As the year winds down, some folks spend the remainder of it celebrating the good things the year brought them, or the potential that the new year has in store. Others look at the past twelve months and reflect upon the ins and outs and ups and downs that life never stops bringing to our door. 

We figured, why not both? So to wind down 2022 we’re reflecting on all of the things that we’re grateful for as a community, and most importantly—as fans of this weird and wonderful web we’ve all gathered around. 

Gratitude has long been a part of Glitch’s DNA. (Fun fact: Less than a month after this post went out, the Fastly team created their own #gratitude channel in Slack so we’ve always been on the same wavelength). We’ve shared in the past how expressing our appreciation for each other has strengthened our bond as a team – but also served as a guiding principle for how we approach the community. Glitch would not be what it is without you—the creators—and we are thankful for each and everyone of you. Our community continues to delight and surprise the greater web community with your creativity, ingenuity, thoughtfulness, and sense of humor.

The “Thanks 💖” button on creator profiles has been a way to show your appreciation for the individual creators and playlist curators, and heading into this season of celebration, we figured we would make it even easier to spread encouragement around the community.

Previously, you could only thank creators from their individual project page—and you still can! But we spruced things up a little, and now you can thank creators directly on their profile pages, which by the way, you have a fully customizable profile page when you register on Glitch. 

Our hope is not only that you thank the creators of your favorite projects, but that they inspire you to create something equally worth celebrating and the thanks continue until, well, until they unplug the internet. So give thanks! 

In the meantime, we’ll be celebrating all of the projects, creators, and the broader Glitch community through the rest of this year, building up to the reveal of Last Year on Glitch, our annual roundup of projects created by you! 

As the year winds down, some folks spend the remainder of it celebrating the good things the year brought them, or the potential that the new year has in store.

A season of gratitude

The year might be winding down, but the Glitch community is still in full throttle! From Taylor Swift’s Midnights album art to splattering soup on infinite images, to biking back to school and tracking Doctor Who, there was no limit to the creativity the community shared with us this past October. 

We’d like the record to reflect that at this point in 2021, we rolled out ~glitch-in-bio to Glitch Pro subscribers in an early access release, and there are now thousands of instances! In other, more recent news, we just updated our ​​✨Prettier button ✨ to support .mjs and .cjs files, thanks to a push from community member @digitpain. 

Have a suggestion for what you’d like to see happen around the Glitch community? Join us in the latest open thread over on the community forum, where we chat about all things apps, cool projects, and weird web wonders. Making some social media changes lately? Over the weekend @anildash made a playlist of Fediverse apps that are taking off on Glitch, or that are handy for developers learning to build there, so check it out.  

That’s it for updates, let’s get to the fun stuff—your creations! 

~draw-your-world by @enauman has a new update with a great door, lol!

For soup lovers (or haters) check out ~soup-splat created by @derekahmedzai 

Glitch got a shoutout in this AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) post about “y2k aesthetic.” 

~stump-spring-bellusaurus by @vian0nguyen is a precious collection of stories by a couple of friends about some bird detectives.

~bloxylibrary by @Daw588 is a handy search engine for Roblox development resources.

This past World Mental Health Day (October 10th) folks celebrated with ~thought-detox created by @AngeloStavrow. If you enjoy it, there’s a free app version available for download as well.

Local students got to ride back to school on the ~bergenbiketrain created by @daniel73473 this past month.

~notion-pokedex created by @thomasfrank is a complete Pokédex in Notion, built in under 12 hours!

@sogalanbat created the Halloween costume of the year, ~tamagotchi-game-costume, with Glitch and Phaser. 

~rosham by @ckolbeck is a shared game of swarm rock/paper/scissors. We could watch this for hours (and maybe we have...)

~gbbo-judge by @lucymeredith3 is a Great British Bake-off simulator.

~surrender-index is (surprise!) a surrender index calculator measuring how cowardly each punt in the NFL is, created by @kylehill.

The Hand Eye Society hosted a whole mini explorable experience on Glitch at ~hes-superfest-2022.

~nyt-letter-boxed-solver created by @mattly, offers much needed solutions when you’re stuck on the New York Times’ Letter Boxed game. 

@RonakChovatiya reminded us of their VR celebration for the Diwali festival 🥳

~castle-staging by @herbst + @marwie lets you create a room and have friends help you build a castle in 3D. Also check out their physics demo that includes a nod to Glitch, ~needle-physics-cannon-sample 🎏

This semester, New York University is using Glitch to teach A&P with the VR demo ~nyulangone-immersive-classroom.

Get started with Needle Engine using the tutorial ~rhinestone-ink-flock created by @herbst.

~travellog-cogap by @carolynlimadeo is a nice travellog web page from a long bike trip.

~fortunewill by @tdopress finally brings Zoltar to Glitch 🔮

~thiccccc by @keaton.brandt may be (unverified) the most c’s in the “word” “thiccccc.”

~where-who is a classic scene from Doctor Who, created by @mapsmania.

And just like that, we’re into a new month! As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~taylor-swift-midnights, a Midnights album cover generator by @derekahmedzai, who also made ~soup-splat!

The year might be winding down, but the Glitch community is still in full throttle!

Last month on Glitch, the October 2022 edition

September just hits different. There’s something in the air. Beyoncé was born this month, and so was Zendaya. Our own fearless leader Anil Dash was born in September, but keeping with the eponymous icons, so were Playlists. That’s right, last September we launched Playlists! Have you created a playlist yet? Share some of your favorites with us in the latest community open thread. 

Open thread? Aren’t most forums open threads? No, they aren’t but we’re glad you asked. We realized there wasn’t really an option in our forum for a watercooler-getting to know you-regular old chat. So boom, open threads began! Each week the Glitch team wants to know who you are, what you’re creating, and what you think is interesting, so join us! 

Lastly, if you’ve missed hearing from the @glitchdevs Twitter account, not to worry! You can still keep up with what the Glitch devs are thinking about and building by following @FastlyDevs, so make sure to follow, like and subscribe! And now for our regularly scheduled programming. ✨

~godard-plot-generator by @samplereality is a Godard film plot generator built with Tracery!

~cardinales-y-romanos is a journal of sorts by @v.isforvioleta, with their words beautifully drenched in the Hydra-synth powered visuals in the background.

~ashley-aka-wyrm is the Glitch-in-bio of writer/editor @peripatetic.poetic

~taylor-swift-midnights by @derekahmedzai is an album cover generator in celebration of Taylor Swift’s upcoming album.

~kanjibreak by @fasiha enables collaborative breakdowns of kanji!

This ring light app by @aTylerRobertson has a color picker so you’re not stuck with just white light!

~get-a-recent-bill-from-congress by @airbr uses the new API from Congress.gov to show recent Congressional bills.

~nomore24 by @vickiniu was created to help others push the movement to end the 24-hour workday for home attendants in New York City.

~lookout-keeper was created by @StuartHoughton85754 to help keep his loved one, suffering from dementia, safe.

~what-colour-is-that is an app @christianp built to help with identifying colors when you’re colorblind.

~wave-rebel-albacore is @potch goofing around with combining 2D marching squares and n-d meta balls

~nethack by @huytd is a retro-style in-browser SSH client to play Nethack

~loc-photo-roulette by @lwrubel is a game where you guess the year of a randomly shown photo from the Library of Congress.

~fake-soaps by @mharen asks you if you can find a fake soap among this list of scents 🎃

~camogen by @aceslowman is an in-browser (and in-progress) environment for creating WebGL visuals.

~tasteful-boom-oatmeal by @marwie demos Google’s text-to-3D model generator, DreamFusion.

~maze-cube by @mitch.c.allen lets you get lost in a maze this spooky season without the chill or muddy boots. 

~needle-fonts-sample by @marwie answers the question on everyone’s minds: Where are the project’s fonts automatically exported from??????

Fan of Critical Role? Check out ~critrolefic, a Critical Role fic generator by @avasalvarez.

~imagine-bamboo by @edie generates a bamboo field from tweets, a great way to belated celebrate #WorldBambooDay

~creating-with-data by @digitalWestie is a dart board showing software industry companies in Edinburgh over the years.

~the-queue by @aTylerRobertson is a queue simulator for you know what reason...

Also by Tyler is this much needed pep talk: ~am-i-doing-this-right

With September firmly in the past, spooky season (or szn, if you like) is now upon us! Please send us your favorite haunted apps and projects so we can—most importantly— love them, but also share them with the Glitch community. 👻

As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~duck-color created by @rsheeter which allows you to express yourself with the full range of RGB in the shape of a duck emoji. Enjoy!

September just hits different. There’s something in the air. Beyoncé was born this month, and so was Zendaya. Our own fearless leader Anil Dash was born in September, but keeping with the eponymous icons, so were Playlists.

Last month on Glitch, the September 2022 edition

August 2022 was quite a month for the Glitch community, so to commemorate that, here are some standout apps that we can’t wait to share with you. Enjoy!

Go to ~prompt-randomizer, write a prompt and shuffle it to your heart's content with this simple prompt generator.

Soothe yourself with the sounds of ~sea-monsters 🦑 on this cool Glitch project.

~pokemon-card-shader is a holographic card shader by @alexanderameye brought from Unity to Three.js with Needle. 

~oceanic-tiger is a random worm name generator 🪱 for the Worms game community on Reddit and they’re pretty funny.

~peg-solo is a fun solitaire peg game with emoji created by @rowan_m.

Ready to build your own amazing, machine learning-powered, musical instrument? The folks from Magenta.js built a playground app ~play-magenta to try experimenting with code and sound in the browser.

Discover how to generate beautiful header images for your GitHub profile READMEs with ~reheader. 

Or, at the very least, feel a tiny bit better about abandoning your side projects on GitHub 😅

Test your pets for motion illusions 👀 with this Glitch app from @duwcoxtpt.

Want to see a rain frog in space? https://pristimantis-torresi.glitch.me

Want to see a Spinosaurus in the wild? https://xr-spinosaurus.glitch.me/

Want to see a goldfish rock out? https://renderagainken-goldfish.glitch.me/

Want to see pixels grow in realtime? https://growing-pixels.glitch.me/

Want to get lost in a hypnotic emoji-laden illusion? https://illusion-gonna.glitch.me

September means back to school for lots of students around the world, so be sure to check back in with us next month for more awesome Glitch apps that will make you scratch your head, giggle a little, or smile a whole lot! As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is @klaus.weidner's ~xr-spinosaurus which allows you to explore both the outsides (and insides!) of a dinosaur in virtual reality. 

Last month on Glitch, the August 2022 edition

If we had to pick one word to describe July 2022 for the Glitch community it would be movement. Regardless of whatever else is going on in the world, the creators keep pushing forward, building apps for loved ones to keep moving through the world, personal economics calculators to keep those numbers flowing, even an app that just bounces around to the delight of everyone who sees it. So take a quick break with us, as we review the new and fascinating contributors from the Glitch community over the past month. 

~bigboxgas by @FlantasticDan is a search engine for “big box” gas prices that looks way nicer than Costco’s app for this.

~real-coal-neon by @camclay helps you calculate what remote work saves you (and the Earth)!

~dekadeka by @noty2008 is a simple page with a contenteditable area so you can click and edit the text. Tip: nice to use if you want to hold your iPad up with a note to a loved one when you’re picking them up from the airport!

~simple-period-tracker is a period tracker that @rahatarmanahmed made for his wife with privacy in mind. It’s a progressive web app and saves the data to local storage instead of the cloud.

~basic-rough-notation by @pshihn is a demo of this really cool library, RoughJS, that lets you add visual notations to your webpage! Check out their playlist for more RoughJS examples.

~cola-calculator by @dphiffer is a cost of living adjustment calculator

~essentia by @EricEisaman is a series of demos of Essentia.js, an “Open-source C++ library for audio analysis and audio-based music information retrieval.”

~lsdsng-to-html by @aga68k converts lsdj to other formats. It got a nice shoutout from someone who made a cool visualizer with it!

~relative-fiction by @filipnest uses the Foursquare and OpenWeatherMap APIs to let you create dynamic stories relative to where your reader is, which is really fascinating!

~trail-talented-angelfish by @AKST is an app that renders sheet music, a great starter for your future music apps!

~hushed-airy-dragonfly by @aidelojejoshua counts how many vowels are in a string. May or may not be related, but the Bee Movie script has 14438 vowels.

~srcsnap by @LingDong- connects screenshots with a particular project revision, a tool for and by generative artists.

~discover-music by @tomthecollins is a music discovery tool made through research at University of York.

~momentous-dusty-alloy by @hitode909 was a widely shared page that let viewers watch the different stages of the Fuji Rock Festival in parallel.

The first Glitch app to ever go viral, ~f1-start by @jakearchibald, had another wave of shares on Twitter as people there tried to see who has the best reflexes.

~caninclude by @CyberLight has been around for awhile but it’s worth sharing again for newer folks. It’s a widely cited tool for seeing if you can put a given HTML element inside another one. Use it next time you even think of putting a div in a button!

~stellenbosch-heritage-tree-storymap by @wihan is a storytelling map of “exceptional” trees in Stellenbosch.

Some clocks: ~qr-clock by @pi43r is a QR code, and ~css-binary-clock by @christianp is a great starter for a binary clock or timer!

~marbled-paper by @nonphoto is a simulator we never knew we needed but have definitely been missing: marbling paper virtually!

~days-since-last-uk-politician-resigned by @leighghunt was widely shared as UK politicians were resigning in droves recently.

~3dep by @giswqs is a map that compares the tiles available in the USGS 3DEP LidarExplorer versus Google’s Earth Engine.

~uk-nutrition-label by @acme is an app that generates simplified nutritional information about packaged food in the United Kingdom.

~spring-tricolor-shop by @aidelojejoshua is a character counter—very useful for prototyping tweets or other strings with a character max! They also made this anime quote generator, ~shell-golden-operation.

~polarized-faint-asparagus by @higashi.kota used Flubber for a smooth as butter animation.

~resonance-choir by @tomthecollins and @jemily was an installation at Web Audio Conf that happened last week. It uses the Resonance Audio SDK to let listeners immerse themself as if they were in the venue!

~arithmos by @Kiritchell is a number guessing game

~nothcom by @jooooooon is a puzzle game inspired by the iconic riddle, notpron.

~motley-intelligent-author is a cute and satisfying little app made by @cora+glitch. Remix to edit the table content and flip all the things in your life that need a good flipping!

~faint-infrequent-breeze by @caesiumtea is an incremental game

~netronics-mapmaker by @Osmose is a prototype tilemap editor for people building custom BBS servers in the game Last Call BBS

~bitter-snowy-catboat is an interactive fiction app and @tenderblackfeelings’s first HTML game! Great work! 

In case you missed it, we also profiled design researcher and creator Elvia Vasconcelos on the Glitch blog this month, so please check out our discussion with her on the politics of participation, and honestly like a hundred other intriguing things! As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~500-breezy-cursors, another new classic by @adarosecannon. 

If we had to pick one word to describe July 2022 for the Glitch community it would be movement.

Last month on Glitch, the July 2022 edition

Have you ever been scrolling along the web and you see something that not only jumps out at you, but makes you realize you have to spend more time investigating this new discovery? That’s how we felt when we discovered Elvia Vasconcelos’ work on Glitch. She has created individual worlds of discovery through taking non-digital objects like sketchnote drawings, pottery, embroidery, and collage and sharing them with Glitch apps, in a way that combines the feelings of being in an art gallery or studio, or having a deep conversation with a trusted friend. It’s hard to articulate the richness of her work, so we reached out to Elvia and she agreed to an interview with Director of Community, Jenn Schiffer. 

Jenn: So I think to get started, I just want to know who you are and what is your daily discipline or job? What’s your story? 

Elvia: I’m always super interested in hearing about the work that I do, how does it land with people? How does it resonate, and also what connections people make. And I’m particularly interested in your experience because if you have this overview of the things that people are experimenting with in Glitch, I’m sure that you will see patterns or trends emerging, like how people are using this platform to work through their practices. That’s my personal curiosity. But I’ll tell you a little bit about who I am.

So my name is Elvia. I am a design researcher, which can mean nothing, but currently I’m doing a PhD at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Department of Industrial Design. And my research is about collaborative methods in design research. Practically I’m interested in how people do things together. Before I started my PhD, I worked for eleven years in the UK as a user researcher, and I specialized in digital government services. My role was essentially to work with the teams that were creating digital services, like a website where you could fill in your taxes or apply for a passport, renew your things. And my role was to bring civil society into these processes. I acted as a bridge. So my research is about how you bring people into structures, processes, and I’m specifically interested in the politics involved. So—who gets to participate in what way, and what kind of power/configurations exist in these places? 

The sketchnotes come in…and specifically, I think through Glitch. The way I’ve been using Glitch is to work through my research questions. I really struggle with writing and articulating myself with text or words, and language in general..and so it’s much easier to kind of draw things out and be like,“ Okay, I’m interested in this, this and that. And the connections are this.” I find it easier to have, almost like maps. 

A visual essay created by Elvia incorporating illustrations, handwriting, markdown, embroidery, and ceramics to explore behaviors around food.

And Glitch, for me, has allowed me to create…I’ve been calling them online essays, but it’s these complex maps of things that combine the sketches with text and links and stuff. It’s been really great to really use it as a surface to unpack things and see what comes out. 

That’s really cool. I think the thing that caught my eye, the one I saw originally was where you were recreating your sketchnotes with embroidery and ceramic. The first thing I saw was a ceramic. I was like, “Oh, this is really cool.” But that’s further ahead of the process. So I want to think back to sketchnotes in general, what brought you into that world? You talked a bit about what purpose sketchnotes have served in your work. Have you been creating them awhile, or is this something in your recent PhD work that you’re exploring?

Essentially they are visual notes that combine simple drawings with text and they are different from drawing or illustration because they are mostly about doing something live and they’re very much working processes. I started doing sketchnoting in 2011, I think—so eleven years ago. And because sketchnoting has a kind of root in the UX industry, so you can see lots of people doing graphic recording in conferences. And so the reason I started sketchnoting was because at the time I had finished a master’s degree in Digital Arts and I was trying to get a job as a user researcher. In London there’s associations and conferences and events every single day. And one of the events that I started going to was the User Experience Professional Association, it’s a volunteer-run association and they do these monthly events. Everyone can come and there’s always someone sharing their skills. And after going to a few of those sessions, I thought, I really want to get involved. But I didn’t feel confident to have a voice, for example, on Twitter. I just felt I wanted to do something, but I felt really shy. So I reached out to the volunteer person and I was like, “Okay, here’s my portfolio. How can I help?” And they were like, “Well, you can sketch the event.” I was like, “Sure, I’ll do that”. And I walked out of the meeting and I had to Google what sketchnoting was because I had no clue. 

Then I just started. Every month I went to their events and I started doing the sketches. At first it took me a long time, and then I started going to all the events I could find and sketchnoting everything: podcasts, lectures, online, and for, I would say, a good three years, I sketchnoted like every week. Then I started doing live conferences and becoming more confident, like sharing it on Twitter and stuff. Then I started slowly doing it a bit more professionally and doing it at work. So sketchnoting the meetings that I was in, and then I started using it as a tool with the teams that I was working with. Then I started doing it live on big walls and it built up more in a kind of commercial sense.

Okay, I’m going to stay up all night. I’m going to create ten pages. This is amazing. Why has nobody told me about this?

I created some courses, so I trained people as well. But then at some point, and this was at the same time as my own practice, I was feeling quite dissatisfied with the commercial world of user experience and of design in general. So I started looking at critical design, social design, and trying to figure out how I could create the practice or another model of a practice for me. The sketchnotes kind of became a tool for me to articulate my work and figure out where the edges of things were and how to communicate.

And now in my PhD, in my research, I’m actually part of what I’m doing. So together with looking at collaborative methods and co-design and the politics of participation, I am also doing that through sketching. And so proposing sketching or sketches is a visual research tool and specifically I’m looking at establishing it as a surface for exchange. A conversation interface in long term processes. 

You mentioned that you’re interested in the politics of participation, like who gets to be involved in what way and who doesn’t. And it’s interesting how your story of sketchnotes starts with you seeking a way to participate and that working out well. That kind of interaction and permission to create and collaborate really resonates with me, personally—AND I think the Glitch team and Fastly overall, when we think about designing and building products that enable creation on the web. So it’s really serendipitous and really cool that your work has ended up on Glitch and so my question is, how did you find out about Glitch?

A few months ago, I was part of this course called Digital Love Languages, organized by the School for Poetic Computation. The course was amazing. And I signed up because it’s quite interesting that you point out that in the beginning, my journey was about wanting to participate and wanting to have a voice. And actually a lot of the stuff or one specific thing that I’m investigating about sketchnoting is this question of voice. Who holds the pen? And what kind of our configurations are obscured in the sketches, like the places where these things were taking place anyway?

But the School for Poetic Computation, it’s related because the premise of the course was like “What would our digital tools look like if they were designed by the people that love us?” So if my mom was creating the tools for us. The whole course was  ten weeks about subverting all these notions around digital languages, and that included the tools. They talked us through basic programming languages. But a lot of tools were introduced to us, and one of them was Glitch.

I don’t know if it was halfway through the course, but I remember when I started using it that I was like, “Okay, I’m going to stay up all night. I’m going to create ten pages. This is amazing. Why has nobody told me about this? And I live here.” I was so excited because it’s like, so easy. And I’ve tried. My portfolio website is on Cargo Collective. My blog is on WordPress. Then I have Are.na pages. I have stuff all over the place, but none of the platforms ever seem to stick. And with Glitch—I’m still struggling to stop—I have ten online essays now, and I’m still like, “Okay, I’m going to create the next one, next one.” But then I’m like, “Okay, wait, how are you going to connect all of these things?” But yeah, that’s kind of how I got into Glitch. As soon as I started, it opened a lot of paths for me. So it was amazing.

It’s great to hear. And I think seeing work like yours on Glitch kind of unlocks ideas in our head. We’re always constantly surprised in a good way of what people are bringing to the platform because we have developers who are building stuff for work and stuff like your work is really surprising and joyful. That’s what we really like. And also the aesthetic of your sketchnote apps on Glitch are really cool looking. So that’s also another kind of surprising thing, the way that you lay out everything, it’s almost like poetry in the process, which is really neat. Another thing I saw you mentioned: your work explores sketchnotes as a conversation in one of your projects. And I’m wondering if there are other situations that you found through your work where sketchnotes are a great tool that maybe the rest of us who aren’t necessarily in the user research space could use. Where would sketchnotes be useful? 

Sketchnotes or sketching can be useful in a number of different ways. So there’s a lot of people using it, or I’ve seen it being used, and I’ve used it in my own workshop as a kind of a reflective tool. Something for yourself, something that you can use to articulate your thoughts in a different way.

And the reason why people tell me that this works for them is because you are not forced, when you sit down and you have a piece of paper and you’re trying to first just put the stuff on the table, and then you’re like, “Okay, what came out? And what do these things say together?“ The way that you are articulating your thoughts is different than if you were speaking or writing about it. So things come up that you look at and you’re like, “Ah this is interesting.” Or in group settings, sometimes you try to explain something to someone. But if you grab a pen and paper and then you put it on paper, then suddenly the other person is like, “Ah, I see what you mean.” It gives something that you can point at, and because it makes things tangible and concrete, they can also be manipulated. Because you can point at it, you can challenge it, you can add something to it, you can add layers, and you can also see how something has evolved. If you do several iterations of something, you have almost like these snapshots, a set that shows, “Okay, first I brought this, then I added that thing…” And there are different ways of doing that.

🌝 Cake is layered. 🌚 Life is layered: An online essay created by Elvia dissecting ideas around questioning, citations, and layers. 

So I think this is not only applicable if you work in the digital industry or as a UX researcher. It’s really about figuring out if using a visual tool, in this case, you know, pen and paper would help you in working through whatever it is that you’re working through. And I don’t know if that’s applicable to the work that you do, but yeah, I find it really interesting as well, this crossover between fields. That’s how I started doing stuff in fabric and in ceramics. But also it’s the same thing when I start working in digital. So working with Glitch for me, was like using digital material and how that intersects with the sketchnotes. I really like the in between things. 

Yeah, because it continues the process, and I think I enjoy the process, more so than the output sometimes, of the art and even work that I’m creating. And I think—I wonder beyond Embroidery and Ceramic, your using Glitch to document your sketchnotes work at this really unique and fascinating meta level where your Glitch profile and even your individual projects are like sketchnotes of your sketchnotes about sketchnotes! Beyond all that stuff and different mediums, what else are you exploring with regards to creating or using sketchnotes? What’s next?

The articulations in Glitch are actually bringing to life what I’m exploring because I’m looking at annotations within sketchnoting and layering. So the mechanism of layering things. For example, if you use transparent paper, like architect paper, you can add layers of things. Or, if you use two types of pens specifically around authorship. If I’m drawing now with blue, I can say “Blue is my voice and then red is Jenn’s voice.” And then I can go back to it at another time and add a green, which is thoughts that I had afterwards or connections that I saw. So I’m looking at layering, annotations and authorship, really kind of issues around agency and voice. And with Glitch, I’ve done a few experiments with hiding layers of information that are hidden.

What would our digital tools look like if they were designed by the people that love us?

One of the examples and a person I follow a lot is Mindy Seu. They have these websites and one of them was around images, and the content was inside the HTML markup. So I did a few experiments where I was using alt text and I thought, “What would a website look like if it was designed, instead of being designed for people that can read text, if it was designed for people that use screen readers first and not second?” And so if you don’t use the screen reader, you only see the images, but the real content is in the alt text, so it can only be accessible through a screen reader. And so I guess, together with authorship and layering and annotations, I’m thinking of how you think through making switched modes and roles so that you kind of challenge the way things are being constructed…through making it clear that things are being constructed prioritizing certain ways of working, certain bodies, certain types of knowledge. And I’m always looking for what’s absent or what’s excluded. Again, going back to voice, it’s like who’s present, but most importantly, who’s absent or whose voice is suppressed?

Yeah, you call out specifically paying attention to authorship and absence, voice and agency, inclusion, exclusion. So you’re researching a lot but basically focusing on systems and process, not necessarily just the output. I think that’s really important, especially, as a software creator, we’re all kind of living in this world where we have to deal with the fact that a lot of people were not thinking about voice, agency, inclusion, authorship, absence. And now we have this output and we’re like, how did we get here? And through your work, I’m wondering what are some ways, or some advice you might have for software creators, including those of us at Glitch, where we can actively pay attention to those themes? Have you seen prior art that’s good, or is it just all examples of what not to do?

An example that came straight to mind is the work of a scholar called Flavia Dzodan. I watched one of their talks, and it was about the genealogy of big data. And I sketched it out as well because there was so much I needed to get my head around. Essentially, what they did was draw a line from the first ever census in the 17th century all the way to the data sets that are being used in big data. And the argument that they created is that the way that humans have been classified as the categories that were created in the beginning have unfolded in time in these structures to categorize people and create hierarchy between them. And they have been used by governments to structure the way that we work. So they’re the backbone of the technologies that we use. For me, as a creator, but also as a consumer, in terms of the digital technologies that I use and the platforms that I use, I appreciate very much this effort of making these things visible. So the implications of the tools that we use in the sense of everything that is in the background that supports me being able to create a Glitch page just like that. But there are consequences for people and for the planet. And so this is all quite abstract, but I’m not looking for answers and solutions. I think there’s a lot of work that can be done about making these things more visible and explicit, even if they’re problematic.

So in terms of the Glitch community, it’s like what are the problematic constructions behind the technology that is needed for this platform? Are there ways of working through it? I guess as a community, I think personally what draws my attention, but I also appreciate that it’s quite a difficult and tricky area to go to.

Thank you so much! This has all been really awesome and I’m really excited about your work. And I know you have a bit more of your PhD to go, so I want to know what is next? And besides Glitch, where can people find your work?

In terms of what’s next, I am continuing to create Glitch pages, and I think I’m going to continue because it’s really opened up a lot of pathways for me. I’m keen to see if there’s a way of playing more with the digital materials that Glitch offers and I guess that’s HTML markup or the elements, but also seeing if there’s a conversation that can be had with the paper sketches. And I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I’ve been thinking of inbetween technologies like scanners, not photography, but scanners. So I’m trying to see if there’s a way of exploring the materialities of things in between before it gets to Glitch and paper. So what are all of these things and seeing what comes up. 

In terms of where people can find my stuff, I’m on Instagram. I have two accounts, of course, because why not? And one of them is like, the historical Sketchnotes are awesome. I didn’t think too much of the label when I created it, and that is more my basic commercial sketchnoting. And then I created a new one, which is called Materia. I created it because I wanted an account that could make a comment about the other accounts, almost like a different layer of commentary.

Thanks to Elvia for chatting with us about how Glitch has enabled her to visualize her research in new and exciting ways. If you build or see an app on Glitch that you want us to feature, we’d love to know! Email community@glitch.com or tweet @glitch!

Have you ever been scrolling along the web and you see something that not only jumps out at you, but makes you realize you have to spend more time investigating this new discovery? That’s how we felt when we discovered Elvia Vasconcelos’ work on Glitch.

Sketchnoting, layering and making connections: A Q&A with design researcher Elvia Vasconcelos

This latest edition of the Glitch community roundup is dedicated to everyone who has tried to do a new thing and learned something cool. Experimenting is brave and sometimes frustrating work, and we think it’s important to commend everyone who tries! All this is to say that we wouldn’t even be able to put together a roundup without you visionary, mistake-making, project sharing people! Thank you for creating and giving the community new ideas to try each and every single day. 

Other things that happened in June ☀️

Fastify updated to v4 so Glitch starters got a little bit smarter too!  

We introduced a new series called This Was Too Big to Fit in Our Newsletter, learn how our homepage rainbow headers came to be!

We’re asking for your ideas that could help determine what kind of Glitch gear gets made! 

And now, onto the good stuff. In June 2022, the Glitch community created these. 

~almina-webgl-works-01 by @almina-orange is the first of their cool Three.js work on Glitch

~memory-village by @aTylerRobertson is an A-frame scene where you can leave notes around the web—metaversal geocaching!

~aframecomic5 by @emmettbaber is a mobile-friendly A-frame app that lets you navigate comics. Super inspiring, and Emmett is the creator who made their link in bio app in AR

 ~vissionss by @nappingg is a sweet song from an artist who coded this page themselves for it!

~false-aeolian-rondeletia by @higashi.kota is a neat CSS conic gradient demo. Check out their profile for other cool explorations of CSS and JS-generated art.

~pleasing-pattern-generator by @aTylerRobertson generates really beautiful patterns! He uses it to generate backgrounds of his Glitch in Bio on the fly!

~noiseless-sepia-ornament by @elvia.vasconcelos is a really awesome documentation of their process in turning their sketch notes into other media like embroidery and ceramics. Also take a look at ~hushed-wheat-chips, an intimate, visual essay challenging the process of questioning. 

~baths by @bradley lets you know who’s in charge at the iconic Russian & Turkish Baths in NYC, as in, the official site links to it lol.

~arrow-nickel-anise is a rock, paper, scissors game made from some #100devs participants!

Heardle variants are still going strong, but here’s a unique and cool clone themed around game show themes, ~gameshow-rdle by @jsach65.

~dotthing by @supermason.0209 is a mobile game where you gotta tap the dots before they disappear.

After we featured ~nails in our newsletter, @KaraAJC wrote in with this remix that adds SOUND! Click and drag inside the embed for full effect.

~fast-goblin-text by @wampastompa ˡₑᵗ'ₛ yₒᵤ ᵗyᵖₑ ᵗʰₑ wₐy ᵢ ᶠₑₑˡ ˡᵢₖₑ ᵢ ₛₒᵤⁿᵈ (“let's you type the way i feel like i sound”)

~weird-ai-prompt-generator by @samplereality is a prompt generator for when you run out of ideas to feed weird AI tools

~50in50-meetmyfurkids is the first of 50 projects in 50 days from @rogermullins.mba. The animals are adorable, and it’s a great remixable expanding card app to use for your own photos!

~terrain-generator by @ARMN88 is a really cool Minecraft terrain generator that lets you in on the drawing process. 

~dct-station by @ffd8 encrypts messages in JPEG files by exploiting its compression process.

~unity-issues by @marwie and @herbst is a public API tracking Unity issues

~copy-js by @codingjlu is a library to implement copy-to-clipboard with open web technology. Did you know we used to need Flash to do this? 

~social-branded-snippets by @mc.reidie is a really cool tool for generating nice-looking code snippet cards to post on Twitter

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~softxels-walker by creator @DaniGatunes, who is always blowing our minds with their Three.js and generative 3D work. Using their library softxels.js they created ~softxels-walker and many other generative walker experiments for generating 3D worlds on the fly.

Last month on Glitch, the June 2022 edition

All of our Glitch Node.js starter projects use the efficient and flexible server framework Fastify. The Fastify team recently released a major update–version 4 includes a number of improvements, but you will need to make a few changes to any existing remixes you created on Glitch before we updated the starters to use it. Read on to learn more!

You can read all about the changes in Fastify 4 in the announcement blog post–here are a few highlights:

Callback and promise confusion has been reduced by requiring calls to reply to be part of a return statement.

Error handling is now encapsulated to improve consistency.

Type providers are now included, allowing your apps to infer types from JSON Schema.

The listen signature has been simplified, with a view to improved contributor maintenance experience.

The minimum Node version now supported is 14.

Kudos to the Fastify maintainers and community for consistently developing a framework that affords Glitch Node.js apps such great performance!

When you edit a Node.js app in Glitch, you can manage your npm dependencies in the package.json file using the dropdown list that shows you any packages that have updates available. If you have a remix of Hello Node, Hello SQLite, or the blank / minimal versions of either of these starter projects, you’ll see the Fastify 4 update in the dropdown list–but you’ll need to make a few additional changes to get your app working with the new version.

Fastify 4 requires at least Node version 14, and there are some packages the starters use that have been deprecated and replaced–there are also a couple of minor server syntax changes.

In your project, open the Logs so that you see the progress unfold. Don’t worry when you see the little sweary face in your app Status at the bottom of the Glitch editor as you carry out the updates–it’s all part of the fun and they’ll turn happy again by the time you’re done!

Check out the help doc for detailed steps, here’s the TLDR; on what you’ll need to change:

Update the node version in your package JSON to 14

Remove any of the deprecated packages: fastify-static, fastify-formbody, point-of-view