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 know that trying new things can be intimidating. But the truth is, we’re all learning new things every day. No matter your level of experience, you’re a newbie in some way.

Along with our active forum, the Glitch Help feature makes getting support with your code from another community member as easy as raising your hand. And so far, thousands of hands have been raised and problems solved!

From anywhere in Glitch, if you’re editing a file, simply highlight the line or lines of text that you’re having trouble with, and you’ll see a 🙋 button appear. Then, describe your problem and click “Ask for Help” and you’re all set! Your request for help will appear on the Glitch homepage so helpful people can offer their assistance.

It’s proven to be a great way to get help with code. Take the experience of Atlanta-based front-end engineer, Alicia Barrett, for example. She first heard about Glitch through a community of people who care about support.

“I’m part of this community called Support Driven, and someone who used to work at Fog Creek told me about the company. I started browsing around and came across Glitch, and have started to play with it ever since then.”

“I was working through the [React Starter Kit], and I had an issue with…making a list, basically. And so I just raised my hand, and I got a response, and I thought that was so cool,” says Alicia.

Even better, Alicia received help in only a few minutes!

“It was super fast, and I thought it was cool because I didn’t have to go to a forum or leave what I was working on. I could just ask for help right there… I really appreciated that.”

“[Glitch Help] is just so easy, and that’s not to downplay the value in working through a challenge — especially with coding — but it’s just easy to get up and running,” Alicia says. She went on to build her personal website on Glitch, including links to some of her projects and the story of her journey as a front-end developer (it’s available to remix if you’d like to make a website of your own!)

But another important aspect of Glitch Help is showing appreciation for those who are taking their time to help others. We wanted to be thoughtful about it and so we built in the ability to thank others from the get-go. This inspired web developer and designer, David Francisco. Although he initially was reluctant to try Glitch, he was soon drawn in by the friendly community.

“I did a couple of projects and eventually I started helping other people using the help feature,” he says.

Helping others spurred David to create his own dedicated tool called Newbie Talk — a fantastic way for people to chat and get help with all kinds of projects.

It’s been exciting to the see the response to this new type of help tool. Beyond getting your problem solved, people have been heartened by the willingness of others to jump in and help:

And community members haven’t just stopped at helping others, some have gone beyond that and built tools to make it easier to start helping too. Like David Cole’s glitch-bat-signal and Nicholas Grenié’s glitch-notifier projects. Both tools alert you when there is a new help request on Glitch. Glitch-bat-signal uses Zapier to send an alert to the app of your choice, and glitch-notifier sends you a message on Slack.

With these apps, you can be notified whenever someone in the Glitch community needs help with their projects. They’re being used by helpful individuals, as well as DevRel teams wanting to support their products and even specialist communities like Botmakers, who have glitch-notifier integrated into their community Slack so they can help out with bot-specific problems.

We know just how difficult and frustrating learning to code and coding can be. But it gets a whole lot easier (and more fun!) when you do it alongside a helpful, supportive community 🤩.

We can’t wait to see what you build on Glitch, and remember — if you get stuck, just raise your hand!

Raising Hands and Helping Others

Here’s the short version: We’re excited about GitHub becoming part of Microsoft, and think it’ll be good news for developers. But based on the huge adoption we’re seeing for Glitch and our own decade of experience in building version control tools, it’s clear many developers also think it’s time to explore new approaches, so we want to build on this milestone for the coding community by articulating a new vision for social coding.

Let’s put it short and sweet: Microsoft buying GitHub is likely to be good news for developers. There’s no better evidence of how Microsoft has been revitalized under the leadership of Satya Nadella than to point to bold moves like this, which would have seemed incredible (and also not seemed credible!) in the past. Old-timers can remember when Microsoft was often described as the Evil Empire, but their moves to embrace open source and non-Windows platforms have seemed sincere and sustained, and we’re happy to see that flourish.

Similarly, GitHub has earned its place as an indispensable developer platform through breaking ground as the first large-scale social coding experience over 10 years ago. Having strong leadership from Microsoft can only be good news, especially for developers using Microsoft platforms.

But if we have a concern, it’s that there hasn’t been a huge leap forward in social coding in the last decade. We simply haven’t seen enough innovation in recent years in the way that coders collaborate, and since every developer will be thinking about these big ideas right now, we wanted to paint a picture of what social coding could look like over the next decade. A lot of people will (understandably) be thinking about backing up their GitHub projects just in case, and we think you should use that opportunity to look at Glitch and consider if it’s time to rethink traditional views on version control entirely.

(Spoilers: If you’re using Glitch, you’ve already got a preview of where we’re headed. If you’re not, here’s how to import a GitHub repo to Glitch. If you have a Node app that you’ve built or like to use, start with that!)

First, some background. Many developers may not know this, but at Fog Creek, we have a deep background in distributed version control systems. We launched Kiln (now available as an integrated version control system in Manuscript) almost a decade ago with a number of groundbreaking features for teams to collaborate on coding. Our path was to take great project management and add version control to it, and this approach taught us a lot about how people can do their best coding together.

We learned exactly what parts of the typical commit-pull request-merge workflow were still far too difficult and complex to understand.

Based on what we had learned, and what we heard from the developer community, we started rethinking some of the assumptions about workflow and collaboration that everyone was taking for granted in version control. Then, earlier this year, we brought Glitch out of beta with a complete re-imagining of version control, and we called it Glitch Rewind. It uses regular git under the hood, but the user experience is a huge leap forward.

Glitch does a few things nobody’s pulled off before:

Glitch automatically commits your changes while you work to a git repo in the background — even with multiple simultaneous people editing the same file at the same time. Imagine if the basic commit process was as easy, and as multi-player, as editing in Google Docs. Even non-devs can do it instantly.

Glitch Rewind lets you roll back commits on a project just by moving back a slider like you’re rewinding a video. If you want to work from that older version, just hit play and keep working. You’ll get a live preview of your changes as you slide around the timeline. Anybody who can play a YouTube video can revert git commits now. Even if you do know the arcane git command line options, you’ll prefer working this way most of the time.

Under the hood, it’s all just git. This means your tools, processes, workflows, integrations and automations can move seamlessly over to projects on Glitch.

We’re building on Glitch’s “remix” feature that lets you clone live, running, code and will make merging changes from remixes as easy as rewinding commits is today.

Glitch’s project pages and  are an open source project maintained on Glitch itself. That means if you want the community features and social networking features on Glitch to evolve, you can make it happen yourself, and become part of a vibrant new community when you do so.

The business tools you use to collaborate on code should be a seamlessly connected part of the larger network where everyone codes together. Glitch for Teams is bringing all the power of Glitch’s collaboration to your work, but without the complexity of having to go through an enterprise procurement process.

Glitch is also trying to be a better, more inclusive community with everything from a friendly and approachable design, to built-in tools for managing codes of conduct and licensing, to our unique Glitch Help feature — if you get stuck coding on Glitch, you can just raise your hand to ask for help!

We’ve got more coming, but you have to see it in action to really understand the magic.

The skeptics among you must be thinking, “Well, that’s all fine, but we’ve got GitLab or BitBucket as alternatives now, why not just use those?” And those are great tools! But they make the same fundamental assumptions about workflow that all the older generation of tools — including our own — had settled upon.

We now think those assumptions didn’t try hard enough. This is where we want to raise the bar:

The basic building block of social coding should be an app, not a commit. The default state of a project should be a functional, running app or site or bot, not a pile of code that you then have to figure out how to get running. (“Start from something that works.”)

Creativity is enabled when everyone can make changes to code and try new things out without fear, thanks to automatically being able to undo any change.

Every member of your team should be able to commit to a project, even if they’ve never coded before, don’t know what git is, or haven’t even heard of git.

Even experienced developers shouldn’t have to memorize obscure command line tools for common tasks like reverting a commit. Very, very few developers feel confident about their expertise in git, yet nearly all have to make use of it. This mismatch helps make coding more stressful, less inclusive, and less fun.

The social network where we show off our code should be as delightful and creative as networks where we find great photos or videos or music.

The community platform that coders use to share their work should be open source, so that we can all improve it together. The business model behind a coding community should be transparent and sustainable, so we can trust it. And the company behind a coding community should be credible, with a track record of being accountable.

There’s a lot more — in fact, we wrote a whole list of the  if you want to check it out. But the bottom line is simple: GitHub has radically changed coding in the last 10 years, and we should all celebrate this milestone for Microsoft and for the community. It’s a validation of an important idea: We don’t code alone.

This is also the perfect time to ask ourselves as coders and as creators, how we can set our sights far higher than merely being social while we code, and truly bring community and culture into the heart of how we create together.

That’s what Glitch is all about. We can’t wait to see what you create!

GitHub, Glitch and the Future of Social Coding

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

Slack recently held their first ever developer conference, Spec. Among the exciting announcements, one of the highlights that they unveiled at the event was their new Actions API.

With Actions, Slack has added the ability to build integrations with Slack that turn clicks on messages into actions in your own apps! So you can build tools that give folks an easy way to complete a follow-up action based on a conversation in Slack, such as creating a new task in a project management app or creating a pull request in code management software. This saves people from having to open a browser window, login, or look something up elsewhere just to perform a quick action.

It replaces what you might have previously built a full bot or slash command app to do, and it provides a little UI around it, making it more user-friendly.

But it’s not just for third-party tools — you can create actions in apps just for your workspace too. So you can build custom actions for your company, connecting Slack to your own internal tools.

Tomomi Imura gave a great talk at Spec, walking you through creating Actions on Glitch using her remixable template project, ‘slack-action-and-dialog-blueprint’.

The project is for a fictional Slack app, “ClipIt”, that allows users to “clip” a message posted on Slack that then uses Actions to export the message to JSON to be used elsewhere.

The readme is thorough, providing the specific steps you need to follow in order to get the app up and running. Plus, there’s a handy diagram in how_it_works.md that visualizes the flow of data between your Glitch app and Slack, so you can really understand how it’s all working.

To get started, you can remix the app and build your own Slack apps using Actions. To learn more about Actions in Slack, check out their API docs and look out for their upcoming ‘Building with Actions’ webinar on June 12 at 10:00 AM Pacific.

And while you’re at it, be sure to check out Slack’s other blueprint projects on Glitch that help you kickstart building integrations, as well as our collection of Slack starter projects if you want to create bots and slash commands.

Turn Clicks into Actions on Slack

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

Mozilla’s Global Sprint is a fun, two-day collaborative hackathon that runs from today, May 10th until the 11th. The event brings together a diverse network of educators, engineers, artists, scientists, and many others to build projects for a healthy Internet.

The Global Sprint is open to everyone, no matter your skill level or background. It’s an opportunity to leverage your design or writing skills, expertise in coding, teaching, QA testing, game design, or whatever else, to help make the Internet better, safer, and healthier. You’re able to collaborate with partners in person, or work online with folks from the other side of the world.

This year, the Global Sprint is focusing on five key Internet Health Issues:

WEB LITERACY: Projects that teach individuals skills to shape — and not simply consume — the web.

OPENNESS: Projects that keep the web transparent and understandable, allow anyone to invent online without asking permission, and encourage thoughtful sharing and reuse of data, code, and ideas.

PRIVACY & SECURITY: Projects that illuminate what happens to our personal data online, and how to make the Internet safer for all.

DIGITAL INCLUSION: Projects that ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to access the Internet, and can use it to improve their lives and societies.

DECENTRALIZATION: Projects that protect and secure an Internet controlled by many, so that no one actor can own it or control it or switch it off.

Here at Glitch, we love these themes behind the Global Sprint, and we want to help you make them happen! So we’ve put together a collection of starter projects that you can use to kickstart your sprint project.

By building on Glitch, you can get straight to hacking without the need to worry about setting up your dev environment. And you can code together with partners in real-time, like editing a Google Doc.

To find a hackathon near you, or to join in virtually, register here for the Global Sprint. And here’s Mozilla’s guide for participating in the sprint.

Join Mozilla’s Global Sprint with Glitch

“Startups need to move fast,” says Sam Wilcoxon, CEO of Lorem Technologies.

“We learned this the hard way after spending nine months writing production-grade, well-tested, highly-performant code and then throwing it all away when we pivoted the product.”

Wilcoxon was determined to not make the same mistake twice, so he and his team decided to build out an MVP using Glitch.

“Glitch enabled us to quickly get code live, rapidly iterate, and focus on driving customer demand, without having to think about DevOps or Infrastructure”.

They used this prototype when seeking to raise a seed investment round, which they did — raising $1.1M in a round led by Flybridge.

Now, they’re launching their product to all.

Many business owners don’t have the in-house technical knowledge to build, customize and fix their own websites, and finding someone with the know-how can be a time-consuming challenge too, especially for small tasks rather than wholesale redesigns. That’s where Lorem steps in.

Lorem provides an “instant help” solution that matches business owners with a website task to a freelance developer or designer suited for the job within minutes. Their focus is on small, one-off jobs, like fixing broken parts of a website, customizing site CSS, or building third-party integrations. Lorem makes it easy to get website tasks taken care of quickly and easily.

Congratulations to Sam and the Lorem Technologies team on their successful launch! They will be on ProductHunt answering your questions about Lorem, so give them your feedback!

From Project to Funded Startup: How Lorem Moved Fast with Glitch

The short version: go to Glitch for Teams, and tell us what collaboration features on Glitch your team would find valuable enough to pay for.

In launching Glitch to the world, one of our core values that underlies the community is that sustainability matters. We mean “sustainability” in every way possible, but today we want to focus on sustaining Glitch as a business.

Our perspective on this is a little bit different. Fog Creek Software (the company behind Glitch) is nearly twenty years old, and we’ve never taken outside funding and have always built our business based on selling our products and services directly to our customers. At a time when lots of people don’t trust their relationship with big tech companies, we feel good about staying on this path as an independent tech company.

But building groundbreaking technology like Glitch takes lots of resources, especially as we want to see the community flourish for years (and even decades!) to come. Now we need your feedback.

Glitch makes developing apps with other people far more pleasant and productive by providing collaborative tools for coding together, and massively improved implementations of features like version control.

Being able to tap into Glitch’s creative community makes it easier to create the apps and bots and sites you need. Just start by remixing; you don’t have to manage any devops, hosting or deployment complexity.

Most companies and organizations see their developers’ and designers’ time as precious, so any improvement in their workflow or process is extremely valuable.

Basic team management features like being able to control who can edit and access a set of Glitch apps would be useful for developers, designers, marketers, educators, and others who do development in a collaborative environment.

We’re building Glitch for Teams as a paid subscription product to deliver those benefits. We know so many of you love Glitch and would love to use it at work, so we’ll build our roadmap around the tools that help you adopt Glitch within your organization. Get in touch with us and share your ideas! We can’t wait to see what you and your team create using Glitch!

Making Glitch Sustainable

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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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.

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