Year in Review   Glitch Feature Video

A year ago, Glitch launched with the aim of building a community where anyone can build the app of their dreams. We wanted to remind people that the web could be a fantastic place, filled with fun and creativity, that any of us can build. To do that, we built the easiest way for coders to create and collaborate, whether you’re an experienced professional developer or you’re just getting started.

Right from the start, Glitch has had some truly unique features for creating and coding:

Real-time collaborative editing, which makes coding together as easy as working in Google Docs.

Instant deployment — so you don’t have to worry about DevOps stuff.

Automatic hosting on a secure URL — so there’s no messing with tunnels and SSL certificates.

Magical CDN — any assets you upload are automatically ready for super-fast delivery.

Secure sharing of code — projects can be public or private, with support for environment variables so you have a safe place to put credentials and API tokens.

The ability to remix an existing project, or import a repo from GitHub — so you never have to start from a blank page.

And of course, ! We don’t use any proprietary protocols or libraries. So if you want to move your code elsewhere, you can. Just download it as a zip, or export to GitHub and it’ll just work.

It gets even better. In the year since we launched, we’ve been hard at work in collaboration with our community, building the things you told us you wanted most.

We’ve added new features, like the ability to help each other with code problems in real-time, so you never have to feel like you’re on your own.

We’ve made it easier to add licenses and a code of conduct to your apps, essential building blocks for a healthy environment where people can express their ideas.

We made it possible for creators to thank each other, encouraging a more positive, more appreciative community.

We introduced a console, giving you access to the container behind your project so that experienced users can tweak things as they need to.

And we added custom profiles and team pages, so you can show off what you’ve been creating, either on your own or as part of a team.

The best thing that has emerged over the last year though is clear: the friendliest dev community in the world. Over a million of the most creative coders, designers, developers, artists, activists, educators — people just like you are using Glitch.

Features are great, but all too often tech is seen as the solution. Glitch is different: People and community are the heart of what we all create, even when we make amazing new technology together.

And whether you’re an old pro or a newbie just discovering code, learning new tools is a fundamental part of being a coder. So we’ve created lots of resources for learning, like starter kits to help you get started with HTML and React, as well as a fun zine which explains some of the key concepts in creating web apps.

Because Glitch is for everyone, we’ve done our best to highlight the creations of those who are under-represented in tech, from showing off the work of community members who are women, to promoting the work of black creators, to featuring makers of all ages right on the homepage of Glitch.

Perhaps most exciting of all are the fantastic apps that our growing community of creators have built. Covering everything from music, art and bots, to apps for activism, learning new skills, and teaching others.

Some of the projects made on Glitch have helped startups raise $1M in funding, while others have created apps that have spread across the web, even ending up being used by real-life F1 drivers. Some of the sweetest apps on Glitch show off a poem or were made by someone who wanted to make their significant-other smile. And others, well, they’ve ruined whatever plans we had for the day because we just can’t stop using them.

Soon, we’ll give the same powerful Glitch tools to teams at work, so developers, designers and anyone with an idea can create real, full-power apps incredibly easily. Sign up to learn more, help shape its development and to be the first to hear about Glitch for Teams.

We’re proud of how far we’ve come in just a year, but we really are just getting started.

In fact, we’re making it official: This Friday we’re tearing off the ‘beta’ label! But as we get ready for Glitch v1.0, we’ll have a new major announcement each day. The new features you’re going to see are going to enable a huge wave of creativity, and inspire you with things that no developer tool has done before.

Come back to Glitch each day this week to see what’s new — this is going to be a week that’ll change the way we all build the web together.

Changing the Way We Build the Web, Together

A year ago, we launched Glitch to the world. Since then, over a million people have become part of the community, creating amazing apps, bots, websites, art projects, virtual reality experiences, interactive infographics and much more.

But we wanted to take a moment to clearly explain what Glitch is about, and why we think it’s a place that everybody on the web will find valuable. This is Glitch:

A community where you can find cool apps and websites you can’t find anywhere else. Think of it as being like YouTube or SoundCloud, but for apps or bots or VR experiences instead of videos or songs.

The most innovative, powerful collaborative platform for creating, remixing and hosting apps. We’re evolving “developer tools” into a set of creative and expressive tools that people of any skill level can use to create the web.

An effort to make the web into a creative medium where We’re an independent company that cares deeply about making tech more accessible, more inclusive, and more empowering, and Glitch is how we’re doing that.

Now, those ideas can mean a lot of different things, whether you’re a person looking for cool VR experiences to check out, an artist who wants to use the web as another outlet to express an idea, an educator who wants to teach a room full of students how to create an app, an experienced coder who wants to launch a new startup without dealing with the drudgery, or an activist who needs to share essential information that others can quickly reuse.

All of those people, and more, are who we’re making Glitch for—and we’re just getting started.

What is Glitch?

Just as important as the technology that enables Glitch are the principles that make Glitch special. We hope you’ll take a look and offer your feedback on how we can put them to work as we build Glitch with you.

Glitch is for everyone. Simple: We want Glitch to be welcoming, friendly, useful and safe for anyone, anywhere to use to create or share or discover. Whether it’s for your personal project, your community or organization, or for your business, Glitch wants to help you create.

Start from something that works. This one’s not so obvious: When you create things on Glitch, you start by remixing a project that already works. That means your odds of successfully creating something are much higher than if you just started with a pile of parts. We want to increase the chance that you’ll start with something other people can see and respond to, and not get frustrated just getting things to work.

Your bug is your bug. This is related to “start from something that works”— if your Glitch project or app isn’t working right, it’s because you made a mistake. And that’s okay! Everybody makes mistakes. But the point is that you should know it’s because of something you did, not some mysterious problem that you can’t see or solve.

Defaults express values. The choices we make should, by default, help the most people share the most ideas, in a way that’s safe, predictable and expressive. In technology, usually everything is possible, but lots of things aren’t easy. We want the settings you get out of the box to be the ones that are most likely to yield delightful results.

Coding is creative and expressive. Our reference points in creating Glitch are the tools people use to create art and literature and films and music — the tools of creation. This is because we think expressing oneself through code is as valuable and powerful as any other form of expression. (And if the thing you want to express is a simple tool to solve a boring problem, that’s cool too.)

We don’t work alone. This is one of our core values at Fog Creek Software, the company behind Glitch. It manifests in a lot of ways, the simplest being that Glitch lets multiple people create code at the same time, in the same place. But it’s a principle that goes much deeper, to the philosophy that all ideas start by building on the work of others, and all innovation happens in the context of communities sharing ideas and inspiration.

Everyone is a newbie all the time. Because tech culture in general, and programming culture in particular, has often erected too many barriers to too many groups, we want to be explicit that Glitch is about tearing those barriers down. And a key insight is that, whether you’ve been coding for one day or for decades, part of the delight of technology is that we’re all learning new things every day. So no matter your level of experience, you’re a newbie in some way, and Glitch is designed for newbies of every skill level.

Learning is fun! Most technology platforms, especially those used to make websites or apps, talk about how they “don’t force you to learn” when you want to create something. But we think learning is fun, if it leads to real, meaningful results, and isn’t just drudgery that isn’t relevant to the topic at hand. So with Glitch, we solve the annoying or frustrating parts of building an app or website, so you can focus on just learning the good stuff.

You own your stuff. This should seem obvious, but these days on the Internet, it’s not: You should own what you create. With Glitch, you do own it. That’s true at the legal level—you choose the license for your work, from standard copyright to completely public domain to any open source license you want. But it’s also true philosophically, because Glitch has no lock-in, so you can export your code and run it anywhere you want. You’re in control.

Sustainability matters. Finally, we care a lot about making Glitch a meaningful platform for the long term. Our company is 18 years old — that’s ancient in Internet terms. And we’re independent, privately held, have no outside investors, and care about being transparent and open in our business model and business processes. All of this matters for Glitch because we want our community to be as invested in its long-term, sustainable success as we are.

Much of what we’ve captured in the Glitch principles are things we’ve learned from some of the core ideas that have made the Internet so powerful, principles like Postel’s Law (“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”), the Principle of Least Surprise (“In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.”), and key insights from the Unix philosophy.

But just as much as we reference any technical precedents, we look at everything from urban design to artistic movements to efforts to advance justice or equity, and we see those as influences on how Glitch will grow and evolve.

Most of all, we find our inspiration in our community, from the new and surprising things you create, and the ways you push us to bring Glitch to even more creative people. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Getting started with a new technology can be intimidating. When we built Glitch, our primary goal was to lower the barriers to entry for developers everywhere, and last year we took that to the next step with the launch of Glitch for Platforms. Since then, companies have used Glitch for Platforms to help improve their API onboarding efforts and drive developer success. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Botkit wants to help make building bots fun and easy, and their gallery page includes different examples of the types of bots that you can create using their API. Providing remixable starter apps is a great way to increase the number of users who succeed with your API, because a working example is so much better than starting from a pile of parts.

Even better, Botkit uses Glitch directly within their Botkit Studio offering — so when you signup they guide you through making a bot which is already up and running on Glitch. By using our support for parameters in Remix URLs they remove the need for the awkward copying and pasting of API credentials, dramatically improving the number of developers who get their bot up and running.

Algolia’s powerful API allows you to add search functionality to your website or app, and their gallery page on Glitch provides a few fun searches to stoke your imagination.

What’s really great about these examples is how their presentation aids in making learning easier. Each sample app is laid out as a step-by-step tutorial, and quirky font choices and playful use of emoji helps make the subject matter approachable. This guided approach to learning takes away the anxiety and doubts developers have when trying something new; here, Algolia directs them to the exact documentation that highlights what they need to know!

With over two billion users worldwide, no one builds at scale quite like Facebook does. Hundreds of thousands of people build apps using Facebook’s API, so understanding how it works and the many ways you can utilize it is pretty crucial.

Take a look at Facebook’s documentation for their Messenger platform. In this Quick Start guide, their starter project is built on Glitch, and users can easily remix the project to create their own. There’s no need for a user to set up a server or mess with SSL certificates — Glitch handles it all for them! 👌

The Wistia video player is simple to use, yet can be customized in lots of different ways using Wistia’s API. You can change the color of the player, add captions, and even include custom timings like annotation links and calls-to-action to drive engagement and turn viewers into customers.

Wistia’s thorough documentation includes examples of how to make these customizations, and they use Glitch to embed live code examples so developers can learn Wistia’s API in real-time. Take a look at their gallery page for even more examples!

These are just some of the ways organizations are using Glitch for Platforms to transform their API onboarding, teach developers, showcase new technology, and help customers through better documentation. Get started using Glitch for Platforms today and show off the full power of your APIs!

Stay One Step Ahead with Glitch for Platforms

Travis Morrison Interview Part 1 of 2

Jenn Schiffer: Hi, I’m Jenn Schiffer. I’m the community engineer of Glitch.com, the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. And today, I am talking to a friend of mine, Travis Morrison, who is a web developer and a musician. Thanks for coming here.

Jenn Schiffer: So what are you doing these days?

Travis Morrison: Well, I make applications for managing lead distribution for a marketing company in the Midwest called Element Three, I chase around a toddler, and I’m writing an album.

Jenn Schiffer: When did you get into tech?

Travis Morrison: Do you really wanna hear the story?

Travis Morrison: Okay. So in 1983, I was 10 years old. Now I’m actually starting to doubt the numbers…sometime in the mid ‘80s. I was a tweener; let’s put it that way. And I was reading  magazine. I don’t know why — I was 11 years old and Washingtonian magazine is one of those corny lifestyle magazines like Bostonian. There’s always one.

Jenn Schiffer: That show up on the hotel benches and stuff?

Travis Morrison: Inside Dallas, yeah. And there was an article about bulletin board systems which talked about these strange worlds. I don’t know why this was in this magazine about Washington — I guess it was accounting for the Washington ecosystem bulletin boards where people could dial up with their computer, connect it to a phone and look at a system on a screen and write messages to other people and get files, and some of the files were games. And I was like, “that sounds incredible!”

So I went in hard on my parents to buy a computer. There was the Atari 400, the Atari 800, the Commodore 64, and then a couple of others I was just like…no. I didn’t wanna do Texas Instruments because it was membrane keyboards, and they always still hurt my fingers. Membrane. I hate membrane. Awful, awful. So I wanted the Commodore 64. It’s either the 64 or the Atari, because I like full — [Travis taps on the table mimicking typing on a keyboard] — Atari 800 or Commodore 64.

I got the Commodore 64 and a 300 baud modem and I immediately called the one bulletin board that that article identified as the most degenerate — like a glue sniffing teenagers board — which was called Spectrum. Within 15 minutes, I was like — [Travis mimics the connection sound of a modem connecting via telephone]— and I signed in as “The Aquatic”, because I was on swim teams. I was the world’s worst swimmer, but I was really into being on swim teams. And immediately, a life was started. I started talking to people like me; I saw my first flaming immediately. Like, why are they so angry and so off-topic? What is this?

Jenn Schiffer: So we’ve been doing that since the ’80s. That’s not a new thing.

Travis Morrison: Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m sure that pre-dates the ’80s. And recently, actually, there are now websites where people log old bulletin board systems by phone number, area code, and username. I don’t know if reunions are happening or stuff like that, but I have dug around on a few of those things to look for some of my favorite hangouts. I haven’t seen Spectrum. I don’t know what happened to those folks. But of course, a lot of them are only on at night, or you would call and you’d be like, “Hello?” You know? And it’d be like, “Mom?” Like, “Hi he’s not…he’s grounded. He’s not on anymore. Can you hear me? Are you there?” But that was my start. I would say that was my start with tech.

Jenn Schiffer: You wrote one of the greatest indie rock albums of the ’90s. I think I’m not the only person that would say that.

Travis Morrison: Oh, okay, if you’re gonna say the ’90s, alright. Top 50 of the ’90s, I thought we were gonna go — [Travis waves his hand in a slow, upward arc]

Jenn Schiffer: But since you were into technology really early, did technology have any effect on your music and writing around that time? Because we think now a lot about technology in music today, where GarageBand — and I mentioned Fruity Loops in another interview, and I guess that was years ago, not really now — but what kind of technology was being used back then for music?

Travis Morrison: Well, I think one of the more forward aspects of The Dismemberment Plan was…we had a sampler, and we got a lot of mileage out of the sampler. That came from loving hip-hop, which was both the most lyrically pertinent and sonically fresh music of that time. But there were also a couple of bands on the periphery of indie rock that were messing around with using hip-hop technology and hip-hop ideas in a punk context. There was a band, pretty obscure, called Moonshake, who were guitar, bass, drums, and sampler. They were a huge influence on us. The band Soul Coughing was like live hip-hop; it was much less of a band that wanted to create a punk rock din with samples. We didn’t just think it up; there were bands we saw who did it. We were like, “Hmm, yes, yes.” Moonshake was a loud as hell hard punk band that had samples and crazy hip-hop record noises floating through the soundscape. And I would say they were crucial for us in that regard.

But sampling…it wasn’t quite yet home recording. We were experimenting with it at the end, and it was kinda awful. It didn’t really work yet.  by Beck was a famous “all in digital at home — wow!” And it probably was the most gruesome process; it probably crashed constantly. Great album though. Great album. And an interesting soundscape. It has a thumbprint that’s very interesting. It doesn’t really seem like sampling. Sampling kinda got shot in the head by the music industry. The golden moment of Public Enemy,  — where you created soundscapes out of samples, and De La Soul got kinda crushed by the legalities of songwriting.

Jenn Schiffer: I guess it’s just the litigiousness of it, makes not only the artists be afraid to do it, but then if they do do it, it makes the people who are paying for them to make their record sort of hold back from doing that stuff.

Travis Morrison: I mean, to be fair…you’re Hall or Oates and you’re like, “Hi, De La Soul? Listen, I love your track, but that’s my song. And a Steely Dan song.” I mean, I’m not a tool…I get it. I see both sides. But I don’t know if I feel like the heavy samples art form thing got shunted to some very strange extralegal zones like what Girl Talk does. It prevented it from becoming lasting major pop music. People started to do things like what Dre did, where they were like “Oh, you won’t let me use it? I’ll just write something really similar or hire a really good musician to write something that gets me the same — ”

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, he’s so good. I think a lot about someone who also does satire and parodies and also open source. With open source software — and a lot of the stuff on Glitch is open source — we encourage people to remix already existing apps, and we have a functionality where you can add a license to your code that gives permission to people to copy stuff over. I know that there are projects that musicians have created — I think Moby has started one — where you can upload your own music and license it so that anybody can use it for free, attributed or not, like in movies and stuff like that. I’m wondering if as more musicians are becoming or remaining independent…like Chance [the Rapper] for example having more control over what is done with [his] music. I would like to see more of a open source mentality. Like, you can sample this with attribution or asking for permission, and you can bypass a lot of —

Travis Morrison: Right. Or less control, right?

Jenn Schiffer: Less control, yeah. When you’re not independent, you have some other person…a rando…well, a manager’s not really a rando, but like Dead or Alive had become a rando, and they own your stuff. I think a lot about that in terms of software ownership. When I make something at work here at Fog Creek, if down the line someone makes something out of it, can Fog Creek go after it? There’s a lot of talk with lawyers about stuff like that in all software companies.

I know I had a friend who worked at one of the really big, major companies of the top three who had made something open source but forgot to list it when they joined that company, and then they remembered it, and because they didn’t list it when they joined, if they release it to the world the company actually owns it. So they’re not able to release it. So we have our own weird, intricate ownership things.

Travis Morrison: But aren’t stars in this day and age afraid of the power of street justice? Like, “No one will ever wanna work for you again because I will make you sound like Satan.”

Jenn Schiffer: I don’t think that people of power in tech have to answer to accountability quite yet. We’re only just starting to see that.

Travis Morrison: They have no fear, and no laws.

Jenn Schiffer: Right, right. We’re only just starting to see that with companies like Uber.

Jenn Schiffer: And all the examples are companies like Uber. Just company Uber. Because what other companies have to deal with that?

Travis Morrison: That’s true. Okay, yeah, you’re right. The idea that all of a sudden all the baddies are just getting whacked left and right…it’s not true.

Jenn Schiffer: How did you end up at Element Three?

Travis Morrison: I was doing freelance work, and I met them over the wire on a Laravel-focused job market or bulletin board.

Travis Morrison: I do. I’m mostly in PHP.

Jenn Schiffer: I also used to write a lot of PHP.

Travis Morrison: “I, too, used to do that.”

Jenn Schiffer: Well actually, Glitch; we focus mostly on Node and JavaScript, but we do have some fun troll examples. It’s a Docker container, so essentially you can run anything on it — so I’ve written PHP on Glitch.

Travis Morrison: Well, ain’t you something.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, to troll Anil I can try to get Movable Type on there.

Travis Morrison: Let’s troll him. Just get a name, just troll the hell out of him.

Jenn Schiffer: So you found out about them over the Laravel board.

Travis Morrison: Yeah, yeah. I was doing some contract work for them, and after a while I was like, why don’t we make it official?

Travis Morrison: Yeah, we made it Facebook official. Worked there for about eight months…and they’re great. It’s cool to work with a company that is…you’re inside New York, I’m inside New York, and I’ve actually found it very gratifying to work with a company that’s working in a space that isn’t mostly manufacturing and Midwest marketing that is outside of the New York zone. A professional culture that’s very unlike New York professional cultures, which has its own qualities. Yeah, it’s really been great. I go out to Indianapolis a couple times a year, which is a really cool city. I think that — you didn’t say this was “predictions with Travis” time — but we’re moving to that part of the show.

Jenn Schiffer: Welcome to Predictions with Travis.

Travis Morrison: I think we’re going to start seeing the great dispersal of tech from a couple of major American hubs to a whole bunch of regional communities.

Jenn Schiffer: And those communities are waiting for it. I know Nashville is thirsty for tech people.

Travis Morrison: Nashville’s a little too expensive for me now, but I love that town. If I could have lived in Nashville? I’m like wow. Why are you doing this? That’d be incredible.

Jenn Schiffer: It’s interesting. A lot of cities are hoping for more tech people to move there, and they’re all literally offering to change their name so Amazon builds their second headquarters there, and giving away taxpayer money and whatever, so they’re extremely thirsty for large tech companies and just the community in general.

Travis Morrison: And this gets back to my original point. How much of the tech world is gonna be like, “I wanna have a mid-sized town with a mellow commute and walks to my children’s school, and I don’t need 17 good coffee places. I need one good coffee place, and I want some tech jobs.”

Jenn Schiffer: And “I want a tech job, and I want to be in tech, but I don’t want to be in a neighborhood of just tech jobs, so it has to be affordable housing so people of different industries can all live together,” because that’s what a community generally is.

Travis Morrison: But how many of our people want to live in the town version of the show ? What if it’s more than we think?

Jenn Schiffer: The issue with accountability in tech is that a lot of people are complacent with where tech is going.

Travis Morrison: Like an infantilization?

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, and I think as students they start to think maybe the housing crisis in San Francisco is bad. Elon Musk puts a car with a dummy inside of it with a bunch of Douglas Adams references towards the moon, and everyone’s like, “Oh, actually, tech is good.”

Keep  reading for part 2 of our interview with Travis Morrison where we talk  about diversity in tech, and where Jenn shows off a fun Web Audio API  you can remix on Glitch.

Talking Music and Tech with Web Developer Travis Morrison — Part 1 of 2

Travis Morrison Interview Part 2 of 2

Jenn Schiffer’s example Web Audio API Glitch app

Jenn Schiffer: How has technology effected music in bad ways?

Travis Morrison: Jesus…you want me to count the ways?

Jenn Schiffer: People who are building software to democratize using technology in music, like having a place where you can like sell your stuff. Or say we were going on tour or whatever. You had started a startup, right? For music. Shoutabl.

Travis Morrison: Yeah it didn’t really work. I learned a lot of lessons about tech; a lot of things in tech and music and business don’t work.

Travis Morrison: That it’s very hard to come up with a profit structure. I mean, you do have to keep the lights on. How will you get money from people who make music? That’s where the predatory comes in.

Jenn Schiffer: There are a lot of places that were like, “oh, if you want to have your stuff streaming on these sites and you want to do it all at once, you have to like pay $300 to this one company and they’ll like do it for you” and it’s like…you could actually go around that. It’s a little more inconvenient, but like it takes more work.

Jenn Schiffer: People aren’t really that upfront with it.

Jenn Schiffer: Music and tech definitely sort of like have its parallel —

Travis Morrison: I don’t trust tech to solve these problems at all.

Jenn Schiffer: Oh no…no…because again, art’s gonna get good, music’s gonna get good but like technology is not…

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. And I think when people say art is gonna get good and music’s gonna get good, people are gonna pay more attention to what has been out there.

Jenn Schiffer: And the more people pay attention, the more empowered those creators are to keep making it. And that’s what’s important.

Travis Morrison: With these times and the tech stuff, I get stressed out when I see so many of these problems and people attempting to solve them on platforms like Twitter which, you know, I don’t know if Black Lives Matter or anything could happen without Twitter but at the same time, you always have to be mindful of the fact that you’re playing on a field in a stadium, but it’s a commercial product built by an industry with motivations that were not inclusive when they built it. Those conversations are happening inside a shell — a container that was like put together by those very energies that have some very questionable motivations.

Travis Morrison: The actual conversation itself might be part of what’s driving a lot of people crazy when they have these conversations in these contexts. You can’t even account for it. But you go to Twitter, and that’s a thing that was built by those motivations — those capitalists, white male motivations. And that’s something everyone should think about every time they start typing.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, ’cause like you said, like tech won’t be able to solve those problems. I think that it can just to people who are in tech today, as a whole, aren’t listening well enough. And it takes listening to solve problems.

Travis Morrison: It’s a historical problem.

Jenn Schiffer: Right. Exactly. I feel like we just do that a lot; we just sort of smile and shake our head “no” all the time.

Jenn Schiffer: I feel like one of the solutions to allowing tech to be open to actually solve problems instead of causing more is lowering the barriers to get into tech for underrepresented people.

Jenn Schiffer: And with Glitch, we are trying to do that by creating a free tool to build off of your dreams; the ability to learn how to code and remix other apps that people have made. And it’s in the browser and it’s their web applications. I think one of the coolest things with regards to music and the web is the web audio API, which is fairly new.

Travis Morrison: I’ve been playing with it the last couple years.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, exactly, it’s cool. I grew up with a huge respect for music and musicians.

Jenn Schiffer: Like my father used to drag me inside whenever “Billie Jean” was playing on VH1.

Jenn Schiffer: And so he really like instilled in me the artistry behind it. I always had access to music through like television, fortunately, and by then all the money that I had — which was very little — went towards CDs and cassettes and stuff.

Travis Morrison: Right, right, yeah, yeah.

Jenn Schiffer: And I was really super into my friends who were all in bands, so a lot of music I was listening to all through college were just like local friends and their friends and fortunately they were good, you know?

Travis Morrison: Right. Your friends’ music is very important. That’s like…it’s such a primal way, sometimes, especially with young people, a much more accurate way to know how someone’s feeling than them talking.

Travis Morrison: I could barely speak until I was like 33 years old. Like, I could talk a blue streak, but never made any sense.

Travis Morrison: Your friends giving you music is like… “I’m trying to tell you something.”

Jenn Schiffer: Right, yeah, they’re like, you know little love notes and stuff.

Travis Morrison: Little love notes, yeah. Many emotions.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. And I think as we’re working on a product that is trying to facilitate open source, I’m always constantly thinking about licenses and trying to promote the open web.

Jenn Schiffer: So I think a lot about how piracy is affected by that. If you democratize building software, you’ll have different options. And I think now the struggle is convincing companies that are consuming open source to give back in some sort of way. And a lot are. Like Linkedin — they have a lot of Ember core developers that work for them, and they allow those developers to give a lot back to the open source community, which is really cool. And so, I want to see that trend kind of move along.

Whenever I think something’s gonna be cool, that’s the cue for someone  to show me that nine people have done it and I’m like totally out of  touch and corny.

Jenn Schiffer: But I also like the fact that browser vendors and people building APIs for browsers are thinking more creatively on what can be done in the browser. It’s not just like putting text in video, but like the ability to create music.

Jenn Schiffer: And I know a lot of people who were working on it, and they were all musicians and they were all like creating music and…it’s very empowering to build your own tools to make your own art.

Jenn Schiffer: And to open it for everyone else to do.

Travis Morrison: Because I think diversity in the creators of this industry is the only hope. Well…and the money. There needs to be more diversity in terms of who gets —

Travis Morrison: Who gets bucks to try a thing. And the amount of white men giving other white men things to like try. I don’t know if I should use a visible new business — no, I’m not — but you see things sometimes and you’re like “a white man gave a white man some cash for that really dumb idea; that was really, really dumb.” Do you think there’s anything else that needs to be done besides current initiatives for continuing to push open diversity on tech teams?

Jenn Schiffer: I get asked that a lot, as a “woman in tech,” who therefore represents all women in tech.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, what we should do about diversity, inclusivity…and my answer’s always dependent on who asks. Always call out people who are actively hostile towards women because that’s a thing that’s happening or, you know, get these guys to give me a ton of money. I’ll help them distribute it. If you can’t do it yourself, let me help you.

Travis Morrison: Right, right, right. You certainly get to that point where you’re like, “I know I gotta do something about this but I only know white men.”

Travis Morrison: And I think they only know white men. And yes, that’s where you’re like, “would you like to pay me?”

Travis Morrison: I know women and people of color; I can help you with that.

Travis Morrison: I think that is a thing actually. You know what I was thinking would be cool? Whenever I think something’s gonna be cool, that’s the cue for someone to show me that nine people have done it and I’m like totally out of touch and corny. In light of my comment about how people are forgetting that the very nature of Twitter conversations are framed in the ideas of the old tech’s power and idea structure and money structure? I would love like a blue sky thing to see women and people of color to put out proposals for the next great social network. I don’t really buy the idea that Snapchat’s a social network. I think it’s a way for two people to send things to each other.

Jenn Schiffer: Snapchat is the most popular social media app for people age 13 to 25.

Travis Morrison: Is it more social than, is it as SMS social?

Travis Morrison: Okay, if you consider SMS social.

Travis Morrison: But no…wait, is email social?

Jenn Schiffer: I think our idea of what social is, is what young people are using.

Jenn Schiffer: I don’t think that’s the case, but I think that’s what people think.

Travis Morrison:Have any of these been the vision of a woman or person of color? I don’t know if a Puerto Rican kid from Chicago who sketches out their idea of the next social network to fix the problems of the past ones or to take advantage of new demand that really had been not noticed. What would that look like?

Jenn Schiffer: Besides solving the diversity and inclusivity crisis in tech —

Jenn Schiffer: What’s next for you? What are you gonna be working on?

Travis Morrison: Well, I’m moving to Durham. The thing I said before about the great tech dispersal? I’m doing it! I’m moving back to a purple state. I grew up in Virginia, and so getting into that community is probably gonna be a lot of my 2018. Continue working…hopefully finish another album.

Jenn Schiffer: One final, very, very important question: will the baby learn how to code or learn how to play guitar first?

Travis Morrison: Oh, he’s playing guitar already.

Jenn Schiffer: He’s playing guitar already?

Jenn Schiffer: Well thank you so much for coming in and chatting.

[The camera shifts to focus on Jenn’s laptop as she demonstrates a Glitch app using the Web Audio API. Travis stands next to her. The opening guitar riff to “When Doves Cry” by Prince plays over the laptop’s speakers.]

Jenn Schiffer: So this is a frequency visualization — you’ve probably seen this many times — and this is all in the browser using the web audio API. So my JavaScript: I start off where I have [audio] in my assets, [and] they’re converted to mp3 MIDI files, and I just have an array of objects called songs that have the title and the artist, which is what shows up here. And then when the app gets started, I want to create a sort of audio buffer so that when I press J, [it] loads a random song. The song loads and then plays when it’s ready and as the song is playing, it draws onto an HTML5 canvas the text that says the artist and song title and also all the bars for that frequency chart.

Jenn Schiffer: Because the web audio API gives you back a data array of, like, all the buffer lengths.

Jenn Schiffer: So that builds this. Let me unmute it again. You can see what else comes up. Another classic.

[“Every Day Is A Winding Road” by Sheryl Crow plays next.]

Travis Morrison: Right. Man, Sheryl. How did she do it?

Jenn Schiffer: The cool thing about Glitch is that you can have it auto-refresh or it auto-deploys whenever you —

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah…so I’m gonna refresh app on changes so I don’t have to click refresh. I want to change the color of those bars, so I’m gonna make it…I guess I’ll make it a little less green and see what happens.

Jenn Schiffer: The fill text, that’s for this. Oh actually, this is position I’m changing…ignore that. Down here, the RGB value…

Jenn Schiffer: It’s starting out as like a turquoise-ish…

Jenn Schiffer: But if I wanna make it more red…

Jenn Schiffer: I’ll do 150. RGB values — the red, green, and blue — can be zero to 255.

Jenn Schiffer: I’m gonna say barHeight.

Jenn Schiffer: I’m gonna lower the G and then keep that there. Let’s see what happens. Oh, purple-ish.

[“Girlfriend In A Coma” by The Smiths plays next.]

Travis Morrison: Yeah, but you changed it. I saw it, I saw you do that.

Jenn Schiffer: So another cool thing about the app is maybe…I mean, this is the ultimate playlist. But let’s say you wanted to —

Travis Morrison: Because you don’t need any other music.

Jenn Schiffer: You don’t need any other music, but let’s say in a less perfect world, you do need more songs. Because I have this as an unprivate project, you can remix this and have your own copy made and deployed with it’s own, different URL. My original project is guiltless-answer.

Jenn Schiffer: And Glitch here has created . And you can show that.

Travis Morrison: Wait, what’s going on up there? What are these?

[Travis points to Jenn’s laptop screen.]

Jenn Schiffer: These are just automatically generated names; you can change them if you like. So within seconds, there’s this new copy here that works the same way. So you can remix my app later. You should.

Jenn Schiffer: You can update the songs, or not, and change the colors.

Travis Morrison: Remix. When I remix it, it’s a totally new thing moving forward. It’s like hitting “copy” in a Google doc.

Travis Morrison: That’s right, right, right.

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