We’re excited to reach the one million app milestone as it shows how we’ve created the easiest way for coders to create and collaborate online. With functionality like real-time collaborative editing, instant deployment, automatic secure hosting and Rewind, we’ve removed many of the technical barriers to getting started with building on the web. By turning “developer tools” into a set of creative and expressive tools, we’ve enabled people of any skill level to be able to create online.

So it makes sense that the millionth Glitch app was created by someone who’s learning to code. freeCodeCamp is a community that helps you learn to code and get experience by contributing to open source projects used by nonprofits. And it was a freeCodeCamp student learning Node.js used Glitch who created the project that marked the million-app milestone. freeCodeCamp was an early adopter of Glitch and their community members use it extensively to learn back-end development, testing, and security. Their approach is hands-on — through coding challenges and building projects, you learn to code, which is exactly the type of thing we wanted to help make more accessible when we set out building Glitch.

And best of all, those beginning coders like knowing that when they use Glitch, they’re using a tool that even some of the most experienced professional developers also use for their work.

But Glitch is about more than apps. It’s helping people create the best of the web by enabling creativity like no tool has done before. Or, at least not since GeoCities. But most people on the web today weren’t around for the heyday of GeoCities, or NeoPets, or MySpace, or any of the other places where an earlier generation of creators got their start dabbling with code. They’ve never known a truly creative web, having grown up on an internet dominated by major social networks.

So we’re bringing that creative, personal, human web back.

With this milestone, we’re showing how a creative community can change the way the web is made to be more open and inclusive, and can come together to invent the cutting edge of the web. Glitch is a place where you’ll find cool apps, websites, and creations that you simply can’t find anywhere else. Think of this community’s future as being like YouTube, but for apps, bots, web art and VR instead of just videos.

We’ve been working hard to make it a welcoming community, whether you’re an experienced professional developer or you’re just getting started. A community where everybody feels comfortable expressing themselves and sharing their creations with the world. And in doing so we’re reminding some, and introducing others, to a fun, creative web that any of us can build. And it’s working. The result is: we’re growing fast!

We love Glitch and we want to do this thing right. We think that means remaining fiercely independent and opinionated. Now, we’re not some flighty startup — Glitch is bootstrapped by Fog Creek Software, the inventors of Trello and co-creators of Stack Overflow. We’re not building Glitch just so we can sell it to some big company in a year and let the community fall apart.

But running Glitch this way brings up an important issue: sustainability. How does a tiny little team support a huge community that’s going to change the web? Well, we’re going to need your help to get the word out about Glitch. We’re committed to making this a sustainable business for the long term. And we’ll be doing this in a few ways, but the first is with Glitch Teams.

From development and DevRel, to marketing and learning, we know many of you love Glitch too and want to use it at work. So we’re building our roadmap around the tools that help you adopt Glitch within your organization. We’re doing this based on feedback direct from the community, and it will include the things you’ve been asking for, such as:

Team Member Authentication: Flexible, integrated authentication with providers that your team already uses to track and manage team members

Flexible Project Permissions: Control over who can access or update different projects and pages

Team Pages: Enabling discovery, remixing and reuse of private apps within teams

Notifications: Get notified about key events as they happen on Glitch

But we’re keen to know what else your team would find valuable enough to pay for. 

Then please get back to building one of the next million apps on Glitch. We can’t wait to see what you create! 🎏🎆

We’ll be hosting a special event soon with the Glitch team, where you can ask us anything about the community, Glitch Teams and the future of Glitch itself.

1 Million Apps on Glitch: The Creative Web is Back!

I love working on Glitch. One of the things I like most is the amazingly creative, friendly, and thoughtful community that I get to work alongside each day.

Tech has been getting a good kicking in the media lately, and rightly so. From execs being jerks to privacy woes — at times the outlook for those making tech can seem bleak. But what gives me hope for the future is the genuine positivity and creativity that I see in the Glitch community every single day.

Glitch is the creative community where the cutting-edge of the web is invented. It’s comprised of coders, designers, artists, activists, students and educators. There are those who love to code, and others that think of it as a tool to get stuff done. There are code newbies, and folks who’ve been creating and coding for years. But what they all have in common is that they’re building the apps of their dreams on Glitch.

These apps cover everything from bots and websites, to art projects, virtual reality experiences, interactive infographics and much more.

Creators are building on Glitch for fun, creating hit apps, like:

 by caseyf: An app that mashes up webcomicname panels, enabling you to create your own mashup comics.

 by jakearchibald: Test your reactions with this F1 start simulator. This app was even used by real-life F1 drivers.

 by notwaldorf: Generate a random emoji garden.

For others, it’s not just fun, it’s funding. Like Sam Wilcoxon at Lorem, who created an MVP on Glitch that would go on to help them secure $1.1M in funding and launch their product to the masses. But many in the community are just creating apps as a way of expressing themselves. Some through music, like: 🎶🎧🎶️

 by arirawr: Slide and tweak the settings to create a super-customizable Spotify recommendation track list.

 by PatrickWeaver: A Rube Goldberg Machine-like mashup of the Google Cloud Vision and Spotify APIs that selects a song based on an image you upload. It’s like Shazam, but for album covers.

While others are expressing themselves through art: 🎨 🖼️

 by mehtapaydin: A 360 immersive experience that follows a water droplet’s journey crossing the desert. Made during Tribeca Film Institute’s Immigration Colab.

 by noahleigh: Make pixelated gradient GIFs with words.

 by AVGP: A fun, wintery WebVR scene. Did you spot the bears’ Christmas get together?

Of course there are those who are building apps on Glitch to help teach others how to code. They’re creating resources like tutorials and workshops. While others are using such resources to try out new technologies and learn new skills. Many people in the community are creating apps to help people in other ways too: 😍🤟🏾

 by picsoung: Looks out for Glitch Help questions and notifies you about new ones in Slack.

 by uveavanto: A map showing trans-friendly GPs in the UK.

 by Riley Walz‏: An app that helps people make routes for running, walking or cycling.

But for me, a clear sign that Glitch truly is a friendly, helpful community is when its members feel safe and empowered to try out new things and share them with the world. There might be almost 1M projects on Glitch, but among them are many that are someone’s first. Whether that’s their first time trying something new:

One thing’s for certain, though — as the Glitch community continues to grow and create the best of the web, we’re looking forward to many more firsts to come.

But who will create the 1 millionth app on Glitch? We can’t wait to see what you create 🎏✨

We’ll be hosting a special event soon with our CEO, Anil Dash, where you can ask him anything about the community and the future of Glitch itself.

A Million Brilliant Moments: Creating the Best of the Web

The tech world has had a little time to digest the dramatic news that Microsoft is acquiring GitHub, and is starting to form its opinions. Amidst the flurry of hot takes, most of the immediate responses focused on the obvious business value for Microsoft: boosting its connection to developers and helping its Azure cloud platform to compete with Amazon.

But as we’ve been creating Glitch, we’ve learned a lot about what happens when coders collaborate together in realtime, and this reveals a deeper insight into where coding is headed. It’s something far bigger than just hoping to encourage developers to use one cloud services provider instead of another.

A network of coders isn’t just useful as a way of collaborating on programming, but is perhaps even more important as insight into social behavior, and as a foundation for machine learning about the way coders work.

Right now on Glitch, millions of users have created, remixed and discover projects, and we’ve listened closely as they told us how we can make those community members more productive. As a result, we’ve begun exploring the power of networked coding. “What if JavaScript wins?” described the ecosystem around coding is increasingly driven by network effects, so there’s an opportunity in building tools and infrastructure which recognize that reality and take advantage of this new environment.

Smart analysts like Ben Thompson have laid out why Microsoft would pay a premium for GitHub by describing the cost of acquiring developers for a platform. Microsoft’s own deck describing the deal emphasizes “the developer’s marketplace,” hinting at a sort of app store for coders, which could indeed be useful.

But the far greater value comes from radically increasing the number of people who can create software, while improving the quality of software that they make. That’s not incremental improvement in coding productivity, it’s an order of magnitude increase in who can create technology — a win for inclusion, innovation and invention as much as it is for productivity.

Imagine a few scenarios that networked coding makes possible:

Analyze code that’s already been written, to understand which functions, methods and libraries are used most often. Then, use that data to build better support for these capabilities, or create new web services or infrastructure that can solve these problems more efficiently. (This is the potential that’s furthest along today.)

Monitor new code as commits are made, seeing trending behaviors in design patterns, and gathering insight into repeated efforts that might be redundant, wasteful, or frustrating. You could even capture errors as they happen or provide examples of how others have solved similar problems.

Identify the social relationships between collaborators, and the invisible network of connections between contributors to a project, to understand which people collaborate well together — or which people could collaborate together. On Glitch, the ability to just raise your hand to get help is already building relationships between coders, whether they’re on the same team or complete strangers, around the way they can collaborate together.

And finally, and perhaps most excitingly, networked code provides a broad set of training data for machine learning about code that’s written in the real world. In the short term, this can provide better tools which anticipate the most common choices that coders make, but in the long term, we can identify likely mistakes or unexpected errors that make software less reliable, less maintainable, less secure, or more expensive.

Some parts of this are theoretically possible with GitHub today, and some rudimentary versions of these capabilities are starting to show up in tools from Microsoft and others, including Glitch. But most tools that try to solve these problems are resorting to brute-force indexing of code or commits after a person has already created their work.

Reaching the full potential of networked coding can’t just happen by trying to analyze “dead” code that’s locked away in old repositories. Instead, networked code requires being connected to creators while they’re coding, responding and even anticipating the work that they’re doing. (And no, not like Clippy — more like the way we share photos of an event with faraway friends so they’ll feel like they’re in the moment with us, together.)

When we started preparing to launch Glitch’s earliest versions, one of our internal goals was, “writing code anywhere else should feel lonely in comparison”. Though it’s still very early, we think we’re well on our way toward achieving that mission.

But in reflecting on that goal, we realized it connected with a lot of the values that we think are important for coding overall , like unlocking the creativity of more people, including those who don’t even think of themselves as coders. Or freeing up creativity by giving people room to experiment or even to make mistakes while still being supported by a community. And tapping into the latest advances in artificial intelligence to give people more confidence that the code they write is secure, stable, scalable, reliable, and legible.

By all means, we should get excited about the potential for new cloud services. And it’s great if more companies are competing harder to earn the attention of today’s developers. But given the central importance of code in shaping the future of culture and society, one of the most important things we can do to set a standard for code going forward, is to make sure it’s more connected.

It’s not just about code connecting to our devices and to our data, but code being a medium through which we form connections to one another. We can’t wait to see what you create!

It’s Not Just Code, It’s a Network

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. If that’s not an call-to-action to create something new, then check out what’s happening in the Glitch community and get some inspiration.

Earlier this week, we launched the next release of the You Got This! Zine — the React Edition! This 24-page zine includes information on some of the key concepts to create apps using React, tips and profiles from React experts, and a spotlight on Glitch creators Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) and Omayeli Arenyeka (@oa495)! We hope that this zine gets your gears turning and gives you some ideas on what to build, or at least  to build it.

Jamiroquai sang about the future being made of virtual insanity; on Glitch, the future is made of virtual reality! Using A-Frame, anyone can make their own VR space directly in the browser. Glitch user Bian Yunxiang (@BianYx) created a colorful project titled Upwardꜛnot northward which takes you through six vibrant and interactive worlds. Can you escape?

Glitch user Karen Vanderpool (@kvpool) also built her own virtual room, complete with music and a fun surprise! Take a look around, explore, and make yourself at home.

Beautiful music and beautiful apps happen when people work together on Glitch. That’s definitely the case with Face the Music, a music-making app controlled by your face!

The app was created by Omayeli Arenyeka (@oa495) and Okay with help from Nicolas Hahn, Eugene Ha, and fellow Glitch user Sean Catangui (@seancaat). We’re almost sure the app isn’t just an elaborate ploy to capture photos of folks gurning at their laptops! Play around with the app, download your creation, and share it with the world.

Making music is awesome, but Glitch can also help you learn to play music as well! Graham Macphee (@gmph) wrote a useful app to help with mastering ukulele chords. Just type your chords in the Ukulele Chord Extractor 3000™ and receive chord diagrams to help you play. Give it a try and you’ll be playing in no time!

When you have a friendly community behind you and a powerful tool to create projects, that’s a great recipe for trying new concepts.

Glitch users Ben Garvey (@bengarvey) and Sasha Garvey (@sashatgarvey) built an HTML canvas experiment with dozens of creatures they call “dot cats”. The end result is hypnotic — try refreshing the page to come up with different configurations!

Glitch is also a great way to build apps to interact with other services. Take this Airtable API proxy built by Glitch user, Danilo Campos (@daniloc). According to Danilo, the app uses Node.js and Express, and it helps people use Airtable for projects by solving some common problems like caching, rate limiting, and key secrecy.

Take a look at the readme information for the project and remix it for your own Airtable bases!

This week’s round-up projects can be summed up by a quote from Dusty Phillips, director of engineering at Dataquest:

We know that learning new things can be tough, but it’s also a lot of fun! With the help of the Glitch community behind you, you’re only limited by your own imagination. Don’t worry — you got this! ✨

Virtual Possibilities

A free, 28-page zine that will help you to learn some of the key concepts needed to create web apps using React.js, including:

Find out how Suz Hinton, Justin Falcone and Florida Elago got into coding.

Must-know advice for those new to React from experienced programmers.

YouGotThisZineReactEdition.pdf

YouGotThisZineReactEditionBWPrint.pdf

YouGotThisZineReactEditionBW.pdf

Making Web Apps with React

The Glitch community has been working overtime this week! We’re spotlighting a variety of projects this week, so let’s check out what people are creating!

Previously on the blog: Profiling Omayeli Arenyeka and Showing Your Pride

Earlier this week, we showcased Glitch user Omayeli “Yeli” Arenyeka (@oa495). She is a creative technologist from Lagos, Nigeria who is currently working in New York City.

Take a look at our creator profile video and find out more about Yeli and her work!

We also looked at some projects on Glitch that have a focus on the LGBTQIA+ community. Add some Pride flair to your Twitter profile or online avatar, find trans-friendly doctors in the UK, and get a history lesson on gay history in a VR setting on Toronto’s Yonge Street!

Glitch is a fantastic playground for digital artists. You can make your own digital masterpiece, collaborate with others, or remix someone else’s concept and make it your own!

Glitch user Jay Wren (@jrwren) created an ode to his childhood with a project that generates dozens of colored lines in an endless scroll. Check out the embed and watch the cascade in action!

Billions of people tune in to the FIFA World Cup to watch teams from all over the world battle it out. It’s easily the world’s most widely viewed sporting event, far surpassing the Olympic Games.

This year’s matches are already underway, so if you need to keep up with the tournament, Glitch user Sebastian Delmont (@sd) created a calendar feed that you can use in your online calendar of choice. The feed continuously updates with the teams playing in specific matches, the score, and other statistics.

Even better, Glitch user Josh Metcalfe (@geekypeacock) remixed Sebastian’s original project and added the USA TV schedule into the feed!

CSS 3D transforms allow you to create some pretty impressive visualizations right in the browser. They can even be used to make something simple and functional, like a game die. Just ask Glitch user Joe Gaffey (@joegaffey)!

Joe’s app is simple and functional — just pull up the app and tap the die to roll it! They say necessity is the mother of invention, and Glitch makes it easy to build the app of your dreams.

Houdini is a new set of specifications that bring help extend the styling and layout capabilities of CSS. It’s still a bit bleeding edge, but thanks to Glitch user Sam Richard (@snugug), there’s now an interactive introduction to Houdini, including examples and code snippets.

Play around with the API examples, and view the Resources page for more information on Houdini!

Back in the day, you could create some really cool retro word art in Microsoft Word. The feature isn’t available in the new versions of the program, but thanks to Glitch user Cory McDonald (@cory), you can take a walk down memory lane and re-live those glory days with his WordArt project!

Cory has nine styles available for you to choose from ranging from a golden gradient to a perspective skew. Everything is styled using CSS, so it works in all modern browsers too. And since this is text and CSS, the styles even work with emoji. Give it a try!

Glitch user Jason Crane (@jasonlcrane) wanted a way to keep track of what the current U.S. Congressional representatives were doing and saying about guns. With the help of an API from ProPublica and the magic of Glitch, he created Congress on Guns, the latest statements and bills by members of Congress on gun violence.

According to his Glitch user profile, Jason calls himself a web developer and journalist at heart, and a project like this shows the power of using Glitch as a medium for activism!

Answering Questions on Stack Overflow with Glitch

Developers worldwide use Stack Overflow to learn about new topics and answer questions from others.

Joseph Wer recently had a question about creating a sticky header on AMP pages. He tried CSS workarounds but couldn’t come up with a solution. After several examples, Sebastian Benz built a quick solution on Glitch that solved the issue! It’s always a good thing when you have the support of the community behind you.

We have covered a lot this week, and the Glitch community just keeps creating projects that bring out the fun and excitement that makes Glitch a friendly place to be. Do you know any Glitch projects that we should cover? Share them with us! 👍🏾

World Cup, Generative Art, and Pride

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

It’s now easier than ever to get your existing code on to Glitch. From today, you can import code from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and any other Git repo hosting service.

To do so, select the ‘clone-from-repo’ option from the ‘New Project’ drop-down menu under the ‘Project Info’ menu at the top-left of the editor. Then enter the full HTTPS git web URL and the repo will be cloned. This clone includes all files and the full commit history.

We’ve wanted to provide more git import options for a while, but with recent news we know this has become more important to many of you and we wanted to be responsive to that!

Beyond making it easier to get your code on to Glitch, what’s cool is that the full commit history is then viewable in Glitch Rewind. This means you can visually see how a project has evolved over time. We think this is important — by seeing the development of a project laid out in front of you, knowing what was changed and why you get a better understanding of how an app was created.

You can also invite other users to your project who can explore the project history too, even if they’re not familiar with Git.

Folks are already thinking up creative ways to use this new capability:

We’re excited to see how else this gets used, as well as the amazing projects you import and work on.

For more specifics on how to import a git repo into Glitch, check out our help docs! 📚

Import Any of Your Code to Glitch!

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

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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.

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