Look it’s 4 PM, it’s too late and you’re too tired to start on something new but it’s too early to leave work without your boss raising an eyebrow — what do you do? Theoretically, you could respond to all of those emails, but that’s just not realistic. Instead, might I propose that you pretend to be working with some Glitch apps?

I’ve gathered some Glitch games that are perfect for keeping you busy when you just don’t have it in you to work anymore — not that I’m speaking from experience or anything, I work 28 hours a day, can’t get enough.

Your first step to slacking off is to play a few rounds of “url-zombies” from Neal Agarwal. As an emoji face, you must fend off as many zombies as you can. This unique game really brings to life a lot of what Glitch values in our community: strange creations that promote procrastination and ponders the concept of mortality… 10/10!

Maybe you’re done with your all work for the day and you’re feeling good so you’d still want to do something mentally stimulating, why not a puzzle? “Number-party” by Christian Lawson-Perfect takes a simple concept, based on a puzzle by David Butler, and turns it into an emoji game. Each number is dressed up as an emoji and the goal is to figure which number each emoji is a stand in for, which you do by adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying different emojis and getting a new emoji answer — almost like emoji sudoku.

For this next game you’ll be going on Wikipedia. Don’t we all end up on there a couple times a day anyway? “Limitrivia” by Robert Vinluan puts your Wikipedia-ing skills to the test by asking Jeopardy style question, but giving you the additional help of searching with Wikipedia. It’s a pretty original take on a single player trivia game and it gives you some fun facts to tell your friends this weekend.

Okay it’s the last half hour of work, you’ve been sitting at your desk since lunch and you need any excuse to get up. Luckily for you this last toy works best with a printer. The project “image-target-to-slam” from 8th Wall, is a very cool example of augmented reality. Just print out the image of the moon provided, open the project on your phone and there you go. As an added game, see how many coworkers you can successfully distract with this digital palm tree.

To save these apps to your My Stuff, check out the collection!

Games to Get You Through the Last Hour of Work

Sarah Z speaks in small dissertations. In explaining her work–dense-yet-accessible YouTube video essays typically between 20 and 40 minutes in length–or in explaining the YouTube landscape, she often formulates thoughts with the same clarity most would need to write and edit to match. “I make analytical videos about various cultural phenomena,” she says over Discord, “from things like movies and TV shows to interesting phenomena such as brand Twitter on social media, what fanfiction of Harry Potter can tell us about how we interpret media–all that interesting stuff.”

Sarah is a 21-year-old university student, a competitive debater (and former two-year president of her school’s debate society), and a Dungeons and Dragons podcast actor. And although her demographic and disposition feel unique of someone who does what she does, what she does–make videos examining media–predates YouTube itself.

The Angry Video Game Nerd, a character/pseudonym of filmmaker James Rolfe’s creation and perhaps the most well-known of all the early media video reviewers, unknowingly pioneered an entire artform in 2004 with a nine minute, 26-second video review of Castlevania II that began with three cutting words: “This game sucks.”

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (NES) - Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN)

The video is perfectly summative of the years of YouTube reviews that followed. It contained simple critiques of an agreeably bad work of art; in this case, a game, which would be a prevalent medium for content creators to examine for years to come. It was not edited or filmed with the highest cinematic quality, nor filtered for family-friendliness. Its creator is white, male, cishet and opinionated. Though the form has grown, filled with more diverse creators, upgraded technologies and developed analyses, the root structures of these types of videos remain visible in Rolfe’s first video even 13 years after its creation.

“You’d think of a review and you’d say, ‘This is something that helps tell me if I’m going to consume a piece of media,’” says Fredrik Knudsen, producer of a YouTube documentary series called “Down the Rabbit Hole” which most often covers Internet lore. “The internet reviewer phenomenon changed that completely. And they challenged that notion of criticism as in service to another piece of media. In this case, the review was its own piece of media. It was its own entertainment.”

In his video about the rise and fall of another video game reviewer in Noah “Spoony” Antwiler, Knudsen goes over the early days of video reviews–including the sizable uptick in such videos that came after, and largely imitated, Rolfe’s works. These videos found themselves placed on newly spreading video sites like blip.tv and YouTube, which went public in December of 2005. “You have people very soon after such as the Nostalgia Critic who appeared and started reviewing other things,” Knudsen says, “because it’s a very small leap to go from making that sort of review content about video games to film.”

The Nostalgia Critic and his That Guy With the Glasses brand, which became a type of network connecting many video reviewers with stylistic similarities, grew a foothold in YouTube’s reviewer landscape. Along came figureheads like Anthony Fantano in 2009 with his popular music review channel The Needle Drop, or the nitpicky powerhouse CinemaSins in 2012, as standout creators on the platform that became as influential through their video critiques as they became popular.

YouTube’s algorithms tend to push rabbit holes of reviews and essays on viewers after watching a few from creators like these; one can slip from RedLetterMedia to a Sarah Z to a Julia Cudney in no time. The countless examples of successful channels reviewing, reacting to and parodying other content illustrate how beneficial it can be to make videos about media. Targeting a popular film, for instance, can provide an entry point for one to share their review with others who have seen the film or take an interest in it. It creates commonalities with communities of strangers who otherwise would be unlikely to take interest in an unknown creator’s work.

If the work is enjoyed by these communities, it can become popular. And if the work is popular, it can be transitioned into a lucrative business.

“I was contacted for a sponsorship offer for the first time, and I decided maybe I could get a better deal by going through Standard,” says Sarah Z. Standard, according to its website, is a “community of digital creators, co-founded by Dave Wiskus, CGP Grey, and Philipp Dettmer.” Its network contains big names from Vox to Philosophy Tube, and its tasks include helping negotiate sponsorships with the creators in their network. “And so I e-mailed and I spoke to Dave, who is one of the founders of Standard, and I thought, ‘This could be a good deal for me, and it could connect me with a lot of other creators and I could have a built-in support network which is really good for me,’ and so it kinda just happened.”

Sponsorships represent one of a few ways in which popular creators can profit from their brands–another notable one being Patreon pages, wherein supporters can crowdfund creators in exchange for tiers of bonus content/gifts. Though it would be a grave mistake for aspiring creators to assume amassing views on video essays is a one-way ticket to the Hamptons, it’s also worth noting that YouTubers are more adept than ever at making careers of their DIY content, especially when such content tends to get bigger quicker when it is perceptibly negative towards popular art–and popular artists.

“A lot of this criticism is happening on YouTube, which is a platform which incentivizes polarization and negativity,” says Sarah, “and because a lot of people who are critiquing media now don’t have the deepest understanding of the processes that go into making a movie, some of the critiques that are being levied toward certain media aren't really factually accurate, or doesn’t really take into account how the industry works.”

Such critiques of these critiques have been levied often against acts like The Nostalgia Critic, who in recent years has been especially embroiled in controversy, not the least of which involving allegations of misogyny and abuse towards employees. Nostalgia Critic is one of many YouTubers whose content skews negative and is often critiqued for poor research but has still obtained a following large enough to sustain a career and a company for years. In recent years, video game reviewers like Cleanprincegaming have also taken their fair share of heat for creating constant, negative deep-dives on controversial games that perhaps do not dive as deeply as advertised.

There have been a plethora of studies analyzing the psychology of negative content, examining why it seems the human brain is more attracted to rage, to criticism, to failure, and to drama than it is attracted to positivity. The bitter Twitter arguments, petty Reddit feuds, viral Facebook news stories (fake or otherwise) and, of course, the countless “thing bad” videos are stark indications of this phenomenon. Given that algorithms funnel eyeballs to videos that are already gaining attention and that succeeding through these algorithms can turn into life-changing careers for aspiring creators, it seems inevitable that YouTube’s cultivated a culture of negativity for negativity’s sake–content trashing other content made, at least in part, to turn a profit.

“I noticed at the beginning that a lot of the videos I was making were negative reviews, and I eventually got kinda bored with it,” Sarah Z tells me. Transitioning away from reviews and straightforward critics and more towards cultural conversations, Sarah addressed the swath of unconstructive negative critiques in a video entitled “Bad Media Criticism.” Her content, which lives in the lineage of YouTube stars like Lindsay Ellis, represents a new wave of elevated discussion, of sociocultural, political and artistic critiques that examine not only why a work may or may not work, but also what it says about the world that creates it and consumes it.

These more progressive spaces filled with creators like Sarah are not at all immune to toxicity in their own right; however, they seem to at least be effective in pushing back against opportunistic nitpicking, inadvertent or otherwise.

“Our job isn’t to seek out as much wrong with a show or movie as we possibly can,” she says. “It’s not attempting to find and picking apart things’ flaws, no matter how minor. It’s just applying a critical eye to the media we consume.”

The Art of YouTube Criticism

There's a well-known saying that if you teach a man to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime. Air Force veteran Jerome Hardaway knows this saying well. As the founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization Vets Who Code, he has used this principle as a launchpad to equip veterans and military spouses with skills in front-end web development to help them ease into new careers -- as well as start businesses of their own -- since 2014. Learn more about Jerome and Vets Who Code in this exclusive interview.

Tell us about Vets Who Code and the purpose behind starting the organization.

Roger that. The purpose of starting Vets Who Code was pretty simple. If you look at [a United States] map, most military installations aren't in really big tech spaces. So the things I wanted to learn that had the easiest point of entry weren't available to learn. And if I didn't go the degree route or another crazy route, I wasn't going to be able to get into the tech industry.

I ended up getting lucky and getting a scholarship to go to New York, and trained and learned how to program while after I already gained some programming experience. But what I wanted to do is negate that, because no one should have to leave their family to have to learn how to program, especially with the world of the internet. I decided that I was going to create Vets Who Code, which was going to be a distributed non-profit. We were actually the first distributed non-profit that focused on making the web our home with a deep focus on the JavaScript ecosystem because it was the lowest level technology out there that was the most versatile. That's just how things happened.

When did you first get the bug for coding?

I got out of the military in 2010, and I was like "yo, these jobs that they're offering me are either jobs that I'm overqualified for or the jobs I am qualified for aren't hiring." Because [the country] was in the middle of a recession, I knew I needed to "skill up" fast if I wanted to get more opportunities. So I did all this research and I saw this commercial about going to, I think ITT or some crazy private for-profit college that probably isn't around anymore, and they were talking to me about coding and SQL and I was like, "what's that?" I started researching more; I had a book that I picked up from someone while I was in the desert on PostgreSQL and I ended up teaching myself PostgreSQL and from there ended up getting my first job as a certified TWIC agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security with a focus on handling their databases.

So I was in there adding and doing all these joins and selections and additions and deletions to their databases and I was like "oh, okay, this is a good salary. I'm in air conditioning. No one's trying to blow me up or shoot me. So this is pretty cool, I can do this." I started focusing on LAMP stack, which helped me start with PHP, and from there, I learned a lot of Ruby on Rails. I moved back home and got a senior Ruby on Rails position. It was a real trial by fire, but I learned I was able to keep up and I was able to do well.

Then I started learning JavaScript and React and I've been on the JavaScript and React train since. I love the deep dive into UI, going more into React and UX and web accessibility, and design systems. You start realizing that there are more layers to each component before you even get to the data portion.

I do a lot of UI and UX stuff now because I'm not a fan of context switching. I have what I call the "3:00am rule." Say someone woke you up at 3:00am and said, "do this for free," but it doesn't make you mad. UI and UX is that thing that for me.

What are some of the advantages of hiring vets for the tech industry?

Discipline and focus. That's a no brainer. Veterans are self-starters; we don't have to look or need to wait to be told to do something. We're just going to go do it.

Then, just problem solving. A lot of people think that people who are in the military don't solve problems well, especially if they're enlisted. That is the furthest thing from the truth, because the mission has to be completed, and you rarely have every tool you need to complete your mission. Those are just a few of the qualities that I can think of that make us an advantageous and eager group for tech companies.

What are some of the success stories of vets who have gone through the program?

Our head of UX, , came to us as a graphic designer two or three years ago, and now she's a senior developer at a company in Chicago. She's actually one of the few veterans who has gone from entry level to retirement as Vets Who Code has progressed. She's one of a few veterans that we have consistently been able to help get jobs and level up through her entire career.

Another great success story is . We helped him get his first job at Microsoft with a focus on JavaScript, Node.js, and Azure. He was just recently promoted as a DevOps engineer, and that's a testament of how versatile JavaScript is. Because we only focus on JavaScript and everything he learned was through us, he's been able to transition from a support engineer to a DevOps engineer, consistently moving through the scope of work while coming to us for help. Our team members have mentored him and drilled him to help him prep for his interviews at Microsoft on both occasions.

Now there's a lot of different programs that are out there for people who want to learn how to code and get a job in the tech industry. Earlier, you mentioned for-profit colleges, but there's also places like General Assembly.

Right. Are there any unique challenges that Vets Who Code face as an organization when it comes to these other programs?

Yes and no. Because we're a non-profit and we don't charge our veterans, sometimes a bootcamp will try to target our veterans because they know that we're not using their GI bill. But it hasn't worked because we're just better. [laughs]

It's the same way Silicon Valley recruits when it comes to startups. There's a practice called pattern matching where they are looking for the guy that looks and sounds like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. That actually works for us because what better person to teach you how to go from an M4 carbine to a MacBook Pro then a person that went from a M4 carbine to a MacBook Pro? That really is our number one advantage for veterans over a lot of the for-profit code schools, colleges, and universities.

Also, 80% of our team are veterans. Our head of mentorship is a veteran; he's also a Rails engineer for the government. Our head of prework is a veteran. He's also an Angular on Rails engineer for NBC. I'm a veteran; I also work at CBS. Carla, she's a veteran. Our head of product; he's a veteran who works at Verizon. Everybody at Vets Who Code who you'll interact with will be able to help you through your journey because they have been where you at every step, all the way. There's a lot more understanding, like "Hey, I know what you're going through. I've been through this."

For instance, our head of product started his journey with us. He was a Special Forces candidate looking to get out of the Army, and was also a D1 athlete in college for cheerleading. He ended up being under contract to teach cheerleading in Greenland, met the love of his life, stayed there for five years but had to come back home cause of health issues. However, he didn't have a transferable skill. We ended up teaching him while he was in Greenland and helping him transition with his wife from Greenland to Texas and he ended up getting his current job at Verizon. These are stories that we have that for-profit schools just can't compete with.

There's also the story of Osvaldo Vargas; he's head of his own dev shop. Two years ago, he was going through things with his family, and he was pushing himself so hard. I saw him [online] on a Friday night at 10:00 PM once, and I called him up and told him go to bed. Very few code schools or organizations have that level of compassion or community. Does their leadership have that level of insight to understand? To be acutely aware of what their students are going through? To be able to say, "you need to rest" or "I understand this is where you're coming from. Because I've been there too." That's always been our advantage.

How can people help with supporting Vets Who Code?

Roger that. One of the biggest ways people can support what we're doing with Vets Who Code is to donate. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, a charity organization, we rely 100% on donations. People can also support us through our HashFlag Shop; all proceeds go to our organization.

We're also planning some really cool things in 2020. We want to take six veterans to RenderATL, and we're trying to make sure that we can fly them out so they don't have to spend a dime. We also have UndergroundJS coming up that we're trying to bring veterans to. For 2020, we want to push our veterans into the real world. We're very excited.

People can also follow us on Twitter. But most importantly, hire our veterans.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Veterans Day Spotlight: Vets Who Code

Glitch is headed to Los Angeles for Capitol Royale November 15-17!

We are partnering with Capitol360, Capitol Music Group’s Innovation Center, to bring this one-of-a-kind creativity and innovation festival to life. Capitol Royale is an all ages event held at the historic Capitol Records Tower in the heart of Hollywood. It will bring together the music industry’s leading creatives, coders, designers, startups and fans to celebrate the incredible work happening at the intersection of music and technology.

Capitol Royale’s theme for 2019 is Music on the Move, and you can expect us to showcase some apps that make music move at our booth in the Capitol Royale Startup Garden throughout the event. Want to learn more about how music and technology have advanced side-by-side? Then you do not want to miss the keynote address from our CEO Anil Dash on November 16. And while you’re around, stop by Capitol Royale’s record fair and merch pop-ups! There will be live music performances, and so much more.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Glitch event without some remixing, which is why we are also helping out with this year's Capitol Royale Hackathon! If you’re a developer or UX designer who really loves music, then this event is just for you. If you want to take part, then submit a project proposal! Selected hackathon participants will have access to a catalog of roughly 40,000 pre-cleared audio streaming tracks from Universal Music Group and Universal Music Publishing Group, as well as never-before-seen original content and archival assets.

Get your tickets today for Capitol Royale, and use the promo code 10off for a $10 discount. Now that’s music to our ears!

Get Your Remix On with Glitch at Capitol Royale

Using Code to Destroy the Gender Binary with Noelle Leigh: A Glitch Creator Profile

Nothing is more exciting than seeing how different creators make the web. At our annual onsite in May, we had three users come in as guests to talk about the apps they've made using Glitch. One of the guests, Noelle Leigh, talked about her “trans-pride-frame” app which let people easily add the trans pride flag around their Twitter picture without logging in.

The app got a bit of traction in the Glitch community and inspired people to remix the project with other LGBT flags (bisexual, non-binary, lesbian, etc.) I got to ask Noelle about that experience and some of her others while working on Glitch.

What kinds of projects do you like making on Glitch? Has Glitch changed the way you thought about your work or your creative process?

My projects on Glitch usually grow from a seed of visual inspiration, so a lot of my projects have focused on procedural graphics in some way. Working using Glitch has encouraged me to be more creative because it makes it so easy to instantly share your work with others!

Not having to fiddle with hosting and domain names helps to remove a lot of the friction that I would otherwise experience, and leaves me with more time to experiment and explore more directions!

When you created the “trans-pride-frame” app, a lot of folks ended up remixing it with different LGBT flags. Was that always part of the plan?

When I was working on the app, there was definitely a point where I considered including some more flags. But while thinking that through, I realized that would introduce a lot of scope creep, and I might never end up releasing the app itself! So instead I settled on making it fairly straightforward to adapt to new flags, and hoped that more people would customize it to suit their needs! I was so pleased when they did!

Can you tell me the story of how you came up with the Emoji Gender Bot?

It's difficult to remember the exact circumstances, but I believe this tweet was the inception for the idea (ironically, I didn't use that library and built my own emoji manipulation functions from scratch).

One of the difficult parts of procedural generation is producing a wide variety of outputs that are both interesting and unique. It turns out the thousands and thousands of available emoji make for a perfect canvas with which to create generated art!

Seeing this emoji library made me realize that I could select and manipulate lists of emoji programmatically. And as an avid fan of abolishing the gender binary, I thought this project could be a great piece of satire on western culture’s obsession with newborns' genitalia!

I saw that for Emoji Gender Bot you made a point to keep detailed documentation. How did you find your passion about sharing your knowledge with others? Does Glitch enable that passion?

My first few projects on Glitch were primarily ways of learning how to use certain new web APIs, which I never would've been able to complete without relying on the well-documented examples of others before me.

Seeing a couple of really detailed breakdown of impressive projects on Glitch inspired me to share my own knowledge for other folks who may be new to the world of JavaScript, which can be really overwhelming!

I'm a huge sucker for good documentation, so I try to include it for any project that I want to share with a wider audience, in order to support an open-source community of young and old who can build on each others work to make more beautiful things!

How Noelle Leigh uses Glitch (to destroy the gender binary)

The web is stuck in a loop–a GIF loop, that is.

It’s an odd thing to think about now but, as formats go, GIFs have a tumultuous past. They’re a way to share an animated picture or video, which sounds like a normal and delightful thing to do if it weren’t for the fact that GIFs are the victim of the web’s greatest failed assassination attempt.

You may have heard the story once before, but let’s recount it for anyone too busy using Giphy to worry about the origins of these tiny artworks. On November 5, 1999, the website Burn All GIFs demanded wiping the format off the internet forever, thanks to a legal dispute over the use of LZW, the technology powering them.

There’s a long and fascinating back story behind that battle, but savvy readers (and anyone alive) will note that, well, the coup didn’t work. The GIF was resurrected after the patent for LZW expired and here we are, living on loop.

We found out the GIF was eternal the day it was almost killed

GIFs represent our desire to remember and to express. They’re “tiny notes passed between those who know,” says Lori White, an independent film director and viral storyteller who has worked at Upworthy and on GIF-friendly projects with filmmakers like Taika Waititi. Like film, she notes, “GIFs can pick up when words leave us.”

They’re a surprisingly controversial method to express emotion or ideas, and who can say what memories should be shared and documented on the web?

“Our brains are highly evolved to process body language and facial expression visually. That makes the GIF the perfect vehicle for conveying in full color and richness an emotion, mood, or reaction, which language alone could only sketch,” technology writer and editor Will Oremus shared.

Think of all the micro-expressions that could have been wiped away like yesterday’s at-capacity hard drive if Burn All GIFs succeeded. Despite their more endearing qualities aspects, we’re no closer to a general consensus on GIFs than we were in 1999. The battle is no longer on legal grounds (except occasionally for FIFA), and would-be assassins are ready to kill GIFs again.

GIF critics argue the format is a poor reflection of the range of nuanced human expression; others raise the matter of its impact on culture. In an interview, investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein compared the use of GIFs to a reliance on Gmail's auto-suggested replies tool, calling their popularity a "constant reminder of how image-saturated and perfunctory everything is" on the web. Fair enough. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of a poorly-chosen GIF can appreciate the awkward pain they induce. But are we willing to get rid of it, forever?

Throwing out the baby GIF with the bathwater GIF

Considering its broad flexibility, it would be more surprising if the GIF wasn't controversial. But what makes anti-GIF arguments unique when compared to say Y2K scare or music file-sharing services like Napster is that no one wanted all emergency preparedness efforts and the sharing of music to stop. No one criticized MySpace because they hated friends. The GIF is being made into a scapegoat for what it represents: a world with limited resources.

As much as it can and does do for us, the web has always been limiting as a venue for expression; its controversies are regularly forgotten and remembered. Engadget senior editor, and creator of the , Roberto Baldwin says that what makes a GIF special is that “not everyone can wax poetic about their emotions. These tiny strings of images are short stories we can share with others that do that and so much more.”

It's the little format that could. Burn All GIFs rendered both a harsh judgment that beckons us to ensure we are in control of the terms of self-expression. Long gone are the days where GIFs were only the domain of fandoms. They rule us all.

“GIFs are a great way to cut through some of the barriers written communication can create,” GIF-maker and editor-at-large at Media Matters Parker Molloy says. “This comes in handy if you're trying to emphasize that you're being sarcastic, happy, sad, and so on. The truth, though, is that anyone can make GIFs of their own.” Even if that feeling is as simple as asking, “what now?” (a GIF made by Molloy)–and even if it’s a fleeting moment–do people deserve a web reflective of their experiences?

This extremely online matter is going to be adjudicated offline, in the real world, where history forgotten can repeat itself on an endless loop, too. In the case of the threatened, controversial, and publically maligned GIF, the format is simply imitating life. As the anonymous GIF-luencer @darth says, "here can we enjoy the GIF forever."

Keep the GIFs alive by enjoying more from Glitch:

Listen: How GIFs Became Embedded in Our Culture (Function Podcast)

Listen: GIFs as Blackface (Function Podcast)

Stuck in a loop: remembering the 20th anniversary of Burn All GIFs

Most people who use technology don't stop to wonder, "Who's on the board of directors of the company that made this product?" But in a moment when tech is increasingly leaving us feeling uneasy, or even creeped out, unsure if we can trust what's happening with our data or whether a company has our best intentions in mind, it turns out this is a question that matters.

So today, we're doing something unprecedented in pushing for accountability and inclusion for a tech company: We're making an open call for a board member for our company. It's just one step toward ensuring that we build a lasting, successful business that does right by everyone we serve.

Now, if you like Glitch and just want to use it without thinking about the company behind it — great! Make awesome stuff, we're glad to have you in the community. But many of you have told us you appreciate that we're trying to ensure that Glitch isn't just a company that makes an awesome product, but is thoughtful about being responsible to the communities we serve. And this is our next big step.

At Glitch, we're a rapidly-growing, deeply innovative startup that serves an incredibly broad and brilliant community. Currently, our board consists of our co-founder and chair Joel Spolsky and me, Anil Dash, as CEO.

We're looking to add at least one more voting board member, as well as potentially one or more non-voting board observers, with the goal of broadening corporate oversight and accountability, helping inform and shape company strategy, expanding the company's network of relationships, and assisting in key tasks like high-level recruiting or partnerships.

Conventionally, these kinds of seats on a board of directors are apportioned through a closed private backchannel, or are simply negotiated by investors as part of the fundraising process. We think we have a chance to make a fundamentally more innovative strategy and a dramatically more inclusive company culture by making our call for board members as open as everything else we do at our organization.

Standard expectations for a board member include a deep familiarity with the communities, customers and audiences Glitch is looking to serve, experience growing and scaling a meaningful business, and the highest personal and ethical standards for a steward of our company.

That being said, we're open to unconventional and unexpected candidates as well! This new board member does not necessarily have to have prior experience on the board of an early-stage startup, and naturally we want to explicitly welcome people who belong to underrepresented groups to nominate themselves.

We're particularly interested in people who can complement or expand the skill sets that Joel and I are familiar with. If you've got deep experience with how to grow a high-scale B2B SaaS business, or a strong background in building large-scale creator communities, or fluency in how to build a world-class consumer brand in media and culture, or any other particular expertise that would take Glitch to the next level from a corporate standpoint, please do get in touch.

Reach out and send us a message to openboard@glitch.com  to get in touch. Tell us a bit about yourself, and what things inspire you on the web or in your favorite creative community, and of course which parts of building a thriving, meaningful business are most compelling to you. And you can suggest others for the board — so don’t be shy about passing this call along, or even just letting us know about someone to contact.

Once you do, we’ll get in touch with you with any follow up questions and to schedule a call so we can get to know each other. (And just like everything we do at Glitch, everyone will get a response.)

Obviously, the core responsibility of a board member is to ensure our business is run successfully, effectively and responsibly, and to encourage corporate accountability. You’ll be there to make sure we’re doing right by our community, our users and employees. Your responsibilities will include attending quarterly board meetings, typically in person in NYC, but remote can work as well.

If you have special skills or qualifications that are pertinent to our work, we’re happy to accommodate those in your responsibilities as a board member, and we’ll work with you to strengthen any necessary skills as well.

We are excited to bring our company and our community to a new level by inviting a new board member to help guide our growth and evolution, and we can’t wait to welcome a new leader to our team.

An Open Board

It’s October 31st and before you get into the holiday mood and stream “All I Want For Christmas Is You” 900 times, we’ve got some treats for you! We’ve put together a handful of apps that will give you both a spook and a fright. From web audio to name generators, there’s no one way to get into the Halloween spirit.

First we have “synthier-things” from Eric Wood, which lets you play and morph the Stranger Things theme song. If you’re exhausted from trick-or-treating, this is the perfect toy to distract your kids for a half hour while you power nap. Plus you can learn more about the oscillator, filter and envelope that adjusts the audio if you check out the README which explains how the project works.

Introducing “rumbling-ironclad,” your friendly neighborhood ouija board from Potch. Rather than wasting your time and money on a physical ouija board to talk to regular boring ghosts, just use this one to talk to the digital ghosts that keep you up at night — old MySpace Top 8’s, LiveJournal entries, etc.

It wouldn’t be Halloween without the “halloween-name-generator” from Melissa McEwen! Use this to spookify your name on Instagram, Twitter or if you’re really bored changed all your contacts and make Halloween year round. Sorry mom and dad, you’re now “momonstrous” and “accursedad” respectively. As an added bonus, here’s a second pumpkin-centered name generator.

I don’t know what exactly “hall-of-jitters” is, but thricedotted has got me spooked. You can just click to add a new specimen and grow your jitter family, but watch out, I looked away for a few seconds and my jitters grew so fast. I now live in fear that my jitter called “EXPECTANT KATIE” might jitter out of my laptop screen.

Finally, the accidental spookiest app on Glitch is… (drum roll) “doodle-place”! Have you ever drawn something so cool that you wish it would come to life? Well after playing with this app from Lingdong Huang you will never want that to happen. In theory a universe with all the doodles would be kind of cute, but the actuality is much more nightmarish.

Whether you’re trick-or-treating, going to a party or chilling at home with a scary movie, there’s always room for some fun web apps in your life. If you want to save any of the apps to your My Stuff, check out this collection.

Boo-ray, some spooky apps!

When you double in size as a team or company, sometimes you outgrow the tools and practices you use. At Glitch, gratitude is a company value that extends all the way back to our days as Fog Creek Software. For years, we’ve iterated on this general premise that taking time to recognize colleagues, peers, and collaborators creates a better workplace for everyone.

When our CEO Anil Dash wrote about this two years ago, the company was half the size it is now and still called Fog Creek Software. Every week during Town Hall, employees would publicly thank one another for help with a technical challenge or major contributions to large projects. It might seem corny, but it became a habit!

We’re not alone in seeing the importance of gratitude when building a team. “Workplace recognition motivates, provides a sense of accomplishment and makes employees feel valued for their work,” a Gallup analysis reads. “Recognition not only boosts individual employee engagement, but it also has been found to increase productivity and loyalty to the company, leading to higher retention.”

What started as an informal Town Hall practice eventually grew to be time consuming and tedious as we added employees. Going around and giving “Bravos” or public acknowledgements became the bulk of the meeting.

We experimented with using Trello to solve for both time and distribution. During the summer, we divided all employees into four groups alphabetically on a Trello board. Throughout the week, employees were encouraged to add Bravos to individuals’ Trello cards and then we’d read the Bravos out loud during each Monday All Hands meeting.

Someone would kick off the initial card and then whoever received the Bravos would read the next set of Bravos for the person listed below them. The process took no longer than 15 minutes, but even then, it led to some unforeseen challenges and feelings.

No one wants compliments out of social obligation, but that’s exactly what was happening. When you see everyone’s name in a column on Trello, it’s hard not to feel bad if someone didn’t get a Bravo — so it never happened, everyone always got multiple so no one felt left out. It came across as disingenuous to receive a broad compliment about your work.

Sarah Zinger, an Engineer on the Community team, was on the opposite side. “I felt some pressure to make sure everyone got good Bravos. I thought, ‘this person is awesome and needs more and better bravos’ but I hadn’t necessarily worked closely with that person for a few weeks and might not have something specific or meaningful to say.’

It also ended up creating a weird relationship between manager and employee. “Giving visibility to your team's work is an important part of managing, but Bravos weren't a good vehicle for that,” Victoria Kirst, Director of Platform said. “What people remembered were the petty social aspects: who bravoed whom, who got the most praise, how effusive was the praise, and so on. I didn't want my reports to get caught up in that -- I didn't want them to be worried if I didn't give them a bravo or if I didn't write something long enough for them -- so I didn't participate.”

In our current iteration of Bravos, we try to keep it simple, mostly using Slack and the Reacji Channeler tool. Reacji automatically forwards a message to a Slack channel if someone reacts to it with a specific emoji.

At Glitch, we have the “Bravo” emoji (Glitch fish with flowers) that pushes message to our #bravos channel. Each week, Jess, our Executive Ops Manager, aggregates the channel’s messages from the week and posts them in our All-Hands Trello board. This gives everyone a chance to see what was recognized throughout the week without all of the fanfare.

If there’s something that particularly stands out, we’ll make it a point to summarize the effort during the meeting, usually by a member of the executive team.

Employees can write Bravos directly in the #bravos channel (above) or simply use our custom emoji to send a message into the channel (below).

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve tried this new system out and so far so good! The recognition is light-weight and part of the teams’ distributed workflow. There’s no more social pressure and the optics around giving and receiving a Bravo are minimal compared to what they were in the past.

Will this system break as we scale to hundreds of Glitchers around the world? Who knows, but it’s safe to predict that no matter how we big we get, our gratitude will grow too.

Are you interested in helping Glitch evolve its culture? We're hiring!

How to use Slack and Trello to show gratitude at work

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.

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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.

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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!

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