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 Stack Overflow and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

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

To get everyone in the holiday spirits, we asked Nicolas Grenié, a Developer Advocate at Typeform, to write about the really cool puzzle he put together using different technologies to surprise his wife for the holiday. We hope you enjoy the tale as much as we did ☺️

As we are entering the Holiday season, and everything around us is starting to adorn itself with red, white, and green, I want to take a moment to tell you a modern Christmas tale. But first, call dibs on grandma’s rocking chair, place it near the fireplace, tuck yourself in your favorite plaid, and pour yourself some hot cocoa. You can even drop some tiny marshmallows in it. It will be our little secret.

To be honest, this is not exactly a Christmas tale, but more a cuento de Reyes like people call it in Spain, where my wife is originally from. In Spain, people celebrate more the Epiphany or Three Kings Day (Dia de Los Reyes) than Christmas. It’s very similar and respects a traditional end-of-year holiday triptych: a family gathering, too much food, and presents for all. Every year I join my wife and her family to celebrate this special day together.

So on the 6th day of 2020, full of insouciance about the year to come, bellies packed with exquisite jamon and bubbly cava, it was finally time to gather the whole family around the tree and open presents. The younger ones were tearing shiny wrappings joyfully, unveiling many trucks and dolls. Surprisingly, a mystery box was still untouched. It had my wife’s name on it: Rebeca.

As she started opening it, all the shouting stopped, as everyone watched, young and old, in monastic silence. ‘What was in the box?’ It was nothing they had ever seen before. There was an assortment of differently shaped pieces of various colors along with a tiny post-it note.

I don’t know if you like puzzles, but my wife adores them! And it looked like the Kings’ elves played a trick on her. On the post-it, she could see scribbled drawings of a Puzzle piece, an End sign, a Camera, and a Phone. What would you understand if you saw such rebus? It was probably not as crucial as Archimedes’ discovery, but my wife shouted Eureka when she understood what the scribble meant: solve the puzzle first and then take your phone out to take a picture.

Everyone quickly made room at the dinner table. Pushed the dirty plates and flutes away, this puzzle was a serious business. After a couple of minutes, every piece of the puzzle found its place in the masterpiece.

It looks oddly familiar.
As the post-it instructed, my wife diligently took her phone out and aimed at the finished puzzle, ready to discover what’s next.

At this point in the story, I want to pause and take a moment to thank the engineers, designers, and everyone at Apple that contributed to building the iPhone, an incredible piece of hardware. Thanks to their sense of detail and craftsmanship, they gave life to this scrappy homemade puzzle and turned it into an interactive object.

The iPhone camera detected the QR code pointing, which pointed to a URL hosted on Glitch. There was still no sign of an actual present. Eventually, the URL on the Glitch app redirected to a typeform with another enigmatic message.

Looks like elves were jokesters. The whole family, five adults and three kids, were now gathered around the table, curious to discover the next part of the puzzle. The typeform asked the first riddle: If you are running in a race and pass the person in second place, what position are you in?

The group agreed on the same answer in a snap! “Of course! You become first! So easy! Next!”
And they moved on to the next question.  Excited, they responded quickly and unanimously, as I expected, and they quickly moved to the remaining riddles. The second was a popular one on Twitter at the time: Someone's mom has four sons North, East and West. What is the name of the fourth son. Can you guess the name of the fourth son?

And the final one came from a riddle site for kids:

Black inside
Black outside
So as my heart
Black wood
Who am I?

You should have seen their face when the typeform said: “Whoops, you only have 0 correct answers... Start over.” The elves were definitively the sneaky kind and didn’t make it easy. The adults sat down. They started getting out pens and papers to draw things and put their heads together, trying hard to figure out where and how they went wrong. They were at it for more than an hour, trying one possibility after another. 

In this whole din, no one noticed that my 9-year old nephew, Victor, had found all the correct answers on his own. However, no one stopped to look up and hear him out. Only after they had run out of options, they turned, meekishly, to the little one. And when they realized that the typeform accepted his answers - all 3 - as correct, the tenor of excitement suddenly changed direction to him. 

Until the iPhone rang and an SMS popped on the screen. There were muffled grumblings wondering if it was another puzzle. The text message only contained a link. It opened a Wallet file. Finally the end!
Indeed! It was tickets to see KISS End of the Road World Tour at the Oracle Arena in Oakland.

Sure, I could have just printed these tickets out and handed it to my wife in an envelope—a bow and wrapping paper around for the sake of anticipation. But we would not have had this family experience, where everybody contributed and participated. This experience created lifetime memories for all the people in the room. Of course, the concert was a blast! The show was on March 6th. On March 7th, the Shelter In Place started in the Bay Area. This concert is the last anything we attended in 2020.

Technology does not need to be all serious; it can also spark joy around you and give life to the silliest ideas you may have. I hope you can explore those ideas and build more meaningful hacks!

Check out this tutorial on the Twilio blog to learn how this gift was put together! Here are the answers to the riddles: second, What, an olive.

How Technology Helped Building A Meaningful Gift Experience

We asked co creators Richard Yee and Alex Tomlinson to share the story behind their new variable font, Whirly Birdie. This fun, flexible, and retro-inspired typeface launched a few weeks ago and it’s just getting started. As one of the most whimsical sites we’ve seen built on Glitch this year, this project should delight web developers and designers alike.

What was the inspiration for this project? How did you take this from concept to launch? 

A: We wanted to make a website as fun as we think the font is. Our idea was to create a “whole world” out of a font, and I think we got pretty far! There’s a clock made out of a font, a bookshelf, and we even hijacked your cursor- so that’s a font too! And, of course, our process involved Glitch at every step! Almost every element on the page began as a separate sketch on Glitch. I guess you could say our process was creating a whole bunch of neat little sketches utilizing the font, and then seeing what made sense together.

R: Yup, we wanted to make something cool combining each of our specialities. Alex is always drawing fonts. I'm always tinkering with weird web tech. We both use Glitch day to day, so this collab was bound to happen at some point! This project was a “playground” in the truest sense of the word. While we started with a loose plan, I think our multiple tangents on Glitch have allowed us to make something super fun.

What stack did you use to make the project? Tell us about the tools, libraries, and frameworks you used. 

A: I think it was all Glitch and Svelte. Unless there is something Richard isn’t telling me about!

R: Svelte was a real gem of a find this year for me as a developer. Just its base configuration was super powerful. Didn't need a separate state manager nor an animation library. Svelte had most of them ready out of the box. It was also very versatile. I could utilize all the powers of a framework without forcing Alex to adopt it when collaborating. There's nothing wrong with vanilla javascript, and I'm glad we could keep some of that workflow with Svelte.

How do you explain what a variable font is and its benefits for web developers and designers? 

A: I think the best way to explain variable fonts to web developers is simply: they're fonts with variables! Depending on what a typographer has drawn in their font, you can use variables to output different weights, sizes, or even animations from a font. The main benefit for designers is the creative freedom. They basically get to co-pilot a font’s design. The main benefit for developers is the ease of using variable fonts. Not much has changed in the CSS, except now you only have to import a single file! You do have this new "font-variation-settings”. Maybe Richard can convince developers better than I can?

R: I definitely expect variable fonts to mature in the near future. The major draw would probably be cross-browser compatibility and stability. Chrome has seen some weird glitches, no pun intended, with how it renders variable fonts. Edge cases for sure, and I'm sure their teams are doing their best to fix all bugs coming in. We actually submitted a variable font bug we found while developing this website and they rolled out a fix last month! 

That said, by baking animations directly into variable icon fonts, it removes the need for a library like lottie.js just to create animated SVGs. It's a super powerful spec, and most importantly, it was super easy to animate! 

What are some of your predictions or favorite trends in web development and design? 

A: I predict that Whirly Birdie and Whirlybats will take over the web, and you won’t be able to read a sentence without seeing an animated airship or UFO. My favorite trend in web design is DIY web design. Anything where you can tell someone designed or coded something themselves and didn’t just defer to some Bootstrap theme or Material Design generator.

R: I definitely feel there's a trend for more bespoke gestures and performance that you would typically find in a native app. That said, I'm a big fan of progressive web apps, which are just websites that you can launch from an icon on your mobile homescreen. It frees you of the browser frame, giving you something that really does feel native. Needless to say, I have whirlybirdie.com installed on my phone. On trends in development, I'm a fan of what Svelte is doing to change up the JS landscape. Having most of the work done on the compiler and not the client is a nice shift in philosophy. 

What’s your best advice for creators looking to make something and sell it online? Any lessons learned the hard way or best practices to share? 

A: Sell it yourself! A big part of the reason I decided on creating a standalone website for this font is that so many “graphic design marketplaces” are abysmal and depressing places. “Products priced 90% lower than yours are more likely to sell!” and “We are now taking 50% of your sales, because we are so devoted to making our service the very best for you! :)” are the sad realities of selling your soul to those places. As for lessons learned the hard way: we had the purchase button in low-contrast pale blue color when the site launched and we switched it to a nice green—and I swear it has impacted our sales. 

R: Market your work and be confident about sharing! Whether it be on social media channels, aggregator sites, or even the @glitch twitter account, I think it's important to be active in seeking out specific communities that would be excited for your new product/website/project. Sharing process work is also a good way to generate interest. Alex was fairly on point promoting Whirly Birdie throughout our development cycle. 

What’s next after Whirly-Birdie? Are you working on more fonts or projects? 

A: That implies Whirly Birdie ever ends! I like to think of it as a living, breathing project. Since launch I’ve stealthily added at least 5 Whirlybat icons, and likely even more by the time someone reads this! As for future font projects, I think there is still so much to explore with variable fonts.

R: Would love more font collabs and maybe branching out even further. For now, I'm headed back to more experimental tinkering. I'm currently making a face-tracking web app for virtual live streamers. Hope to launch it early next year!

We asked co creators Richard Yee and Alex Tomlinson to share the story behind their new variable font, Whirly Birdie. This fun, flexible, and retro-inspired typeface launched a few weeks ago and it’s just getting started. As one of the most whimsical sites we’ve seen built on Glitch this year, this project should delight web developers and designers alike. 

What does it take to create and launch a font? A Q&A with the Whirly Birdie creators 

Although Glitch is a really powerful platform where you can build full-stack web apps, I also find that one of its simplest, most straightforward features has some pretty amazing potential.

You can easily create and maintain a group-edited collection of Markdown files on Glitch, almost like a Google Docs for Markdown. Once you do, there's a huge set of possibilities of what you can do with those files

If you're here, you already know what Markdown is — it's a way of formatting plain-text files so that they can consistently be parsed into rich text or HTML if you'd like. I've been using Markdown since John Gruber first created it almost 2 decades ago, and it's been amazing to see it become so ubiquitous that many more technical users just assume it's going to be available wherever they want to write.

Markdown also has a few key advantages over the ways that people commonly write together as part of teams or workgroups. In a tool like Google Docs, as good as it is, there are some pretty significant constraints:

There's no built-in formatting styles for code, or even for blockquotes.

You can't just use HTML even if you know it

Copy & paste can still be annoying in the same way that Microsoft Word is frustrating, bringing over unexpected styles or formatting

None of these by itself is a huge problem, but all of them together can be really annoying and frustrating. Meanwhile, trying to edit Markdown files alongside other people is... weirdly hard? You could use a whole complex git-based workflow, but that seems like overkill, and we're spoiled by being used to edit together in Google Docs and Figma and all our other tools that let us collaborate in realtime.

So, the answer to easily editing Markdown files while working together on them as easily as sharing a Google Doc? Glitch!

Take the piece that you're reading right now: I wrote it right on Glitch, and then I could easily share it with my coworkers so they could read over it and offer edits or suggestions if they wanted. It works just like sharing in any other app, without having to go through the complexity of git. And now if I don’t want my notes to be readable by everybody on the Internet, I can just set sharing to be private, and only the people I invited can read what I’ve written.

Now, if I want to undo changes, or go back to an earlier version, I still have git under the hood, automatically saving all my edits as I go. If I want to get really fancy, I can even hook up other tools to my Markdown files on Glitch because it's all accessible as a completely standard git repository. But I don't have to do any of that stuff unless I want to.

And best of all, any people I invite in to share this Glitch project can also create and share their own Markdown files that we all maintain together. If we want to make a knowledge base or a documentation manual together, it's easy enough for a brand new user to jump in, and advanced enough for any coder to feel fully comfortable building on top of. There are even niceties like a fancy little button that will automatically format your file and keep it looking neat and clean.

Of course, since Glitch lets you create and run full-stack apps, the sky's the limit when it comes to using the Markdown files you make on Glitch. If you want, you can build (or import from GitHub) a static site generator, and publish your Markdown files as web pages. You could use the built-in git support to synchronize the repo to another hosting platform or publishing tool. You could write scripts to process your Markdown and output it in any format you want, or to submit it to another platform's APIs. You could even build another Glitch app that uses your documents as data that it works from.

The key thing is, it's just code. You can do anything any standard coding environment lets you do, but it's just easier to get started writing and creating and previewing your Markdown files.

So, if you're looking for an easy way to create and share documents together, and Google Docs isn't a good fit because it's not designed for plain text files, keep Glitch in mind as part of your toolkit. (And let us know if you find good uses for it with your team!)

Although Glitch is a really powerful platform where you can build full-stack web apps, I also find that one of its simplest, most straightforward features has some pretty amazing potential.

You can easily create and maintain a group-edited collection of Markdown files on Glitch, almost like a Google Docs for Markdown. Once you do, there's a huge set of possibilities of what you can do with those files

If you're here, you already know what Markdown is — it's a way of formatting plain-text files so that they can consistently be parsed into rich text or HTML if you'd like. I've been using Markdown since John Gruber first created it almost 2 decades ago, and it's been amazing to see it become so ubiquitous that many more technical users just assume it's going to be available wherever they want to write.