you have quick problems to solve. Patrick Perini used it recently to make a simple color picker app for a Zapier zap:

Make sure to view the readme.md file to see how the app works! Add in the correct parameters in the URL in your address bar, and the app will return a color or a list of colors sorted in order of frequency. Not bad for 20 minutes of work!

Nebulous CMS calls itself the smallest, most adaptable CMS in the world. It runs off Node.js, JSON and Markdown, which means that it’s perfect for Glitch! The first theme for Nebulous CMS is live, and creator Andrew Chilton ported it to Glitch for easy remixing and editing.

This is a fantastic way to make a quick single page website, and all changes go live immediately. Change out the images and links and customize it to your heart’s content!

We love when creators get inspired to make projects based off Glitch features, which is where the idea for Newbie Talk came from. Here’s how creator David Francisco describes the app:

You will need to supply your email address to use the service; from there, Newbie Talk will send you an email allowing you to sign into the service, create an avatar, and begin to offer help.

Plant biologist and Web VR developer Colin Keenan wants to make VR experiences that capture the feel of Raleigh and North Carolina. His app, A VR Picnic, shows off his favorite neighborhood spot Dorothea Dix Park.

What locations would you like others to experience using VR? Remix this project and show the world!

Stack Overflow is the world’s largest developer community, and millions of developers share their knowledge across a number of different topics. And what’s a better way to answer questions on Stack Overflow than using Glitch?

For example, abraham recently helped solve another user’s problem with progressive web apps with a quick demo. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to show a solution than to describe it!

The members of the Glitch community are always coming up with creative new projects worth celebrating. Have you made something in Glitch worth telling the world about? Find out how to get your app in shape, share it with us, and we may feature it in the future!

From Coding Help to a VR Picnic: This Week on Glitch

Emojineering with Monica Dinculescu: A Glitch Creator Profile

Monica is an Emojineer at Google, where she works on Polymer, web components, and Chrome.

She’s passionate about emoji, web fonts, and cheese, which you’ll see are recurring themes throughout her projects on Glitch that both explain and inspire. Her creations run the gamut from super-serious tutorials that go into nitty-gritty technical issues, to what she describes as “a lot of pretty silly side projects, mostly related to emoji.” ✨

Although, you know you’re doing something right when your “silly side projects” get a nod from superstar digital designers like Susan Kare 🙌🏾

An explainer about loading web fonts created for her fab SmashingConf talk, Fontastic Web Performance. It covers the potential problems that result from inefficient handling of web fonts and how to avoid them, along with a demo showing you the outcomes of the different techniques she describes.

If you’ve ever tried to position page elements using CSS floats, you’ll know how finicky they can be. Thankfully, Monica’s float-layout project describes how the algorithm that browsers use to position floats actually works. It’s a fantastic resource and the interactive demo drives home some difficult to grasp ideas.

Emoji-Garden: Sowing the Seeds of a Remix Revolution

Compared to the early days of the web, where millions of people around the world were creating weird and wonderful websites that expressed themselves, some parts of the modern web can feel soulless. Many websites do seem to all look the same, and for some, the internet has literally just become Facebook. This has led folks, like Dan Nosowitz, to conclude that the internet is now “a utility world”. One that’s “efficient and all-encompassing”, but also “not very much fun.”

At Glitch, we don’t buy this. We know the good, fun internet is still out there and creators like Monica are proving it. Case in point is Emoji-Garden. It’s a random emoji garden generator that makes cute little gardens.

But that’s not the only thing it has generated. It’s kicked off a mini remix revolution, unleashing creativity in those seeking to make their own perfect emoji gardens.

Like New York-based software engineer and writer, Margaret Ikeda, who wanted her emoji world to reflect her day-to-day one. So she remixed emoji-garden and created emoji-city - complete with pretzels and traffic jams.

Meanwhile, Audrey Moon’s remix, emoji-voidscapes, takes a decidedly darker turn (that’s still super cute!)

For Stirling Allred, her perfect emoji garden needed hedgehogs. Lots of them. So she remixed Monica’s project to create her own hedgehog-ified version.

While Lisa Ciccarello wanted something a little more arid.

These emoji-filled creations are the perfect antidote to the bland, functional internet Dan describes. Creators like Monica show us that the web is still a thing we make, not just something we consume. Just take a look at the heart-warming responses her projects inspire 😍

You can follow Monica on Twitter, learn about web fonts and more on her blog, and see what she creates next on Glitch.

Emojineering with Monica Dinculescu

Talk with any designer or programmer, and they will tell you that music is an integral part of their creation process. Music can not only serve as a source of inspiration, but it’s also a great way to get in the zone for any project. Music is even a big part in how we designed Glitch! 🎏

Let’s look at a few ways that members of the Glitch community are creating fun and amazing apps centered around music!

Spotify is one of the largest and most well-known streaming music services today, and you can use their APIs and SDKs to build apps that interface with their vast musical catalog. Arielle Vaniderstine, developer advocate engineer at Spotify, created two particular apps that help you broaden your musical tastes by discovering new music recommendations!

Nelson let’s you choose from dozens of genres and different audio features — danceability, energy, and liveness, just to name a few — to make a unique, custom playlist. You can play the tracks directly in your browser or in the Spotify app. The Big Spotify Button pulls a song based off your listening habits, which is a great way to find new music that you’re sure to enjoy. (You’ll need a Spotify Premium account to use this app, but there are a number of other great apps to try out over on Spotify’s gallery page!)

Get into the groove and make your own tunes on Glitch— no musical experience required! We’ve talked about Mary Rose Cook and her drum machine app before, but the beauty is in its simplicity. Just click the grey boxes and let the app do the rest.

Electroplankton might have been a sleeper hit on the Nintendo DS, but it’s getting a new life on Glitch! Check out Remixtoplankton, a charming re-interpretation of one of Electroplankton’s music games, Luminaria, using p5.js and Gibber.lib.

We hope these apps open you up to a whole new world of musical possibilities you can create on Glitch. Looking for more examples? Then our Music category is just what you need. Creating music with code — it’s possible with Glitch! 🎼

Strike a Chord with Music Apps on Glitch

The Internet is a powerful tool for uniting people around an important cause. But sometimes finding the quickest or easiest way to get a website online or even gather emails for a mailing list can be a daunting task. Let Glitch take your civic organizing efforts to the next level! Here’s a look at a few helpful and useful apps that you can remix and modify to fit your needs.

Email has its pros and cons, but it is still an effective and easy way to reach an audience. We like MailChimp as an email service provider for its ease of use, and we’ve made a starter app that will allow you to collect emails, and automatically subscribe people to a MailChimp list! Sign up for a free MailChimp account, follow the steps listed in this project’s README.md, and you’ll be ready to send emails to your supporters in a matter of minutes. Remix this app and customize it for your mission or cause!

Do you need to collect emails using an online form, but don’t have an email service provider yet? Or do you use a different email service provider besides MailChimp? Don’t fret — here’s where remixing apps on Glitch comes in handy. Software developer Lauren Dorman remixed our MailChimp Starter app and created a Google Sheets Starter, which stores emails and names in a handy spreadsheet. From here, you can download the data as a .csv file and upload it to any email service provider out there. All you need is a Google account, and you’re ready to roll!

The team at Campaign Zero is dedicated to helping people take direct action to end police violence. We’ve brought their homepage widget to Glitch for easy embedding onto any website. Just enter your address, and you’ll find your elected officials at the local, state and federal levels, as well as their positions on key criminal justice reform policies. Email and telephone numbers for these elected officials are also shown, which is useful if you want to take your advocacy efforts further. Remix the app and customize it to your liking!

Even if you need to create a simple landing page, you can make it happen on Glitch. Take a look at Tech Forward, a Glitch-powered website with dozens of links to tech-focused advocacy organizations and nonprofits working for social change. You can remix this to show a list of endorsements, or display companies that support your cause.

We’ve included links to these apps and more on our Peoples Response page. Get started today and make something great to help make a difference. It’s time to take action!

We The People: Using Glitch for Activism

Anil Dash is CEO of Glitch, and the host of Function, a podcast exploring how technology shapes culture and society. 

He also serves on the boards of Stack Overflow and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

Maurice Cherry is Glitch's creative strategist.

Incidents

The Workers Who Keep the Web Safe in an Unsafe World

Animal Crossing Helped Me Get Back to Real Life

New Rules of the Classroom: Remote Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever

Function with Anil Dash

Open World is a fiction anthology podcast about how science and technology serve as a backdrop for imagining a better future, helping us envision the positive influence that science and tech can play in a real future. 

Open World is produced by Keisha "TK" Dutes and hosted by critically-acclaimed podcaster Rose Eveleth, for Glitch. By speaking to the pressing concerns of our times through love, friendship, community, compassion, and sustainability, the host will help listeners imagine new ways forward into a future that is less scary and more positive, and something we can start working on constructively.  

Open World launches weekly episodes in Spring 2020. Want to contact the show? Email youropenworld@glitch.com.

Open World

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. We’ll talk to some of our top creators, explore cool apps, and even hear from the people who work at Glitch!

Shift Shift Forward

Celebrating the makers, creators and coders who shine.

The Playlist

You Might Also Like