Welcome to September! Which means almost fall, which means almost Halloween and then the holidays and now it’s basically 2022. Welcome to the last few days of 2021, basically. If you too feel like time is flying, take comfort (or a breather!) by checking out all of the cool things that the Glitch community put together during the month of August while some of us just completely lost track of time. 

Wait, before we get started, one important thing worth mentioning is glitch.new just in case you missed it. Enjoy this shortcut to many of our starter apps, including Eleventy, React, and SQLite, or get down to business building your app, so we can feature it in next month’s community roundup. 

~imagining-progress by @louis-yes is a paper doll app made for a rock-climbing friend.

Try coloring in this fun plan of Boston, or make your own at coloring-book-generator.glitch.me, created by @bplmaps.

~joline-spirograph by @meklarian is a spirograph app and in this house we love spirographs!

~hex-triplet-words by @annoyedhumanoid is a beautiful display of hex colors that also are words, as shown off on the Glitch forum’s Gallery.

~solid-spangled-ranunculus by @habbekak is a soundboard for saying “Michael” several different ways.

~endless-nothing by @ghostglyph is a really simple poetry generator.

Check out ~todays-album, created by @tec27, after he saw some people tweeting that it was the anniversary of an album he liked.

We loved this experimentation with reflections in A-Frame, created by @cwervo.

~bikelanes by @hootalex visualizes the distance of bike lanes laid throughout the country!

~mostcommonjsprojects by @christinavoudouris lets you search the top JavaScript projects on GitHub.

~htmlview by @fonsp lets you view a rendered html doc of an html file from GitHub.

~every-different-district by @bplmaps shows US congressional districts according to various demographic variables, like median income.

@josepharhar built ~accent-color to demo some actually cool and exciting CSS changes coming for form elements.

~p5 is a clever use for the glitch.me domain for this p5.glitch package, built by @ffd8.

@Potch made a dashboard-friendly view of @NOAA’s smoke forecasts: ~us-smoke-forecast.

Miscellaneous and necessary! 👽 🦖 🤠

~ringlight is a digital, adjustable ringlight by@jlozovei. Remix and change its colors to suit your lighting needs!

~theuseless-web by @Zrafei will drop you into one of many “useless web” apps.

~create-a-jazzword by @holgerkurtz is a password generator where you can play the password.

~memepool by @everyplace is a resource for their Cooper Union Interactive Design course which displays resources stored in a Google Sheet.

~roadtrip is for road trips without birds, ~birdtrip is for road trips with birds.

not only are ~favicon-snake and ~favicon-pong by @aTylerRobertson really cool, but we also came across his ~pin-tab-pomo. It’s really cool to see the use of the favicon in tabs here!

~threejs-gltf-mosquito by @mrdoob has us really excited for a Jurassic Park event in the metaverse one day.

~thisolesyadoesnotexist is another great app from @monolesan, generating fake photos of her using a generative adversarial network (GAN).

Did you know that many New England town names are duplicated across the six states? This new tool from @bplmaps shows you which ones are the most common: ~town-after-town. 

Which of these apps will you be remixing to put your own spin on things? For the uninitiated, remixing is creating your own copy of an existing project. From there, you can customize the project and make other changes. Already an existing project owner, but want to add the nifty Remix button to your project? Use this link!

As always, if you have Glitch projects 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 project in our next roundup! ✨

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~fishdraw built by Lingdong Huang, which has been shared widely via Hacker News and Twitter. 

Welcome to almost September! Which means almost fall, which means almost Halloween and then the holidays and now it’s basically 2022.

Last month on Glitch, the August 2021 edition

How is it that July simultaneously felt like the longest month of the year and like it was over in a blur? However time flowed through your last month, we have a full roster of amazing projects that the Glitch community built over the course of July. 

~unicode-guessing-game by @christianp is a game where you guess the name given to a Unicode symbol. I'm not great at it!

If you loved cookie clicker then you need to play ~idle-chicken by @24amesquir right now!

~infini-footy by @aTylerRobertson is a multi-player soccer game!

~pet-the-loaf is a very important game by @mjlee3w.

Glitch enthusiast and creative technologist Rich Yee has done it again with kalidoface.com—but this time it’s in 3D. Check it out!  

~chaos-board is a fun multiplayer soundboard that plays the sounds behind popular emoji, created by @aTylerRobertson.

~hunter-comic is a beautiful online comic about a doctor and their newfound friend by @amepixel.

~vagabond-grove-brook is the dissertation project of @jRoshLam that lets you explore the timbre of sounds, which is what lets us distinguish different instruments from each other. Check out the video about it, it’s really cool stuff and uses the Web Audio API!

~philly-public-art by @dudethatbe is a search engine for public art in Philly.

~infinethum-ephemeral by @sheIby lets you create generative geometric art. 

~memoires is an art piece by @n.hieda that lets you traverse through conversations they have with someone.

Stare too long into ~cyberneticflow by @rodolfoocampo and you may find yourself in another dimension.

~molybdenum-supply by @pts is a stunning microfiction web zine.

~realless by@monolesan uses Tensorflow.js and your eyes to change the layout of the page as you blink.

~keyboard-dressup by @anh lets you map out different colored keys for your next mechanical keyboard.

~peyote-internet-theatre is @denmch’s first website, a *sob* Jeff Buckley tribute site. We love when the community uploads their very first websites to Glitch!

~2021-reads is a really nice looking reading list by @ivavay.

~tweet-image is a utility by @ozgrozer that lets you generate nice images of tweets in case you prefer that over using the JavaScript embeds.

We love this very adorable web page version of a very adorable tweet, by @mjlee3w.

~ajar-distinct-library by @srunika.k uses Teachable Machine to detect if your pronunciation is English or French. Read their blog about it!

~rana-maga by @diegose will make an anagram out of what you type. It was suggested to someone as a way to generate a fake username.

~affirmations by@cubeghost is an affirmation memes generator from a friend of ours, discovered on a Tumblr timeline! It’s cool to bump into a Glitch app versus just seeking them out!

~three-good-things by @desilove is a really awesome tool for practicing gratitude. This app has been around awhile but is making the rounds again.

~shore-lowly-parenthesis is a utility by Google @softplus for grabbing the images from within a Google doc, something that’s normally hella annoying to do.

~twb-data-source-mapper maps out the data sources used in a Tableau workbook, created by their product manger, @KeshiaRose.

~dark-mattr-theme by @tamojaydey is a very nice theme for VS Code, but we wouldn't mind one day configuring the Glitch editor to use it!

~squiggy by @LingDong- is a really cool stroke polygonizer. Check out their profile for other really rad and impressive doodly apps!

~direct-img by @lomanic is an awesome tool that helps you get the actual image file from services like Tumblr and Giphy who turn .gif requests into branded landing pages.

We love this use of our Eleventy starter: ~hospitable-diffeqs is a guide to differential equations by @art.and.math.mmss

Want to brush up on your JavaScript? Check out ~101-exercises by @ryanorsinger, and you’ll be reversing arrays and umm other stuff, in no time!

Fanmail, a.k.a blogs from the community ✍️

Clive Thompson wrote about his really cool pomodoro timer that we even use, ~text-pomodoro.

Glitch is used to demo failure states in this blog post about Lighthouse and render blocking

Logrocket published a tutorial on getting started with the Notion API, which of course uses Glitch as the starting point.

Check out this interview of Oz Ramos, creator of Handsfree.js and Glitch enthusiast!

Glitch using Glitch (because “dogfood” = yuck 😝)

Shouts out to Casey for making ~standup-time. It’s tools like this that we love to see our community using Glitch for at work, so it’s great to see us modeling that from within. It makes our daily-standups more streamlined. 👏

Love dev.to? So do we! Check us out over there and follow along for more updates. 

That’s it for now friends. Remember you can always check out our collections of monthly project roundups plus other cool apps on the Glitch community page. And if you have Glitch projects 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 project in our next roundup! ✨

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~recursive-cube-split built by @yellarkh, which is a colorful and cool Mondrian-style generative art app.

How is it that July simultaneously felt like the longest month of the year and like it was over in a blur? However time flowed through your last month, we have a full roster of amazing projects that the Glitch community built over the course of July.

Last month on Glitch, the July 2021 edition

One of the best parts of Glitch is that you can go from idea to sharing in seconds, and we’re always on a quest to further improve your time-to-hello-world without complicated tooling or lock-in. Last year we launched the Glitch.new shortcut to help that cause. Since then, we’ve seen thousands of apps created with Glitch.new, as well as an overwhelmingly positive response from the community!

Now, thanks to all of your excellent feedback and shortcut requests, we’re excited to announce an entirely new Glitch.new.

Now, starting up your next React app is now as simple as going to glitch.new/react. And there are similar shortcuts for all the most popular frameworks used to build on Glitch!

But what if you don’t see your favorite framework? We’ve got you covered! You can create a shortcut for any public project on glitch by using glitch.new/~[project-name]. 

Plus, here’s one more superpower: You can use glitch.new to import from GitHub. Just put glitch.new in front of any GitHub repo URL in your browser, and you’ll instantly have that repo imported and running on Glitch.

More shortcuts mean more kinds of developers can get to “hello, world” faster. We can’t wait to see what you create with the new Glitch.new, built for and inspired by feedback from the friendliest community of coders.

Have an idea for a great shortcut to add to Glitch.new, let us know in the Glitch forum! 

Just launched: a whole new glitch.new shortcut, that makes it faster and easier than ever to create any kind of app instantly in your browser. Make a new full stack React or Eleventy app, remix any Glitch app, or even import a GitHub repo, all just by typing glitch.new.

Glitch.new (and improved!) shortcuts

You can do a lot of cool stuff on Glitch, but what first drew me to the platform as a user was the ability to easily build and host APIs. I still can’t quite believe you can hit a button and immediately have a hosted API available for making client requests, backed by persistent data storage. If that isn’t enough, you can jump in and start editing in the browser, seeing the results straight away, with no deployment process whatsoever. 🤯

So needless to say, I’ve been having fun working on the new set of data apps I’ll talk a little about in this post. We’ll run through the available options, whether you’re hosting your data on Glitch or connecting to an external service. We’ll also take a look at our minimal no-frills version, and find out how you can switch to your own data provider, use your project as an API, or just tear it apart and turn it into whatever you like.

The app concept we’ve used in all of the Hello data projects is a user poll on favorite coding languages. The homepage lists the poll and presents results in a chart when the user casts a vote. An Admin page shows a log of votes, and allows deletion when you set up an admin key by following the steps in the README.

These projects are intended to follow on from Hello Node, using a similar pattern–a server script returning data to a user interface with Handlebars templating.

When you remix the Hello SQLite project, Glitch will build you a copy of the underlying database, making your app work out of the box with no setup steps. 

The database files are placed in the .data folder, which you should use to securely store any data you add to your apps, as the folder is not copied when a project is remixed. The data starter projects also use the .env for secure storage of access keys: How do I store secrets, credentials, or private data?

What we’re going for here is coverage of the primary operations you’d need in a database backed app–queries, inserts, updates, and deletes. Authentication / authorization is a huge barrier when learning about anything data-related, so we wanted to introduce the idea of auth without wading knee-deep into a full auth flow, which is not only a pain, but frankly not the most fun part of working data when you’re just getting started.

A common pitfall in building demos for data is allowing the user to post without requiring auth. You can of course do whatever you like in your own remixes, but for the official Glitch apps we need to be mindful of the risks in allowing anonymous users to post data that other people in our lovely community will see. This is why we went for a poll, since you can only submit a vote for existing options. 😅

As with our recent series of core Hello apps, the data apps include next steps you can try out in TODO.md, so that you can get stuck into an edit straight away, and take it from there. 🚀

Third-party data integration with Airtable and DataStax

Hosted SQLite is handy for ease of setup, and lets us minimize learning barriers by keeping people within the Glitch environment, but as you work on real world projects, you’re likely to integrate data from a third-party service. This is where our Airtable and DataStax projects come into play.

Hello Airtable provides a low-friction data storage option with setup steps outlined in the README. We’ve included a link to a base you can copy so that the app will work as soon as you’re set up. 

Copy the base, grab your ID and API key, pop them into your Glitch project, and off you go.

We’ve been loving collaborating with the DataStax team on the Hello Astra project, which uses Astra DB, a persistent cloud database that gives you all the power of Cassandra but without the complexity of setting it up. For a distributed, highly scalable data service, there are remarkably few steps required to get started–each outlined in the README. 

Expect to get your own database ready and connected to Glitch in the space of a few minutes.

Our Hello apps are primarily optimized for learning, with lots of bells and whistles demonstrating a variety of functionalities, plus a nice front-end so that you see something when you visit a project’s page. This is good for beginners, but for those who just want to get a project up and running with as little hassle as possible–we have blank versions of the starters.

The blank SQLite project gives you a minimal outline of CRUD operations, with a sample data model representing a list of chat messages. This app has no front-end, so the home route just returns a list of the available endpoints (courtesy of Fastify hooks). The sqlite.js module handles managing the database, with server.js calling the methods available to retrieve, add, update, and delete (with endpoints returning JSON). To change the data model, alter the setup code in the SQLite script.

We’ve tried to build these projects in a modular fashion so that you can pull out whatever bits you want and bin or ignore the rest.

Our Hello data apps support sending and receiving raw JSON if you want to use them without the front-end. You can make requests to the endpoints from any client of your choice, supplying a query parameter: ?raw=json (try glitch-hello-sqlite.glitch.me/?raw=json in your browser or client to see it in action). 

We structured these apps to handle the database operations in a dedicated module for the relevant provider. In the src folder you’ll see sqlite.js, airtable.js, or astra.js, with methods called by the server script whenever an endpoint receives a request.

This means that you can swap out an existing database for another one, just by replacing the data handler script. The server will continue to work as long as you provide the same methods in your data module, and include the script name in data.json, for the database property.

If you remix with a different database, let us know how you get on!

You can do a lot of cool stuff on Glitch, but what first drew me to the platform as a user was the ability to easily build and host APIs. I still can’t quite believe you can hit a button and immediately have a hosted API available for making client requests, backed by persistent data storage. If that isn’t enough, you can jump in and start editing in the browser, seeing the results straight away, with no deployment process whatsoever. 🤯

So needless to say, I’ve been having fun working on the new set of data apps I’ll talk a little about in this post. We’ll run through the available options, whether you’re hosting your data on Glitch or connecting to an external service. We’ll also take a look at our minimal no-frills version, and find out how you can switch to your own data provider, use your project as an API, or just tear it apart and turn it into whatever you like.

Dive into the new Glitch data starter apps

And just like that we’re into a new month! While the internet was busy celebrating Pride, National Selfie Day and National Donut Day, the Glitch community was doing all of the above and working on creating new and inventive ways to internet all of the things. With the added option of our recently released persistent data storage starter apps, June was such a productive month that it keeps getting harder and harder to choose apps and projects to write these roundups! Let’s take a look back at some of our favorite June joints. 

~experiments-os is an online music sequencer that lets you make  tunes in your browser and share them with friends! Created by @Cringe_gaming.

~generate-melodies-magenta uses Magenta.js to generate melodies! Built by @shahu.kareem.

~ai-circus is an entry for the AI Song Contest, and they include a section where you can remix their AI-generated chorus!

~time-invented-humor by @jaked is a Tone.js demo and little beat creator!

~racing-game-handsfree-prototype is a prototype but fun nonetheless - a racing game that only uses hand motion, by@GoingHandsfree.

~what-i-got by @blaine_cook is the superior of the Sublime text editors, as noted recently by the AV Club. 

~bodytype is a really cool way to demo a typeface, created by @diandraelmira.

~forgotten-blinks by @monolesan detects your blinking in order to determine the page opacity.

~thekoinobori by @aboutDavid is a decentralized blogging app, with the name paying homage to our logo’s inspiration. 🎏

~brockly by @khalby786 converts your screenshots to a beautiful browser mockup.

~k8s by @anmaso is a neat UI editor for Kubernetes descriptor files.

~hellmo is ...um, exactly what it sounds like. Created by @outofambit.

~thesis-during-covid is a crowd-sourced collection of online exhibitions, remote festivals, and tools to create them, put together by @xinemata and @lee2sman using Leafy!

~aliciaalonso by @addiellucena2020 is a simple page about a really interesting woman, made on Day 3 of this creator’s #100daysofcode journey.

~wordsearch-generator by @christianp does what it says on the box: generates a wordsearch!

~personality-quiz-sarahv by @sarah.voon38 is an app by a Girls Who Code student which they called out in announcing the new cohort getting started. We love to see all the apps these new coders make on Glitch!

What a way to start the summer! We can’t wait to see what you do next, especially with the new blank Hello apps out there. Thanks for making June an absolute delight! If you have Glitch projects you built or love and want us to feature, share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your project in our next roundup! ✨

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~lorem-blocksum built by @ker0chan, which lets you generate blocked-out-text content, which the creator made for game designs. 

And just like that we’re into a new month! While the internet was busy celebrating Pride, National Selfie Day and National Donut Day, the Glitch community was doing all of the above and working on creating new and inventive ways to internet all of the things.

Last month on Glitch, the June 2021 edition

Good news — after the wonderful response to our recent huge updates to Glitch, we’re back with even more of what you — the Glitch community — asked for.

Now running a real database behind your app is as easy as remixing

We’ve launched four brand-new starters that instantly set up some of the most popular database options for your app automatically. 

~glitch-hello-sqlite: A simple, powerful full-stack app backed by a SQLite database

~glitch-blank-sqlite: That same SQLite app, but with just the basics to get started

~glitch-hello-airtable: Use your data in Airtable to power your Glitch app!

~glitch-hello-datastax: It’s a Cassandra database app, powered by our friends at Datastax

Now, you can experiment with creating archives, backups, collaborative apps, and more with the power of persistent data storage. 

Imagine having a full-stack node app running a Cassandra database, in under a minute. Thanks to our amazing Glitch community, that's now possible, along with lots of other improvements to building full-stack (and even database-powered!) apps.

Try out Blank starter apps and improved next steps

We loved this idea from the community, so now Blank starter apps are available for most of the Glitch starter apps. Blank is truly the best way to describe these minimal starter versions of the apps, and we’re very excited to see how you use them! We’ll create Blank options for all of our Hello starter apps going forward. (No more having to delete parts you’re not using!)

Another update to the current roster of Hello starter apps is the new “Try this next” in TODO.md, which gives you a simple list of tips on what to try next once you’ve created a new app.

Look for the TODO.md file in our Hello apps. It’s got a few suggestions for things you might want to try next with your new app. Let us know if you try any of them out!


Check out curated collections and start gathering your own

Search no more, curated collections are back! Now, you can find the new (and classic!) starters on /create-project along with a showcase of apps made by the community. 

We’re always on the lookout for apps and collections to share with the community, so let us know if you’ve curated any that we should share by posting them to the Support Forum gallery. 

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any fresher

Finally, because you know we like to keep things fresh, we’ve made some performance updates resulting in a significantly faster load of Glitch.com (up to 3 times faster!). This is just the first step toward even bigger new community features to come. 

We can’t think of anything fresher than showing appreciation back to the community so now you can thank users just by hovering. This makes it easier than ever to thank fellow members of the community for their awesome contributions. Don’t be shy about thanking your fellow community members, it’ll make their day.

As you try out these new starters, features, and updates, be sure to tag us on Twitter or email community@glitch.com so we can share your handy work with the Glitch community. We want to tell the world about what you make, so don’t be shy. Your work helps inspire everyone else in the community!

Good news — after the wonderful response to our recent huge updates to Glitch, we’re back with even more of what you — the Glitch community — asked for.

Data-driven full stack apps — running instantly!

Recently, we launched a whole new set of starter apps on Glitch, with the goal of making it nearly instant to build apps using the latest and greatest frameworks. Naturally, while creating these new experiences, we wanted things to be simple. But that raised an important question:

Going back a few years, we built Glitch around the idea that anyone should be able to create a real website or app using standard code, right from their browser, and have it up and running instantly. Today, that’s more or less the case, and the evidence is that clever folks (like you!) have used Glitch to build over ten million apps.

For some users, like students learning to code for the first time, “simple” may best mean “has the fewest distractions”. And in that context, distractions can be things like metadata or configuration options that, while useful for a production website, might require a lot of confusing explanation at a point when a learner is first trying to understand the major concepts they’re wrangling with.

By contrast, for coders who may be familiar with web development in general, but might not know the specifics of a new framework that they’re trying out for the first time (or for the first time in a long time), the typical boilerplate that one might see in an app are familiar and reassuring parts of a web page that they expect to see. And so, “simple” means “it handles all those little default chores for you, so you don’t have to”.

These are both valid expressions of “simple”, and both vitally important to audiences we care deeply about. Having simple experiences that anybody can use to start coding productively is a key part of tackling the stress we call "stack anxiety".  But these two versions of simplicity are also mutually exclusive — we can’t make an app that’s “simple” by having fewer lines of distracting metadata while simultaneously making one that’s “simple” by giving you all the default metadata out of the box. We can’t be simple by automatically handling configuration while also being simple by making it easy to customize configuration.

So we took an uncharacteristic path for Glitch: We chose both.

Typically, we’ve had a strong bias toward being opinionated, while offering customization under that hood. That way, we can have a predictable experience that users on the platform can share, and also we can smooth the rough edges of one particular designed experience. But we’re at a stage of maturity and familiarity with the ways that people want to build on Glitch which lets us offer a little more flexibility without losing that ease of use.

We took an uncharacteristic path for Glitch: We chose both.

Thus: “Hello” and “mvp”. (Here, we're using "mvp" to mean "minimum viable product", a common industry term for the simplest version of a project that could possibly do the job.) For each of our common frameworks, we offer each of these two options:

Hello: a starter app that’s set up with all the most popular default configuration settings and boilerplate provided for you out of the box

MVP: a starter app that’s the absolute minimum to get you running, with nothing that you might want to delete and no distractions of anything unfamiliar

These two approaches encompass two different but valuable views of simplicity:

“Do it for me, but let me change it later if I need to”

“Don’t do anything for me except the essentials, so I don’t have any distractions”

We’d love to hear how those choices work for you, and also how you think about what “simple” is for creating. The early response to these choices has been phenomenal. One way we could tell that this approach is working is by looking at examples like these Preact starters, created by a community member, which already follow the implicit convention we’ve been creating. The fact that people in the community can intuit how these kinds of examples should work means that it’s comprehensible enough for people to understand the whole system, not just one individual implementation. And it’s creators in the community who see the benefit.

We’ll be accelerating our creation of opinionated new starter apps in both flavors of “simple”, using the toolkits, frameworks and libraries you’ve asked for most. If you want to be part of creating one, or to see your favorite technology featured, reach out and share your ideas (or example apps!) with us. And if you’ve tried out the new, simpler starter apps, let us know what would make them even more useful for your workflow. We want things to be as simple as possible.

Recently, we launched a whole new set of starter apps on Glitch, with the goal of making it nearly instant to build apps using the latest and greatest frameworks. Naturally, while creating these new experiences, we wanted things to be simple. But that raised an important question:

What kind of simple?

What do we mean by "simple"?

If you follow developer conversations online, you’ve no doubt seen various people saying things like “Everybody ought to try this one new framework!” or “Nobody should still be using that old library!” or “That programming language is dead!” Very broad, sweeping, seemingly-authoritative statements, often made without considering the context by which others make their technical decisions. They don’t always do much to make things easier for people who just want to create. You've probably also seen people worrying about all the prerequisites and technical dependencies that get in their way every time they try to create something new. It’s gotten harder than ever just to _try_ the new frameworks and libraries that come out every day, let alone give them a fair, in-depth assessment. Trudging through installation, configuration, dependency hell, and all the other parts of setup can have you feeling burnt out even before you set out to learn a new syntax or design pattern.

In short, the way that coders encounter new technologies that are supposed to help them seems perfectly designed to create what we could call “stack anxiety”. We can sum it up as two big worries:

Concern that one isn’t using the “right” tools or frameworks, not on technical grounds but on social ones

Fatigue or worry about all the overhead involved in trying out new frameworks or libraries, with lots of technical barriers that have nothing to do with coding itself

Put together, these two big causes of stack anxiety are like a perfect recipe for sucking all the fun out of coding.

Stack anxiety is a lot like FOMO — it’s exacerbated by how we talk about coding, especially on social media. Thought pieces written by people who are (or who sound like) experts, even when well-intentioned, can have a huge negative impact on coders who are just starting out. And we're all newbies sometimes, whether it's because we're new to a particular framework, or because we're new to coding in general.

The end result is the coding equivalent of looking at your Instagram and comparing yourself to an influencer whose entire job is to look appealing on social media. You’re gonna feel bad! And you never see all the hard work they're doing behind the scenes, often with a whole team helping them do it.

This painful pattern often makes the most vulnerable coders feel bad for making choices that are often perfectly reasonable, or for which they didn’t really have much choice due to legacy or other constraints. Sometimes you just can’t use that tech that it seems like all the “cool kids” are talking about. And sometimes, even if a technology is really interesting, getting it set up and running takes up all the time or energy we have, leaving no time for, you know, the actual coding.

We’ve thought a lot about stresses like Stack Anxiety when making Glitch, because we’re deeply focused on removing any barriers that get in the way of quickly creating apps. And here’s what we've found: barriers to coding are as likely to be social or structural as they are technical.

A lot of times, the hard part about coding isn't the coding.

So, how are we trying to make sure Glitch reduces everyone's anxiety a little bit? By addressing the issue at a few different levels.

You've got this! One consistent part of how we've designed Glitch's community is to make sure everyone is encouraged and rewarded for being thoughtful and supportive to one another, not critical of their choices. For example, in lots of places where you see another person's avatar on Glitch, you can instantly click to thank them. (And we'll be working to expand this to almost every place you can connect with people on Glitch.) When so much of coding culture is about tearing apart other people's work or trying to seem smarter by being critical of their creations, it can mean a lot to know someone has your back. It even goes all the way to Glitch's very name — we chose a name that means a little mistake or problem, because we all have bugs sometimes, and it can be reassuring to know that we can fix them together.

Really good defaults. Recently, we created an all new set of starter apps for people to remix and get started with as they build new apps on Glitch. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but part of the reason we spent a lot of time choosing really great default stack choices on these starter apps is so that you don’t have to. You’re not getting into some personal or political battle when you pick a JavaScript framework on Glitch, you're just getting something that runs great, instantly, and lets you focus on your ideas and your coding.

Instant setup. How many times have you lost all your momentum on creating a new project because you get stuck trying to wrangle dependencies, or configure new components that you have to install, or because something in your dev environment breaks in a way that takes forever to debug? One key goal of Glitch is to eliminate those entire categories of stresses — especially because it can be so hard to feel inspired and motivated to make something new if the first thing you encounter is a whole lot of exhausting chores.

The great part is, over the last few years, the Glitch community has fully adopted this ethos. Everyone works together to support community members and creators in having less stack anxiety overall. For example, we’ve documented the rationale behind our opinionated choices for each part of the stack in our new starter apps. But that's not trying to say “this is the One True Way”. Rather, it’s so you can understand the choices being made, and keep your focus and energy on the problem you’re trying to solve. If you run into any issues, these default choices were made with the goal in mind of ensuring you’d be able to find others using the same tools in similar ways — whether that’s in the Glitch community or out on the internet at large. We wanted to make it as likely as possible that getting your app running wouldn’t involve having to justify, defend, or explain your technical choices to anyone who wasn’t trying to help you build.

Ultimately, that's what all this work boils down to. The social aspects of coding, and connecting to other coders, should be reassuring us about the choices we make, and the tools we rely on. Trying new things should be exciting and rewarding, not a moment that inspires fear of what's about to happen. There are so many more cool apps and projects just waiting to be made, to solve real problems or express meaningful ideas. We just have to support each other in making an environment where the social and technical barriers to coding don't get in the way of unleashing that creative potential.

Trying to end "Stack Anxiety"

Around the web, May was about many things: a rainbow of M1 iMacs, very hungry caterpillars, bags of gasoline, Mare of Easttown, the list goes on. But here on Glitch, we celebrated new app starters, the BTS army, colors like you’ve never seen, and of course, some amazing remixes. But one thing was for certain – May was a season about fun and reawakening, and we definitely saw those themes in the apps that you all created during the past month.   

Hello, starter apps! Not only did folks do some awesome remixing of our new starters for React and Eleventy, but they also began to create more!

~glitch-hello-vuetify is a simple Vuetify 3 starter, based on the Vue 3 starter, created by @Stylix58.

~Elm-Lang is a clean Elm language app scaffolding, created by @christianp.

~hello-webpack-typescript, created by @KumuPaul is a template for building a vanilla single page application with Webpack.

@jonathan-annett created ~glitch-zenpoint-repl which allows you to run a REPL via Glitch. A REPL, or read–eval–print loop, is a development tool that allows you to interact with objects in your code.

~mdn-content-popularity lists Mozilla Developer Network (mdn) content by popularity, which is a pretty cool API if you ask us. Hats off to @tomayac!

~alternative-twitter-embeds, created by @stefan, allow you to embed tweets without compromising your users’ privacy and your site’s performance. 

~guessrgb is an RGB guessing game, and related to color is ~find-css-colors which is a cute CSS color name picker.

~blink-blink uses Tensorflow and your webcam to change the background when you blink, created by @monolesan. We can’t wait to see this being remixed to create a cool photo booth app or game that you can play with just your eyes!

A project from MIT’s Feminist Futures hackathon, ~reproconvos is both a physical card set, and a digital set, built by @blouhie and @althea.rao. The cards are a set for Conversations For Every Dinner Table, and give prompts to discuss topics like postpartum issues, menstruation, pregnancy, reproductive health, and more. 

~are-we-done-yet is a really fun and also infuriating game by @dmmanesh that tests your patience but it’s hard to stop playing.

The BTS army has been using Glitch to track streams for years and on May 21, a new single came out ~butter~, which means a new viral BTS site for it—you guessed it: ~bts-butter went up too.

~bequiet is an audio-reactive experiment by@dnlsmm using Hydra! 

Just look at how ~color-twist renders, we wish it would go on forever. Created by @bengarvey.