Games can be a great way to learn new concepts, spend time with friends, or just unwind at the end of a long day. And wouldn't you know it — games are actually a big part of Glitch's DNA!

For our first episode, we talk with Glitch user and software engineer Joe Gaffey about his history with game design, hear from our engineering lead Keith Kurson about fun games to play and remix on Glitch, and we have a roundtable conversation with CEO Anil Dash and other Glitch team members where they talk about our history with games, and mention some of their favorite games of all time.

Looking for bonus content? Our app collection for this episode is where it's at, including links to all the Glitch apps and other games mentioned in this episode and much more!

Executive Producers: Maurice Cherry, Keisha "TK" Dutes
Editor: Brittani Brown
Engineer: Keisha "TK" Dutes

Game On!

Hosanna Tolman:
My top number one video game of all time is Link’s Awakening, Legend of Zelda.

Steph Monette:
So, my favorite game right now is backgammon.

Zainab Shah:
So, my favorite game is called Ludo.

Osmose Kelly:
So, my favorite video game is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

Tasha Hewett:
My favorite game is this pinball machine that’s called Total Nuclear Annihilation.

Jenn Schiffer:
One of my favorite games is Katamari Damacy. The designer, Keita Takahashi, ended up working on the game Glitch that then became the company Slack…and now we’re Glitch.

Maurice Cherry:
This is Shift Shift Forward, a new podcast from Glitch that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. I’m Maurice. I work on the marketing team here and as you can probably guess, this episode is all about games: the ones we love to play, the ones that inspire our creativity and the ones that make us want to create our own.

Maurice Cherry:
You’ll meet Joe Gaffey, a software engineer by day and a die-hard game creator in his spare time. Later, our engineering lead, Keith, clues us in on game apps on Glitch that anyone can play or remix. But first, let’s eavesdrop on a conversation about how hard we game at Glitch with some of our fellow team members. Software developers, Tim and Greg, our head of legal, Nkasi, and our CEO, Anil. Our producer, TK, kicks things off. Here we go.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
I had no idea people at Glitch were such extensive gamers. What are all your favorite games?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Oh my goodness. Okay. This is sort of for nostalgic purposes, but also because it’s one of the franchises that manages to keep bringing it. So, the first time I got really into video games was my sister’s eighth birthday when my dad, which he doesn’t like video games at all, surprised her with a Nintendo. Right? And the game that he bought was the Legend of Zelda in the, if anyone remembers, the gold cartridge. It was such an amazing game. And still Nintendo is putting out the hits with Legend of Zelda, like the last one on the Switch, oh my God, what was the name of it?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Breath of the Wild. So, funny story, I refused to start working at Glitch until I finished that game because it is such a gigantic time suck.

Anil Dash:
The truth comes out now. You were like, “I have some meetings. I can’t start right now.”

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Oh, yeah. Legend of Zelda. All of them. I even played it on the Game Cube, and it was Wind Waker on the Game Cube. So yeah, I would say that’s one of my favorite games, if not my favorite game game. Yeah.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
What about you, Tim?

Tim Kington:
Go’s a strategy game from Japan. It’s, I guess, originally China… It was brought to the US from Japan, but it’s like 4,000 years old. And it’s a one on one game like chess where you have a board, black and white pieces, and it’s a zero sum game. So, somebody win’s, somebody loses. The rules are extremely simple, and it’s really deep

Anil Dash:
And Go’s also how they test a lot of coding and testing AIs and things too. Right? Is it sort of like a common coding challenge as well?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Is that the game in Avatar: The Last Airbender?

Tim Kington:
Oh, Avatar. No, it’s not. It has the same flavor kind of, yes. Something Lotus, I think it is.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Yeah. Yeah. For like the Lotus tile?

Tim Kington:
Yeah. It feels like that kind of, but it’s not the same game.

Tim Kington:
Yeah. Go’s used as an AI challenge, and for a long time it was considered sort of the pinnacle of AI challenge. Chess had been knocked out 20 or 30 years ago, and Go was the next big thing. I thought computers won’t be able to beat professional humans at Go. So, I gave a Friday talk here about Go and AI and why it’s so hard, and talked about how it’s at least 10 years away. And then, I gave another talk about six months later saying a computer just beat a pro.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Greg and Anil, what are your favorite games?

Greg Weil:
Halo 3 because that had this whole custom game system, which was pretty new at the time, where you could to lay out stuff, make your own map, and then they had a separate game type system. And it was just a ton of fun playing like weird modes that people came up with where all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, everyone moves 10 times faster because there’s no friction and you’re at the bottom of a big slope and there are cars sliding at you really fast that the other team is in, and you just need dodge the cars because if they hit you, they win. But if they miss, they’ll fall off the bottom of the ramp and into the ocean.” Just really weird ideas like that, which were just a ton of fun to play.

Anil Dash:
A couple of quick ones. Back in the ’90s, Lucasfilm, George Lucas’s… like the Star Wars company, they had a company called Lucas Arts, and they would make games. And they were mostly like a star Wars version of whatever games were popular. And then, they did one game called Grim Fandango, that was themed around the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and it was like a a murder mystery, Noir thriller, adventure game with really heavy candy skull art. it was just beautiful and great world building, and I’d never seen anything like it. And I think that really changed my perception of what games were. I think in a similar vein, the first Portal game just blew me away.

Anil Dash:
It was like you felt your brain bending, it was thing teaching you as you went. That was actually in the first notes of when we were prototyping Glitch and stuff. The first thing I thought of was Portal was this idea of what’s possible changes as you use it? And you want something where playing it teaches you what you could do. I just thought that was masterful game design.

Anil Dash:
My all time favorite game is Mario Kart. Obviously, there’s the trash talking part and whatever, but the serious part was like, it was something where there was both immediately accessible to a normal person who could walk in and just button mash and do all right. And then, there was this infinitely deep finesse where the more you want to practice and you wanted to have your preferences… I like this character and this car and whatever. And I just really, really loved the blue shell, which was this idea… Everybody hates the blue shell, and what I loved about it was there was an intention to the game design, which was like, if you’re running away with it, and it’s not fair and it’s not going to be fun for everybody, the game is going to empower somebody to be like, “All right, let’s keep it close. Let’s keep this thing fun.”

Anil Dash:
So, there’s a whatever, a kid that’s playing for the first time, and somebody like me who’s been playing for 30 years or whatever can play together and still have fun. And I see that now all the time where I got a kid, I got an eight year old son, and he’s good. I don’t have to spot him. He’s doing all right. But even before he was, you could play something together and share this thing, and it’s the nostalgia aspect of like, “I grew up playing this and you grow up playing this.” But also, that intentionality, I think about all the time. Somebody made this technology, and you think about all the math behind it to get all these shapes up on the screen, and they’re like, “We’re going to design a system where people can sit together and have a good time together.” And that shows up in the work. And I just thought, “man, those people were doing good with their lives.”

Anil Dash:
Literally from day one, it was always gamers, but it was a lot of… Well, board games was a big part, so it wasn’t always video games. So, the DNA, the gaming DNA, of the company is deep.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
I heard there was a bridge game. Is that true?

Tim Kington:
It’s true. Yeah. That one got started because our former president, Rich Armstrong, was really into bridge, and I think I mentioned that I played bridge when I was here my first week or something, so he wanted to get a bridge game together. And we drafted a couple of people and made them learn bridge.

Anil Dash:
I came in, and I’d heard about the bridge game. It predated me. And I joined the company, I was like, “This sounds like…” I pictured like a dark room and everybody’s got those accountants visors on, and you’re just about to get… Like they’re going to run the table [inaudible 00:00:08:27]. They’re just going to [inaudible 00:08:28] you because they’re like the bridge experts. There’s Tim’s, who’s like the mathematical mind, and they’re like, “Oh, I’ll just teach you how to play.” Really, you’re just outmatched.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
I heard from a little birdie that also we had a connection to the folks at Slack or a connection to playing games on Slack?

Anil Dash:
Back in the day, they had started a game called Game Neverending. God, this was probably 20 years ago at this point. And it was beautiful and this great art, and a core base and die hard users, but then everybody else is sort of like, “This is like intense. I don’t know…” You wouldn’t casually go up to Game Neverending and start playing it., And then they built another game, and it was called Glitch, and it was the same as Game Neverending. It was like wild art, massively multiplayer game. Everybody’s in the RPG core base of die hard users, not a whole lot of people playing, and they had built a tool that helped them make the game, and that that tool was called Slack.

Anil Dash:
And then, again, they did the same thing. They were just like, “Nobody wants our games but we’re going to build the tool.” And then, they became Slack, and they’re now multibillion dollar company and I think all of those people have private islands or whatever. But I guarantee you when they’re going to retire, they’re going to be like, “Let’s build a game, and it’s only going to have a couple of users, but it’s going to be really cool looking.”

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
And then, you said we got our name was similar way?

Anil Dash:
Well, what happened was the team had built a prototype of what became Glitch, and we were like, “We need a new name for it,” or whatever. And I think just independently… Tim, you tell me if I’m wrong. My recollection is we came up with the name Glitch independently at one of the early meetings where we’re like, “That’d be a cool name.” But it was like, “Oh, but it’s taken.” And I was like, “Well, I bet they would do a solid.” So, because I knew them, I was just like, “Look, it’s not going to be bad. It’s going to be cool like your game.” And then, they were like, “All right, let’s do a deal and let’s get you the name.” And so, Glitch, for like the first, I don’t know, six months that Glitch was running, our site, our tools of Glitch were running, but one of the top search terms that would come in was Glitch the game because people were still looking for that old game in the [inaudible 00:10:26].

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Well, we have a programmer that makes games here. Greg, you were telling me over beverages, I don’t want to say what kind of beverages, because you’re here, you’re a web developer at Glitch, but on your off time you make games. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Greg Weil:
I like making games a lot because whenever you’re making one, you end up touching a whole range of different skills, I guess, where you start out where it’s just, “I’m going to code up some movement. I’m going to focus a lot on just making it feel responsive and fun to play.” But then all of a sudden it’s, “I need some sprites for the character moving around, and they need to look good. And also, they need to still fit the gameplay and all the other different kinds of things.” And all of a sudden you need sound effects, and then all of a sudden you need the ability for multiple people to play together. And all of a sudden, it feels like you’re doing like 20 different skill sets but just a little taste of all of, which is a lot of fun to work on.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
For you guys that make the things that we love so much, what are my game options on Glitch?

Greg Weil:
There are a couple games on Glitch that are kind of surprising and a little tricky to find sometimes. I saw one on the forum just like a week ago that was pretty neat. It looked like an online World War II bomber kind of thing where different players are… It’s massively multiplayer, everyone goes into a single world, and you’re flying around planes in the top down perspective.

Tim Kington:
There’s a Snake game out there that’s a clone of the old Apple II, Snake Byte, the grandfather of the Snake game on your phone.

Tim Kington:
Yeah. And that one has clones of all the levels. So, there were like 20 levels in that game, I think, and it has different walls in different places and gets harder as you go along. I kind of enjoy that one.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
That’s classic. I’m going to jump over to Nkasi because I don’t think people think that the office’s legal counsel is going to be out here organizing a whole Mario Kart tournament. Can you talk about that?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
During my interview, and Neil, I don’t even know how it came up, but he’s talking about Mario Kart and how he was awesome at it. And I was like, “Oh man, I need to confirm all the boasting that was going on in this interview.” So, our onsite came along, and I was like, “Do you know what? This is the perfect opportunity. This is the perfect opportunity.” And so, actually, I got together with Greg and another engineer here, Victoria, and we created the Mario Kart tournament. It was actually really easy. Maybe we accidentally indexed for it, but a lot of people really know how to play Mario Kart, like serious, serious know-how. Like brought their own controllers, like, “No, I want to use this specific controller because then I can actually fly it into things.” So, yeah.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Playing games at Glitch sounds like inviting singers to karaoke.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
I mean, I guess. That is definitely true. I did come to [inaudible 00:00:14:00], but I didn’t think about it. I was just like, “Oh, maybe there’ll be three or four people that would be interested in that.”

Greg Weil:
Yeah, yeah. All the quiet folks all of a sudden got real loud. It was good.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
So, with that being said, all of y’all, and especially Nkasi, any plans firstly for another Mario Kart tournament or any plans for any other game nights at Glitch?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
What I would really love to do, and whether it’s a game… I think you could consider it a game, but I love Rock Band. Love it. Love it. Love it.

Anil Dash:
Now that I hear that, that’s the most surprising thing I’ve ever learned about you. I’m like, “Yes, that fits.”

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
I don’t know what you mean by that. We’ll have a discussion later.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Offline. But that’s something I’ve been floating around in my head because, then, you can have people at the same time singing some amazing tunes. And I’ve learned a lot of different rock songs through Rock Band, that I had never heard of, and now are there on my iPhone playing it all day. So, that’s what I’m kicking around in my head for the next onsite.

Maurice Cherry:
Next up, meet Joe Gaffey, a telecoms enterprise software architect by day and a gamer and creative coder by night.

Joe Gaffey:
Yeah, I was into games and coding from quite a young age, actually. I remember seeing arcade machines probably in the early ’80s in local fast food restaurants and such places and thinking these were the best things ever. So colorful and loud and so different from anything else that was around at the time. And these were actually the first computers that I interacted with. Later on, we had an Atari 2600 in the house, and that got lots of use too. Then when I was a little older, I found some coding books in the public library, and I used to read the program listings before I even had access to a real computer. I got my first computer, then, from my parents for Christmas around the age of 10 or so. It was an eight bit era. Commodore 64, one of those ones with the cassette player for loading software. Took about 10 minutes to load 64 [inaudible 00:16:13].

Joe Gaffey:
So, I started coding basic games like Pong and brick breaking games and so forth, and Commodore PET BASIC. Then whenever I was playing commercial games on a C 64, I was always really trying to understand the game mechanics and looking for glitches and insights into how the game worked under the hood. Then once I discovered all of the mechanics of the game, I usually got bored and moved onto the next one or maybe try to recreate something from it in my own code.

Maurice Cherry:
With his love of old school games, some programming knowledge under his belt, and a desire to code, Joe got competitive.

Joe Gaffey:
Yeah. Get Up game off competition turned up with retro gaming team. I taught it. It was really a good opportunity to bring together some of my different interests. I was originally thinking of of Asteroids, a clone of Asteroids, perhaps with a mix of like Lunar Lander mechanics thrown in. But then I thought about those old, colorful, and loud Galaxian and Galaga machines. I thought it would be a great example of a retro gaming game to show my kids and hopefully get them into interested in coding as well. To make it a little more interesting for modern audiences, I added some original mechanics like the [up 00:17:24] red pills, the destruct orb, smart bomb, and the wingman assist, and of course the end game boss battle. If you use one of the destruct orbs just at the right time, you can take out an entire wave in one shot, so there’s a little tip. A [inaudible 00:17:39] in the game off that year, which I was very pleased with.

Maurice Cherry:
Here, Joe weighs in on how he used Glitch to make Galaxeroids.

Joe Gaffey:
Well, I really key benefit for me was portability. I did not much free time when he’s working on Galaxeroids, so I was taking every opportunity to get some coding done using whatever device I had to hand. And having the web based editor made this really easy of course. I actually coded it the whole thing and produced all of the art assets such as they are in the browser as an experiment to see if it all could be done that way. Gethub integration was also a great help, so I could easily create snapshots and forks as needed. Example, for releasing into different app stores. I actually published Galaxeroids into the Microsoft store and the [inaudible 00:18:22] game store as a progressive web app. T. Then making Galaxeroids a PWA on Glitch, I was able to test on any mobile device I can put my hand on, and I was able to send beta links to friends, to family to test some their devices and then make changes on the fly so I could test the fixes immediately.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s no secret. Joe loves retro gaming, but he’s really got his eye on the future.

Joe Gaffey:
I like to play simple games with my kids like platformers, like Mario Bros. and Tetris, but I’ll give most genres a go. So, I’ve done some other experiments with games. In another experiment on Glitch, I built a Guitar Hero/Rock Band clone called Rockstar, which uses the web MIDI and web Gamepad APIs. [inaudible 00:19:07] playing along with MIDI tunes using the actual Rock Band instruments, guitars and drums. It actually worked pretty well in the end. Needs a little bit of UX tidying now, of course. More recently, I’ve gotten into driving simulators in VR, and that’s a whole different experience. And my latest splits experiment, which I called WD-40 for some reason, comes from that interest, and so my first real attempt at 3D programming on the web.

Joe Gaffey:
It’s a physics-based driving simulator based on three.js with ammo.js physics. And it’s pretty basic right now, just extends one of the ammo.js code examples. But my idea is to use it to experiment with upcoming web standards like the upcoming USB web hitch ID, human interface device API, so I want to see if it’s possible to build a full driving simulator where USB-based steering wheel and pedal controls, including full force feedback, just using web standards and technologies running in the browser. I eventually, I’d like to experiment with WebXR, as well, and mixed reality. Maybe driving an RC car remotely on the web over WebRTC, that sort of stuff. Like somebody [inaudible 00:20:24] experiments, I try to push the boundaries of what’s considered feasible to do with web standards technologies in the browser and keeping the source code as open and accessible as possible at the same time, and Glitch is really perfect for that.

Joe Gaffey:
I’m quite passionate about the open web and the idea that anybody can look under the hood of a website and see how it works just by clicking on the view source option. Unfortunately, that’s not so easy to do these days with modern web frameworks, but you want to be able to take advantage of JavaScript and create this rich experience that offers, especially for games and demos, but ideally to do it in a way that supports open and accessible coding. I think in this way, platforms like Glitch shows there’s a real opportunity to realize the vision of the social rewrite web as originally described by Tim Berners-Lee in the early days of the web.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, let’s talk to a member of the team to get the lowdown on some glitch apps that anyone can code, use, or remix for themselves.

Multiple Speakers:
Welcome to the App Review.

Keith Kurson:
Hi, I’m Keith Kurson. I’m an engineering lead at Glitch. I run what is now called the Dotcom team. So, we make everything on Glitch that isn’t part of the editor, so the front page, collections, user profiles, all of that.

Keith Kurson:
One of my favorite is called Figma Pacman, and I use this tool called Figma which is what our designers [inaudible 00:22:01] use and a lot of other designers to build layouts. It’s sort of the design tool at the moment. But we’ve seen some really interesting uses of Figma and other tools that aren’t traditionally used for this on Glitch. And so, Figma Pacman is an example of an app where you, in Figma, draw a little maze like what Pacman runs through, and then Glitch users can plug in that URL and then play Pacman on that maze. And so, it’s a really cool combination of two different tools. And people who aren’t that technical… So, it was made by a designer who uses Figma all day and doesn’t get a lot of time to do programming, and so anyone can jump in and make their own maze without really needing to know how to program. And I think that’s really cool and shows off what Glitch games can look like.

Keith Kurson:
And then, the second one that I really, really love, that I’ve played a bunch of times, is called PowerSlides, and you’ve probably seen some version of this in the city that you live in performed live. But basically, it takes a bunch of random slideshows from all over the internet, so government slideshows, weird marketing slides, things like that, and combines them into one huge database. And when you start the game, it chooses 10 of them randomly and you have five minutes to give a South by Southwest style presentation with these totally random slides that could just have a picture of a dolphin and say, “Think of the dolphins,” or a text line that just says, “iPhones for dogs,” and you have to give a presentation like you’re trying to sell this thing. And that is really fun to watch people do.

Maurice Cherry:
Want more gamer goodies? We made a collection filled with bonus content where you can play the Glitch apps mentioned in this episode, see a list of the team’s favorite games, and check out a game related articles and more on Glimmer. You’ll find a link to the collection in the show notes. That’s it for the first episode of Shift Shift Forward, a show about everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. Our website is glitch.com/SSF, and our Twitter handle is @Glitch. Let us know what you think about this episode on social media by using the hashtag #shiftshiftforward. And if you really liked the show, then subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

Maurice Cherry:
Here’s what’s coming up on Shift Shift Forward. A lot of us are sheltered in place and adjusting to the reality of living and working from home for the foreseeable future, and technology is a big part of that. So, who is considered to be in tech these days? 

Maurice Cherry:
Shift Shift Forward is produced by Maurice Cherry and Keisha TK Dutes, with editing by Brittany Brown and sound design and mixing by Keisha TK Dutes. Special thanks to the entire team at Glitch.

He also serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation 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.

Incidents

The Workers Who Keep the Web Safe in an Unsafe World

Animal Crossing Helped Me Get Back to Real Life

New Rules of the Classroom: Remote Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever

Function with Anil Dash

Open World is a fiction anthology podcast about how science and technology serve as a backdrop for imagining a better future, helping us envision the positive influence that science and tech can play in a real future. 

Open World is produced by Keisha "TK" Dutes and hosted by critically-acclaimed podcaster Rose Eveleth, for Glitch. By speaking to the pressing concerns of our times through love, friendship, community, compassion, and sustainability, the host will help listeners imagine new ways forward into a future that is less scary and more positive, and something we can start working on constructively.  

Open World launches weekly episodes in Spring 2020. Want to contact the show? Email youropenworld@glitch.com.

Open World

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. We’ll talk to some of our top creators, explore cool apps, and even hear from the people who work at Glitch!

Shift Shift Forward

From idea to code in seconds, build and learn alongside the most creative coders on the Web

Welcome to the Glitch Blog ✨

— Glitch Blog

June is about to be a very exciting month for the Glitch community! But before we get to that, you know we have to celebrate all of the cool things that were created in May. From mythical monsters to time travel to playing with custom domains, the Glitch community was very busy building, experimenting, and making the web a blast. 

Speaking of custom domains, special shout out to all of the folks who participated in the community testing last month. You all helped us to make Glitch and Fastly even better for building with and we can’t wait to show you how. If you missed out on that fun, don’t worry! There will be another round of community testing coming soon to try out Fastly features on Glitch apps from within the Glitch editor. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, share your interest by commenting on this sneak peek thread in our community forum! 

~biking-in-chicago by @etsinger gives you the lowdown on the issues facing bikers in the Chicago area. 

~creating-with-data.glitch.me/shirt-designer by @digitalWestie and @petra89962 uses generative art to create some shirts people would truly love to buy!

~archive-stumbler created by @ckolderup lets you explore the Internet Archive in a “Stumble Upon” style. 

~gh-pages by @domfarolino is a useful tool for remembering how many static pages you’ve deployed to GitHub. 

~succession-generator created by @derekahmedzai lets you hold onto your emotional support billionaires’ toxic family drama just a tad longer. 

~minigamesbyjess created by @jessameliasilver is the perfect way to kick off your Friday, with a variety of fun mini games. 

~notsoterriblestory by @sjsbutterfly is a fun “choose your own adventure” style game.

~poetechnics-transfluxions created by @ryanhgreene1 is a fascinating collection of poems, diagrams, and figures from Yaxkin Melchy’s "constellation book" called EL NUEVO MUNDO or THE NEW WORLD. 

~pale-reliable-fog by @aagunasekaran will keep you on your toes. 

~word-mastermind created by @clupasq a fun word guessing ga—….it’s wordle, it’s a wordle clone and I just now realized. 

~mythical-creatures by @mapsmania lets you wander the world of cryptids at your own peril!!

~wswjp by @Flench04 and @sutherland.creations details racism facing the Douglas County School District.

~timetravel-streetview by @mapsmania is not a new app, but allows you to now travel to Los Angeles in 2100. 

~birds-eye-quebec created by @mapsmania takes you over Sherbrooke, Quebec circa 1881. 

~cubshomegametoday created by ​​@jbouvier is like a Magic 8 Ball for Chicago Cubs fans. 

~tbb-links by @triangleblogblog is a cool Glitch in Bio app for Triangle Blog Blog fans. 

~galaxykate-arvr-aframe by @galaxykate gives you a chance to play around with WebXR, remix it and give it a try!

~paint-it-timelapse created by @new.in.twon is a soothing timelapse painting of whatever you choose!

~incantationbowl by @olee0114 lets you unearth a 3D incantation bowl from ancient Mesopotamia. 

~strange-attraction created by @rowan-m is another satisfying project that creates beautiful art generated by math that you can shuffle to your heart’s content.

And that’s a wrap on another amazing month for the Glitch community! Follow us across the open social web 🌐 

You can still send your projects and playlists to us via the community forum, 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 ~bikebus created by @daniel73473 for the Chicago metro area, not the Milwaukee area—but if there is a Milwaukee bike bus we would love to know about it!

June is about to be a very exciting month for the Glitch community! But before we get to that, you know we have to celebrate all of the cool things that were created in May.

Last month on Glitch, the May 2023 edition

If Stefan’s name sounds familiar, we profiled him 6 years ago (essentially, a million in web years) about creating Twitter Bots. Obviously a lot has changed since then (we got TikTok, a global pandemic happened, we lost Twitter) aside from Stefan's passion for creating bots. We caught up with him to chat about the recent AI hype and the future of bots on the web. 

Glitch: Do you remember the first bot you ever interacted with?

Stefan: The first two bots I remember learning about would be @congressedits, which is a bot that posts anonymous Wikipedia edits made from IP addresses associated with the US Congress, and @YesYoureRacist, which originally retweeted tweets that contain “I'm not a racist.” Now it seems to be more of a manually managed account.

Either way, both of these showed me how a simple, yet clever idea can be very impactful.

I imagine that there are many folks these days who hear "bots" and (similar to the word "hacking") assume the worst: misinformation, threats to democracy, spam, etc. Does this happen when you talk about your work and if so how do you reconcile that in a way that shows how great bots can be without dismissing the threat that actual bad bots are?

I don’t actually recall having this conversation personally, but I am very much aware of this perception.

I have this video, from a few years ago, of a UX review of Botwiki done by someone who’s not too familiar with creative bots. And I really enjoy the part where the person speaking goes from visiting a website on which they have no idea what to expect, to saying: that’s kind of cool.

I hope Botwiki has the same impact on people who come across it, perhaps by accident, or trying to learn more about other kinds of bots, and realizing that there’s a lot more to this topic.

There’s been so much change and uncertainty in a lot of the bot-building world lately, what keeps you motivated to help people build bots even when it’s challenging?

I’ve been working on Botwiki for a few years now, and there were definitely moments when I did feel burnt out. And that’s when you know you need to step back from what you’re working on, take a break, focus on something else.

But this site, even if it’s a pretty small niche, feels very special to me. There really isn’t a project quite like this one, and I still get occasional emails, less so now, compared to the early days, with people reaching out with questions, asking for help with things not covered by my tutorials. And I really enjoy that, I like being able to help others, and seeing their excitement when they get their idea working. I find that very rewarding.

...you can actually build a bot that doesn’t really run on any of the existing fediverse networks, like Mastodon, but it’s its own server.

What's a platform you wish you could build a bot for but they don't have an API for it?

That’s a great question, and I guess I don’t really have an answer for you. It feels like every big platform has an API nowadays. And if not, there’s usually a way around it.

I would say, the one challenge I see here is platforms starting off being open to developers, but as their venture capital funding starts to dry up, and they need to turn profit, things start to get closed off and limited. See Twitter for example, where they’re now charging ridiculous sums for things that used to be free.

AI hype aside, what do you actually see as being the next big thing for bots, and the like?

After Twitter’s takeover by Elon Musk last year, after a brief period of living in denial about the whole thing, I’ve moved my attention to the fediverse. I’ve had an account on Mastodon for a few years by then, but didn’t really get much out of it, but that has changed significantly, as more and more people flee Twitter.
And it’s a breath of fresh air, on many levels, including it being a great platform for creative automation.

Mastodon’s API is very similar to Twitter’s, with fewer restrictions, and it’s completely free, so it’s really easy to get up and running on it, even to move over your existing Twitter bots.

And that’s what I’ve been seeing, folks have been migrating their bots from Twitter, and making a lot of new ones as well.

And because of how the fediverse works, you can actually build a bot that doesn’t really run on any of the existing fediverse networks, like Mastodon, but it’s its own server, so to speak, and becomes a part of the fediverse. And that’s pretty cool from a technical point of view, and something you can’t do with today’s commercial social networks.

Do you have a favorite project, or maybe bot that you’ve seen on Glitch?

I have quite a few of them saved, the list is pretty long. I really like lists on Glitch, like this one with Data Journalism projects. I’m into music, so I definitely have to mention this nice little drum machine. I’m a big fan of the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis, so this title card builder using his style was a neat find. The Online Museum of Multiplayer Art is also great. And I enjoy browsing the various demos, like the ones for A-Frame. And as for bots, I really like this sock-generating one, which is actually a remix of my Twitter bot template.

I host my own Mastodon instance, and you can also follow me on SoundCloud and GitHub. And Glitch, of course! 

Stefan Bohacek is a web developer and engineering manager, and a prolific bot creator. His templates for building bots have been remixed by hundreds of developers, and his work has been featured in Wired, The Verge, and other tech blogs and online publications.

If Stefan’s name sounds familiar, we profiled him 6 years ago (essentially, a million in web years) about creating Twitter Bots.

5 Minutes with Stefan Bohacek, bot builder 

AI assisted coding has really taken off recently. The tech and the conversation around it say some interesting things about our understanding of what developers do.

AI can write some kinds of code, and it’s even helping people who aren’t coders to make software applications. It’s also frequently wrong. We’re still learning the types of coding task it’s suited to — in what specific contexts it’s a help rather than a hindrance. Unrealistic expectations and inaccurate interpretations abound! The conversation reveals our inability to define the real skills in being a software developer.

It’s not writing syntax. Being able to recite the right keywords only takes you so far.

Back when I was training for tech, an instructor told us a story about a research exercise. A mix of people looked at a code sample for a short time and tried to memorize as much of it as possible. Some had never written code, and some were experienced software engineers. The non-coders were able to recount detail about the first couple of lines from the top of the excerpt. The developers remembered almost none of that detail, but recounted a high level overview of the structures they had seen (a loop, a conditional, etc). The developers understood the code differently.

Code comprehension remains a neglected part of developer education, but this exercise reflects how integral it is to making software, and that abstraction level is a key aspect of working with code. The actual syntax is a detail — an important one, the code won’t work if it’s wrong — but focusing on syntax is only helpful at a granular level, it doesn’t come close to conveying what a developer actually does.

When I see a job posting that requires experience in specific frameworks or programming languages, it always seems like such a missed opportunity. Software engineering is fundamentally a learning activity. Developers are always learning new technologies and solving new problems. Once you’ve learned one language you pick up more. What characterizes the more experienced developer is the ability to reapply skills in different contexts.

I’ve had the privilege to work with incredibly highly skilled software engineers, and if I were to try to describe their talents and contributions, writing correct or efficient syntax would not make the list lol. Part of it is going past “how” and delving into “why” — articulating the problem as it stands within an organizational or social context, making sure you’re solving the right problem, and defining it in an actionable way. There’s a ton of communication and collaboration, and being comfortable with ambiguity is hugely valuable. 

Making the web isn’t about writing code, it’s about being able to create and participate through technology. 

Shifting abstraction levels have given us an evolving definition of software engineering since the inception of coding. What seems like essential knowledge to one generation of coders becomes an invisible part of the stack to the next generation. There’s a strong argument that AI is another interface in this cycle. Remember the discussion a few years ago about knowing how to use effective phrasing for a Google search? The algorithms in the tools we use daily have advanced, but describing many of them as natural language processing is still a stretch. 

Everyone who interacts with tech figures out how to give the inputs that get the desired output, whether you’re writing code or adjusting your accent because the voice recognition tool can’t process Glaswegian — we learn how to get the machines to do what we want.

Increasing abstraction levels have been accompanied by the rise of the API — we make software by combining a lot of components towards a particular goal. Connecting all of these different tools means the activity is in part defined by its technological and community ecosystem. Software engineers make something valuable within a complex landscape of interacting systems. 

The modular style of making software is successful because it frees developers to focus their creativity on the parts of a project that make it unique — which are also the parts AI is least able to approach.

Making the web isn’t about writing code, it’s about being able to create and participate through technology. As it becomes harder to say what is and isn’t software development, maybe it becomes more interesting to ask other questions. For example, what does a tool enable people to do, what are the opportunities, and what are the risks of harm?

What do you think the skills in software development are? Share your thoughts in the Glitch community forum!