Glitch Blog

Effective Unit Tests

The value of Unit Tests is now well understood and appreciated by many developers. Yet, there’s a lack of literature on writing effective Unit Tests beyond the ‘Getting Started’ guides and beginner’s material. That’s what lead Jay Fields, Senior Software Engineer at DRW Trading, to write ‘Working Effectively with Unit Tests’. In this interview, we tap into Fields’ knowledge of Unit Testing and learn how to write tests that are maintainable and can be used by all team members, when to use TDD, the limits of DRY within tests and how to approach adding tests to legacy codebases.

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“It’s really tough”, Fields says. “I think you first have to start out asking yourself Why?” and this is “the first step I think a lot of developers don’t take”. What happens when “I come back to this test in a month, am I going to even understand what I’m looking at? If you ask yourself that, I think you start to write different tests. Then once you evolve past that, you’re really going to need to ask yourself, ‘If someone comes to this test for the first time… how long is it going to take for them to be productive with that test?’”. So ultimately, the real value is “a lot about establishing patterns within your tests that are focused on team value and on maintenance of existing tests, instead of being focused on getting you to your immediate goal,” says Fields.

It’s this focus on the team and the longevity of tests that leads Fields to consider DRY to be something on an Anti-Pattern. “It’s a tradeoff. I think people don’t recognize that nearly enough”. This trade-off comes in its maintainability, says Fields. “Imagine you have some junior guy, just graduated, fantastic programmer. He’s just not really familiar with xUnit frameworks that much. Maybe he doesn’t know that he needs to look for a setup method, so he’s basically stuck.” So “DRY’s great. If you can apply DRY on a local scale within a test. It’s fantastic if you can apply it on a global scale, or across the whole suite so that everybody’s familiar with whatever you’re doing then that’s great too. That helps the team, but if you’re saying that this group of tests within this trial behave differently than these tests up here, you’re starting to confuse people. You’re taking away some maintainability.”

Another concern for Fields is the value derived by adding tests. He’s a proponent of the selective use of Test-Driven Development (TDD). “Everybody needs to try TDD,” says Fields. “Just try it all the time. Try to do it 100% of the time, and I think you’ll very likely find that it’s extremely helpful for some scenarios, and not for others… For me personally, I’ve found when I know what I want to do, if I have a pretty mature idea of what needs to happen, then TDD is fantastic because I can write out what I expect, and then I can make the code work… The opposite scenario where I find it less helpful is when I’m not quite sure what I want, so writing out what I want is going to be hard and probably wrong. I find myself in what I think is kind of a wasted cycle of writing the wrong thing, making the code do the wrong thing, realizing it’s wrong, writing the new thing that I expect which is probably also wrong, making code do that, and then repeating that over and over”. When you get into a loop like that, you need to stop says Fields. “Just brainstorm, or play around with the code a little bit, and then see what the test could look like once you have a good idea of the direction it is going.”

This focus on value and the return on investment is especially important when adding tests to a legacy codebase. Fields asks, “do you really need to test everything equally when the business value is not the same? … There are so many things that aren’t really important to you. As long as you can keep sending them bills and keep getting paid and find the customer when you need to, the rest of the stuff is not as important”. So to guide his decision making he suggests that you “focus first on the things that are mission critical. If the software can’t succeed without a function working correctly, or a method working correctly, then you probably need some tests around that. After that, you start to do tradeoffs”. It’s important to take a holistic view, as “you are then maintaining the code and the tests”, says Fields. “If I have too many tests, then I need to delete some because I’m spending too much time maintaining tests that aren’t helping me. If I don’t have enough tests, then it’s very simple, just start to write some more… I tend to do that whenever a bug comes in for something that’s critical.” For everything else it’s important to ask ‘what is the real impact here?’ before diving in and writing a test for it.

Another false errand can be the elusive 100% test coverage. “Earlier on I thought it was a good idea… then you start to realize you need to test things like, say you’re writing in C#, and you have to automatically generate a set. Do you really want to test that? I think all of us trust that C# is not going to break that functionality in the core language, but if you put that field in there, then you have to test it if you want to give 100% coverage. I think there will be cases where you would actually want to do that… maybe you’re writing for NASA or maybe you’re writing for a hospital system — something where if it goes wrong, it’s catastrophic”. However, few of us find ourselves writing such code. So for the rest of us, Fields suggests that if you’re just “building some web 2.0 start up, not even sure if the company is going to be around in a month, and you’re writing a Rails app, do you really want to test the way Rails internals work? Because you have to, if you want 100% coverage. If you start testing the way Rails internals work, you may never get the product out there and you’ll have a great test suite for when your company runs out of money”.

When it comes to making mistakes with Unit Tests, Fields says, “I think the biggest one is just not considering the rest of the team.” “It’s really easy to do TDD. You write a test, and then you write the associated code, and you just stop there… I think the largest mistake people make is they don’t think about the most junior member of the team… Are they going to be able to look at this test and figure out where to go from there? And if the answer’s no, then that might not be the best test you could write for the code”. But it’s difficult to learn more beyond this, says Fields. “I think that there are great books that help you get started. I think ‘The Art of Unit Testing’ is a great book to help you get started. There’s the ‘xUnit Patterns’ book, that’s really good”. But, beyond that “I really think that there’s room for some new books… because Unit Testing’s only going to be more important. It’s not going away”.

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From Developer to Tech Lead

Pat Kua knows what it is to be a great Tech Lead. Not only has he worked with hundreds of clients, helping to solve their engineering problems, as part of his role as Principal Consultant and Tech Lead for Thoughtworks. But he’s also learned a lot from his conversations with other experienced Technical Leaders. Kua spoke to more than 35 whilst researching his book, ‘Talking with Tech Leads’.

He knows the Tech Lead role inside out and has seen first hand the issues they face. In this interview, Kua shares his view of the role, the mistakes he has seen new Tech Leads make and tips for being more successful. We also hear why he thinks Tech Leads should spend at least 30% of their time coding. Perhaps more importantly, we also hear how they can find the time to do so!

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Pat Kua has been working as a Technical Leader for eight years, working alongside Agile development teams. “One of the interesting things I’ve observed is a gap in leadership skills for technical people”, Kua says. Part of the cause of this is a lack of learning resources on the subject. “There are lots of books that teach you how to be a great developer, that teach you how to learn refactoring skills, things about good clean code, how to unit test stuff”, but there’s not much out there about becoming a Tech Lead.

That’s not the only problem new Tech Leads have to contend with. It’s also a lonely role — “you’re kind of by yourself”, Kua says. “There’s not a lot of support. You’re kind of thrown into this world between business people and this frustration of wanting to write code and there’s nobody there to help you”. You’re taken away from the familiar, “where you’re surrounded by compilers, test frameworks, new technologies and then suddenly you’re having to worry about who on your team is currently a bit upset, about trying to negotiate an agreement between two very opinionated developers” and all “while you’re still trying to get something delivered”.

Anyone who has been in any sort of leadership position will know that “you won’t have enough time to deal with all of the things that you’d like to do, and this is true when you’re being pulled in quite a few different directions”. And so of paramount importance is the ability to “really prioritize time to its best use possible”, Kua says. As you develop in the role, you also have to broaden your perspective and take a more holistic view. “So thinking about longer-term plans, are there any bigger, nagging architecture issues that need to be dealt with”, have we made “the right technology choices or should we be looking at a new technology and if so how do you kind of introduce that”.

A common theme in Kua’s writing on the subject of Technical Leadership is that of the paradoxes the role throws up. As Tech Leads “we have to be really focused on delivering something. At the same time, we kind of want the team to be learning new technologies, to… spend time on training, to go to conferences” and “focus on removing problems and the technical challenges that we have in our environment. But, it’s… hard to balance out those two kinds of aspects”, Kua says. “I don’t think you can ever really say that’s it’s a perfectly unbalanced equation, it will wax and wane depending on what things are going on. But it’s a key skill for a Tech Lead to sort of accept the paradox and embrace the paradox and to find a way to do both at the same time”.

“When I talk to developers going into the Tech Lead role, the biggest thing is ‘do I still get to code?’,” says Kua. “My answer is, to be effective, I think you do need to code”. “Developers really respect technical ability. And it’s very difficult for people who want to follow a leader”, who “want to respect their leadership decisions if they don’t have that respect for their ability”. This probably stems from “the classic ivory tower architect, that makes decisions far removed from the context of the problems that we experience on a day-to-day basis”. So that’s why “Tech Leads, to be effective, still need to code. Or at least, be at the coal face, where they’re reading code, being able to work with people on code” to help ensure that they really “understand what the key problems are. To understand the language that developers use, so that they can talk at the same sort of level, and also know when people are maybe making a bigger deal out of something”.

“I think 30% is a good minimum if I think that of a week, it’s a day and a half”, says Kua, about the amount of time you should actually still spend coding. Whilst at times this might not be possible due to more pressing concerns, “it’s important that the Tech Lead thinks about spending some time in the code, so you’re getting the respect” and maintain “a true awareness of what’s actually going on.”

“Tech Leads will always be interrupted”, says Kua. He recommends a few tactics to help cope with this. “Some Tech Leads simply block out time in their calendar so that they can actually spend time without interruptions. I think that’s easier in some environments than others. In a sort of more Agile environment, where the team is all co-located, there’s lots of things going on, even blocking out your calendar doesn’t really solve a lot of that problem because people will just come and walk up to somebody and interrupt them”.

So Kua suggests “having some sort of visible sign that says ‘actually I need some quiet time’”. “What I’ve used personally, for instance, is a flag on the desk to indicate when it’s no interruption time”. “Other Tech Leads take themselves out of the working space. So they go off to a quiet room, they book a meeting room and then they sit in the room by themselves. Just so that they can go through a few things in quiet time. Another way is to maybe offset your day as well. So either, start early or end early but do the same sort of hours. And this kind of helps you to get through all of those things before everyone else gets there into the workplace and interruptions start to come”.

“I’ve worked with a lot of developers, trying to coach them into this new role”, says Kua. “When you watch new developers go into this role for the first time, I think there’s two streams”. “There’s the Tech Lead that believes that the entire team should be self-empowered, every developer should know what they should do, and the Tech Lead wants to have trust in everyone”. “So they sort of just sit back and hope for the best. And I think this is where things get a bit dangerous if the team hasn’t gotten into that mode and they don’t already have that strong vision”. Typically then, in the absence of true leadership, “the most opinionated developers sort of pipe up and they form the direction themselves” and this can “quickly fall apart”, says Kua. When this happens “people spend a lot of time arguing and the same things come up over and over again” and are never truly resolved.

However, Kua has also seen those that think they “need to demonstrate that I’m a Leader, they’ll want to still make all of the heavy technical choices, so they’ll want to be involved in every technical discussion”. And while “I think these two extremes are elements that good Tech Leads should be able to play”, “they shouldn’t be playing that mode of Tech Lead all of the time”. Kua recommends an understanding of the situation leadership model, “which kind of talks about situations where more directive behavior is useful. Where maybe more targeted coaching is useful, and where perhaps pure delegation, and just sitting back and trusting the team to do the things that need to be done makes sense”. But it can take “time to develop an awareness of when to use which mode”.

Kua says that the people side of the role, is “one of the hardest things for a Tech Lead to learn and it’s just a skill that you don’t necessarily practice when being a developer”. Another key part of this is the need for the tech Lead to act as a linchpin between engineering and the business. “A lot of the skills from Tech Leads, that end up being developed is this kind of translation, where you’re kind of trying to avoid all of the technical terms and trying to express it in ways that your normal family members might be able to understand who don’t understand technology whatsoever. But you kind of need their buy-in to understand why you’re going a certain direction with things”.

To help build those skills Kua recommends the book ‘Getting To Yes’. “The book is about negotiating, and it’s about trying to come up with a good way forward while you’re trying to appease both sets of interests. What’s great about it, is that it’s a very short book and I think it has some really great stories that help people to understand some good skills”.

He also recommends ‘Crucial Confrontations’ and ‘Crucial Conversations.’ “I think it’s useful because there will always be some tense situation at some point in a project with one or two people” — “it’s kind of natural, people are unpredictable”. “I think that the book helps people to understand how to have a discussion around the topics where they’re emotionally sensitive, or you know that you have a certain position and reaction where you need to deal with a difficult topic and talk to somebody about it.”

Kua reflects though that there’s really no one right way to solve these problems and taking a different approach “doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re better or worse. It’s just a different way of achieving the same sort of goals. And I think for me that was sort of a surprise… because rather than trying to mold people into what I see as an ideal Tech Lead, it kind of gives people a lot more freedom to mold the role into however they see it best fit their own skills.”

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The 10X Programmer, and other Myths

Laurent Bossavit is a myth buster. Beyond his role as consultant and Director at ‘Institut Agile’ in Paris, France, he’s the author of ‘The Leprechauns of Software Engineering’. In researching this book, he found evidence that debunks myths common among Software Engineers. In this interview, he explains how folklore can turn into fact and why the 10X Programmer, the Exponential Defect Cost Curve, and the Software Crisis may not be as real as they may seem.

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Bossavit was an early advocate of Extreme Programming. He even authored the first book in French on the topic. And it was whilst he was researching proof to substantiate its benefits that he first stumbled upon some of the ‘evidence’ put forward to support some popular theories in Software Engineering.

“I didn’t wake up one morning and think to myself, ‘I’m going to write a debunkers book on software engineering’”, says Bossavit. “It actually was the other way around. I was looking for empirical evidence, anything that could serve as proof for Agile practices. And while I looked at this I was also looking at evidence for other things… related to Agile practices. For instance, the economics of defects and just stuff that I was curious about like the 10X programmers thing. So, basically, because I was really immersed in the literature and I’ve always been kind of curious about things, in general, I went looking for old articles, for primary sources”.

A common tenet in Software Engineering is the idea of the ‘10X programmer’. This is the notion that there can be up to a 10 fold difference between the productivity and quality of work produced by programmers with the same amount of experience. Bossavit says, “it’s actually one that I would love to be true. If I could somehow become, or if I should find myself as a 10X programmer, maybe I would have an argument for selling myself for ten times the price of cheaper programmers”.

However, “when I looked into it, what was advanced as evidence for those claims, what I found was not really what I had expected, what you think would be the case for something people say, and what you think is supported by tens of scientific studies and research into software engineering. In fact what I found when I actually investigated all the citations that people give in support for that claim, was that in many cases the research was done on very small groups and was not extremely representative”.

The main studies are now quite dated, there’s “this whole set of evidence that was done in the seventies, on programs like Fortran or COBOL and in some cases on non-interactive programming, so systems where the program was input and you get results of the compiling the next day. The original study, the one cited as the first was actually one of those, it was designed initially not to investigate productivity differences but to investigate the difference between online and offline programming conditions”.

So that is the first problem with the claim, Bossavit says. “How much of that is still relevant today is debatable. How much do we understand the concept of productivity itself is also debatable. And also many of the papers and books that were pointed to were not properly scientific papers. They were opinion pieces or books like Peopleware, which I have a lot of respect for but it’s not exactly academic”. What’s more, recent “papers did not actually bring any original evidence in support of the notion that some programmers are 10X better than others, they were actually saying, “it is well known and supported by ‘this and that’ paper” and when I looked at that the original paper they were referencing, they were in turn saying… things like ‘everybody knows since the seventies’. So you ended up with these circles of citations, with no actual proof at the end.

“My conclusion was that the claim was not actually supported. I’m not actually coming out and saying that it’s false, because what would that mean? Some people have taken me to task for saying that all programmers are the same, and that’s obviously stupid, so I can not have been saying that. What I’ve been saying is that the data is not actually there, so we do not have any strong proof of the actual claim”.

Another ‘fact’ that Bossavit takes issue with is the Exponential Defect Cost Curve. This is the claim that if it costs one dollar to fix a bug during the requirements stage, then it will take ten times as much to fix in code, one hundred times in testing, one thousand times in production. “That one is even more clear cut”, says Bossavit. “Those are actual dollars and cents, right? So it should be the case, at some point a ledger or some kind of accounting document originates the claim. So I went looking for the books that people pointed me to”. But what he found was that “when you look at the data and you try to find what exactly was measured”, you typically found that “rather than saying we did the measurements from this or that project, books said or the articles said, ‘this is something everybody knows’, and references were ‘this or that article or book’. So I kept digging… and in many cases I was really astonished to find that at some point along the chain basically someone just made evidence up.

I could not find any solid proof that someone had measured something and came up with those fantastic costs”. “You can find some empirical data in Barry Boehm’s books and he’s often cited as the originator of the claim. But it’s much less convincing when you look at the original data than when you look at the derived citations”, Bossavit says.

There is a third claim that Bossavit has researched, this is called “The Software Crisis”. This is common in mainstream media reporting of large IT projects that highlight high failure rates in software projects, suggesting that all such projects are doomed to fail. Bossavit says that “this is a softer claim right, so there’re no hard figures, although some people try. So, one of the ways one sees software crises exemplified is by someone claiming that software bugs cost the U.S. economy so many billions, hundreds of billions of dollars per year”.

But what he found most interesting, was “the very notion of the software crisis was introduced to justify the creation of a group for researching software engineering. So the initial act was the convening of the conference on software engineering, that’s when the term was actually coined and that was back in 1968, and one of the tropes if you will, to justify the interest in the discipline was the existence of the software crisis. But today we’ve been basically living with this for over forty years and things are not going so bad”. As Bossavit puts it “when you show people a dancing bear one wonders not if the bear dances well, but that it dances at all” and “to me technology is like that. It makes amazing things possible, it doesn’t always do them very well, but it’s amazing that it does them at all. So anyway I think the crisis is very much over-exploited, very overblown, but where I really start getting into my own, getting on the firmer ground is when people try to attach numbers to that”. He found that in some cases the methodology used was that they “picked up the phone and interviewed… a very small sample of developers and asked them for their opinion, which is not credible at all”, Bossavit says.

“Some of them come about from misunderstandings”, Bossavit says. “I found out in one case for instance that an industry speaker gave a talk at a conference and apparently he was misunderstood. So people repeated what they thought they had heard and one thing led to another… So I think that was an honest mistake and it just snowballed”.

“In some cases people are just making things up… and one problem is that it takes a lot more energy to debunk a claim than it takes to just make things up. So if enough people play that little game some of that stuff is going to just sneak past. I think the software profession kind of amplifies the problem by offering fertile ground, we tend to be very fashion driven, so we enthusiastically jump onto bandwagons. That makes it easy for some people to invite others to jump, to propagate.”

“Somewhat cynically it varies between, ‘why does that matter?’ and a kind of violent denial. Oddly enough I haven’t quite figured out why, what makes people so into one viewpoint or the other and there’s a small but substantial faction of people who tell me ‘oh that’s an eye opener’ and would like to know more, but some people respond with protectiveness when they see for instance the 10X claim being attacked.”

So why does it matter? Well, Bossavit says that “claims which are easy to remember, easy to trot out, they act as curiosity stoppers, basically. So they prevent us from learning further and trying to get at the reality, at what actually goes on in the software development project, what determines whether a software project is a success or failure, and I think that we should actually find answers to these questions.”

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Go Beyond Code to Become a Better Programmer

Many of us want to become better programmers. But how exactly do you go about doing that? Pete Goodliffe thinks he has the answer. He’s a programmer and software development writer who has authored two books, ‘Code Craft’ and ‘Becoming a Better Programmer’, both of which provide advice to Software Developers on how to hone their skills and become better programmers. We interviewed him, and he told us why you have to go beyond code to become a better programmer.

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So where to start? For Goodliffe, it starts with having the right attitude — “The standout difference between the really good coders that I’ve worked with and the ones that aren’t so great, is attitude,” says Goodliffe.

“It’s not a hand-wavey thing. I’ve worked with people who know technology, who know the idioms, and how to do all this stuff. But, if they don’t have the right attitude, they’re just not effective programmers and they’re not great people to work with. The kind of stuff I’m talking about here is humility. You don’t want to work with people who think they know it all but don’t. Being humble is the key thing. It doesn’t mean that’s an excuse to not know stuff, but it’s just not believing that you’re better than you really are”.

You can develop this humility by “being in a state of constant learning… so looking for new stuff, absorbing new knowledge, wanting to learn off of other people,” explains Goodliffe. “It doesn’t necessarily mean be a perfectionist and wanting to make everything perfect before you ship. It’s doing the best you can in the time you have, with the resources you have. But that kind of attitude really drives through to great code”.

Another way he suggests that you can improve your code is to write less of it. “It seems kind of counter-intuitive for a coder… but it’s entirely possible to write thousands of lines of code and achieve nothing in it. Think about it — no unnecessary logic, don’t write stuff that doesn’t need to be said, don’t write verbose code. Sometimes you can stretch out boolean expressions into massive If statements which just hide what is being said”. Ultimately for Goodliffe this means writing “simple but not simplistic code. If you don’t write enough code, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. But by avoiding all points of needless generality, like making abstract interfaces, or deep hierarchies that don’t need to be extended,” then you can write much more effective, concise code.

Goodliffe is also adamant about the need for programmers to communicate well. “Code is communication. You’re communicating not just with the computer, you are communicating to other people writing the code. Even if you are working by yourself, you are communicating with yourself in two years time when you pick up the same section of code”. And this is something that needs to be kept in mind, says Goodliffe. “It’s a skill, and it’s something you learn, and it’s something you need to consciously practice. And yet, I don’t know of courses… that really focus on something that’s really quite an important skill for programmers,” and so it can often be overlooked.

Of course, we aren’t all the same and our aptitude for communication differs. But it’s important to recognise your communication strengths, suggests Goodliffe. “Some people can talk well, some people are shy and retiring, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are stuck like that. That doesn’t necessarily make you a bad communicator. Some people communicate better in different media and it’s worth bearing that in mind. Some guys are really great on email, they can write concise, clear descriptions, they can follow a line of argument by writing and explaining something really well. Other people struggle to put it together in words”. So he suggests that you should “learn how you communicate well, play to your own strengths and pick the right medium”.

“The reason people pay us to write software, unless we’re doing it for fun, is because there’s a complicated problem that needs to be solved,” says Goodliffe. “There is some necessary level of complexity in software engineering and we have to embrace and understand that”. Yet many of us fall into the trap of writing code that produces unnecessary complexity. So Goodliffe suggests that what we should always aim for is to produce code that “when you look at it, it looks obvious. That is the key hallmark of some excellent code… you know it wasn’t simple to write. But when you look at it, the solution’s simple, the shape is simple. All I can say is, that’s what we should strive for”.

Sometimes though, this is taken out of our hands and we’re landed into the middle of a messy codebase. When this happens, “the most important thing… is to ask people,” advises Goodliffe. “I see so many developers who just won’t sort of swallow their pride and say, ‘I don’t quite know what this is doing, but I know Fred over there does. I’ll just talk to Fred about it.’ It’s often those little bits of insight that can give you a super-fast route through something intractable,” Goodliffe says. What’s more, all too often we “pick up some code, look at it, and think ‘that’s a bit dodgy isn’t it… what were they thinking?” What we forget though is this happens with our code too. “Somebody else picks it up, and they’ll make that same judgement call on my code,” says Goodliffe. So what we need to remember is that “what I might think is some terrible hack, is probably some pragmatic thing they did for a very good reason.” After all, “nobody goes out of their way to write messy code… I can’t say that I’ve found anyone that really tried to ruin a project. So approach code with that attitude,” cautions Goodliffe.

Regardless of our own skills though, Goodliffe says that “the biggest thing for me… is to sit at the feet of great coders. I have learned the most in my career when I have been around excellent people who I can learn off of. Whose skills can rub off on me and I have moved jobs. I have moved physically to be able to work with those people”. This can be motivating, and it’s important to keep stoking our passion for programming. “I’m enthusiastic. I love this stuff,” says Goodliffe, and “if you have an enthusiasm, that passion for programming, it tells out in the code that you write”.

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How to Maximize Your Impact as a Software Engineer

Edmond Lau is an experienced Software Engineer who has worked for the likes of Google, Ooyala, Quora, and Quip. He also spoke to Engineering Leaders from companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Stripe, whilst writing his book ‘The Effective Engineer’. We interviewed him to understand what he has learned about maximizing impact as an engineer.

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Lau says that something he noticed early on in his career that was reinforced after speaking with Engineering Leaders is that, “if you pick up the right habits, techniques, and mindsets when you’re starting off, then you’re significantly more likely to succeed”. This is most obvious when you look at the career progression of Junior Developers in organizations with and without effective onboarding programs, says Lau.

When starting at Quora early on, Lau says “it was sort of luck of the draw whether you would have a good mentor, or whether someone would explain to you core concepts in your first day or your first week or your first month. People who got lucky were much more likely to succeed and much more likely to be effective many months down the line”. So Lau set work on revamping their onboarding, and his re-worked “program was an attempt to level the playing field a little bit so that it wasn’t based on luck… whether you were on-boarded well.”

“Onboarding is not something where you do it once and you’re done. It’s something you do very incrementally,” explains Lau. “Start by documenting questions that new engineers are asking and make them reusable resources. If you are a new engineer, then as you are onboarding identify the things that are giving you problems. What is taking a long time to do that really shouldn’t? Over time, you can build up a repository of knowledge that becomes much more useful for new engineers joining the company.”

As an example of this Lau describes how things work at his current company, Quip. “Any time we are building new products we end up writing a short design doc that is then shared with the team” and then “everybody gets this new piece of information” and if “someone ran into an issue we document that into some best practices.” What this means is that over time “we end up with lots and lots of documents that are really useful for new engineers.”

Having spoken to many engineering leaders about what worked well in their careers, a number of common themes emerged. Lau says that one such theme was “focusing on and investing in tooling”. For example “when I talked with Bobby Johnson, who is the former Director of Engineering for Infrastructure at Facebook”, Lau recalls, “one of the biggest time and investments that he made that had the biggest return was just building tools. Trying to automate as much of the mechanics of what they were doing as possible. Every time they got a problem and found that they were still repeating what they were doing, they would write a tool for it and automate it.”

Another theme was “just keeping things simple… when I asked them what’s the biggest lesson or the most valuable lesson you’ve learned in the past year, they would say they just sort of made things a little too complex” and that things didn’t work when “there were a lot of operational burdens to keep things going.”

Keeping things simple and automating repetitive tasks are great examples of work which optimizes the impact you can have. This is a key part of Lau’s approach to engineering and is what he terms Leverage, and focussing on this helps engineers identify activities that have the most impact.

“Leverage basically means what is the output you’re producing for the amount of time you’re investing? It’s a metric of the impact you’re generating per amount of time that you spent.” So to be “an effective engineer you want to focus on the high leverage activities.” This might seem obvious, but as Lau explains it can be hard to actually internalize — “This is something that took me many years to learn… I used to work 70 to 80-hour weeks because I thought that was how hard a team had to work”. But after “we built an analytics module for a client and they never used it, or when we would build a product and it would never get the user adoption that we wanted… those experiences made me feel like working hard, putting in those hours just isn’t enough.” Lau says that what he then learned to do was “prioritize the things that are actually generating a large impact for the amount of time you’re spending.”

So, how do you know what to focus on? “The key” explains Lau, is in “setting up feedback loops, and that applies to everything you do. For instance, when you’re writing software, it means you send around a lightweight design doc to get feedback on your design before you even write any code. When you’re writing code it means… sending your code to code reviewers that are the strictest. The ones who would do a good job of critiquing what you’re doing. If you’re working on a product it means… getting feedback from gatekeepers who sort of block or launch as soon as possible. Then when you’re building or iterating a product, it means running A/B tests to measure if this change is actually materially improving the product in some way.”

To monitor and gauge this feedback you want to “pick a metric that incentivizes the type of behavior that you want”. Lau gives the example of a Performance team looking to optimize the performance of their product — “the metric that you want to improve could be something like the 99th percentile of all load times. Or it could be the average load time. Either of those metrics would improve the performance of your product, but they have very different outcomes. If you’re improving the average load times, that would tend to make you focus on general server improvements, but if you were focusing on the 99th percentile… then you’re focusing on the long tail of the application.” So it’s important to consider the metric you choose carefully, as “the choice of metric affects the type of work that you focus on,” Lau says. So “pick the metric that is most aligned with the success of the business.”

Lau attributes success in his career to having purposefully sought out job opportunities where he could continue to learn new things and push himself. Without doing this, Engineers can end up “being stuck on a plateau where they’re not really challenging themselves, they’re not really learning day to day. Just from my own experience, when I was at Google, it was a very comfortable place and sort of after my first six months there I learned a ton… but after two years I felt like I wasn’t really challenging myself anymore,” explains Lau.

Another way he has developed himself is through meet-ups and swapping stories with other developers. Lau comments that “when you’re working on a team, a lot of times the lessons we learn are just the ones that occur during the projects that you work on. People who have either had similar experiences or have gone through other projects… can teach you a ton.”

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Building a Culture of Learning in Development Teams

Joe Mastey is a developer who previously led internal learning at Enova where he built out their internal learning program. In this interview, we hear what worked, what didn’t and how you too can kick-off an internal learning program for your development team.

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In a lot of companies, people just learn on the job. But Mastey says that “when people try to learn on the job, they really only learn a narrow subset of all the things that they need to about a technology. What that leaves is a big gap in their skills where maybe they know a lot about one particular section of the platform, but then they miss entire other sections. That ends up being a hindrance.” What’s more, people can pick up bad habits and practices from learning this way too. After all, not all of the code in our codebases is good, but people see that code and “pick up these terrible patterns and so they internalize the wrong thing instead of learning the right thing,” says Mastey.

The answer to this problem is to establish a learning culture. “The thing that interested me the most was that by creating a culture of learning, we actually increase retention, not only of the younger people but also of the more experienced engineers,” says Mastey. “There’s this thing where when you’re at a technology company for maybe a couple years, right at the beginning you’re learning new things. It’s very exciting, you get a new platform… but, a couple of years in, and you are basically done learning parts of it. You feel like you slow down in that learning. This is the part where a lot of people end up dropping off. By building a culture that continually moves forward and rewards that kind of learning, we can attract really great engineers. And we can also retain really great engineers too.”

Another benefit of a learning culture is that “it actually reduces waste,” says Mastey. “One of the things that we’ve seen a lot of is if you aren’t really great with your tools, you’re not leveraging them completely. Because of that, you’re spending more time than you need to. One of the things that’s maybe counter-intuitive is that by spending this extra time, we actually end up saving time in the long run.”

And anyone who is interested in establishing a learning program can do so. “I have no teaching background whatsoever,” confesses Mastey, but “one of the things that I always tell people is that when you’re trying to build this part of your culture, you don’t need to have a teaching degree. You don’t need that expertise. Really, if you’re interested, you can figure it out.”

So there are three key stages that Mastey outlines to create a learning culture. “The first phase is really building up credibility. In that phase, we are trying to just find these quick wins and things to help people prove to themselves that what we were doing is going to be valuable and going to provide value to the business”.

You can progress to the second stage once you’ve built credibility and people are starting to understand the positive value a focus on learning can have. Mastey says that “in the second phase we can start to expand outside of the couple of people and some of those quick wins. We can start to invest time and things that take a little bit longer and now we’re involving entire teams of people. We’re trying to build links between teams. We can actually invest a little bit more money because people have started to understand what we’re going to get back for that money.”

Then by the third stage, it’s “essentially making that a permanent part of the culture… you can make it a part of people’s job”. By this stage people “just don’t even remember that it was ever something that they didn’t do. At that part, you have the ability to make really big changes that are incredibly helpful to the company but really need to have everybody on board,” explains Mastey.

To get started “you really want to focus opportunistically on places where you can have a lot of impact for only a little bit of effort,” says Mastey. “Don’t try upfront to change the world right out of the gate, because you don’t have enough buy-in for that yet.” You should also bear in mind that it’s an iterative process, cautions Mastey. “A lot of things don’t work. That’s okay. Like that’s part of the process… we don’t know upfront what’s going to work… so try a thousand things and monitor how they’re working, but don’t be afraid to throw them out.”

“Some of the really easy stuff” to start with, suggests Mastey, “is have a brown bag lunch. Have a book club. Do code review. Literally, you can have two people on different teams, just have those two people do code review between each other. Already, you’re starting to create the links within the organization that is going to support those changes later on”.

Another suggestion is to “post in your company’s chat program that you want to go to a meet-up and see if some other people will come with you,” says Mastey. You want to think of “things where you only need a couple of people to buy-in. It doesn’t really cost you anything, but you can come back and say, ‘Okay. I now know about this new JavaScript framework. I now know about this tweak that I didn’t understand before’”.

Then once it’s working, you can think of things that require a little more time investment. “Cross training is one of the big ones that I love,” says Mastey. For example, “your UI people should understand the database. Your database people should understand how testing works” and through cross-training you can encourage this learning and reduce your bus factor.

Something that worked well for Mastey were weekly tech talks. “In the first company that I did this at, we had an hour long tech talk program, where it was four slots every single week. Every week, we got four new ideas into the organization”. Of course, “that does take time, and it does take preparation, but when you can start to do that, the effect on the organization is really obvious and it’s really good”.

There is a lot that you can read on the subject. Mastey recommends Dave Hoover’s Apprenticeship Patterns book in particular, but warns to “not get stuck on reading and learning everything beforehand, because everyone else’s organization is really different than yours. Whatever you learn you’re going to have to take with a grain of salt anyway. The best thing to do is really just get in and start getting feedback from your own organization and from your own stakeholders. Don’t think that you’re going to perfect it by reading.”

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How to Find, Hire, and Retain the Best Developers

has been a developer for more than 35 years. A well-known PHP community leader, he’s experienced in building and managing development teams and is the author of ‘’. We interviewed him about finding, hiring and retaining developers. Here’s what he had to say.*

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To hire the best developers, you first have to know exactly what you’re looking for. For me, says Evans, “the number one thing that I look for is competency. If you’re not competent then you’re going to be a hindrance to the team.”

Then next is culture fit. “These days, you have to be very careful when you say cultural fit because everybody says you’re only looking for ‘white guys that graduated from your college’.” But Evans explains that this isn’t what he means, “cultural fit does not mean that you look like me, it does not mean that you think like me. What cultural fit means is that I’ve got a team that is currently working together and you’ve got to be able to play a part on that team.” This is paramount for Evans because as he sees it, “building that team culture is so important” as is “keeping the team cohesion”. “I’ve seen great teams make a bad hiring decision and totally destroy the culture of the team and the momentum of the team. Just because they got one person who dragged the whole team down,” cautions Evans.

So once you’ve settled on what exactly it is that you’re looking for, you need to consider how you’re going to find that person. Evans suggests that if that’s finding a developer in the local area, then “the first thing is to get involved in your local community. That means start attending your local developer groups on a regular basis. Go 5 or 6 months to build your relationships before you start doing any real recruiting. Even then, once you start, don’t just walk in and say ‘I’m here, I’m collecting Resumes’, but be the sponsor — buy the pizza and the beer…” It’s important to get this right, because “your local community is where you’re going to find your best resources.”

When it comes to writing a job ad, Evans stresses the need to put yourself in the developer’s position. When a developer is looking for a job, what they want to know is “‘can I afford to take the job? am I qualified for the job? how much does the job pay?’ That’s the important stuff. If you nail those, then you have a good chance of finding the developer that you’re actually looking for.” So, “number one, and I cannot stress this enough”, says Evans, “is put a salary or salary range on the job ad. You’re not limiting yourself… you’re not giving away any secrets because I guarantee that if you’ve already got developers, they’re talking to their buddies and we know how much you’re paying.” Then, it’s equally important to only put the skills that you really need on the ad. The tendency for some is to list everything they can think of, but if Evans sees that then “that’s a red flag immediately. What it tells me is that you don’t understand what you want, so you’re just throwing everything out there”.

Once you’ve got some applications for a position coming in, then you’re going to want to make sure they’re a good fit. Evans explains the approach he takes to make sure the team can work well with a candidate. “I get the entire team that the person’s going to be working within one room and I let the team ask questions until everybody is out of questions”. He does this regardless of the level he’s hiring for — “I don’t care if you’re Junior, Senior, an Architect or whatever, you’re going to get to ask any question you want of this person, as long as it’s a legal question”.

Another key aspect of this approach is that as the team manager, he doesn’t ask any of the questions. “My job is to sit back and see how the team interacts with this person and how this person interacts with the team. If I see a lot of friction, I’m thinking this might not be a good fit.” What’s more, everyone has to agree on who to hire. “It has to be a unanimous vote. I’ve actually had to walk away from candidates because I had one person say ‘I don’t think this person is going to fit well on my team’, and so we said ‘I’m sorry it’s not going to work’, because the team is the one that’s going to have to work with them. I’m just going to have to manage them, that’s the easy part. The team has to work with them on a day to day basis. If that team is not sold on the fact that this person is the person that they want on their team, I’d rather just walk away and find another candidate.”

“The final thing,” Evans says that he looks for, “once I have determined competency, once I know it’s a good cultural fit, is ‘can I afford them?’.” However, unlike in a lot of companies when it comes to salary discussions, Evans is clear about one thing — “I do not negotiate salaries. I ask the person ‘what do you need?’ I expect that person to be honest with me and tell me the number they need.” Then regardless of what that number is, “if it fits within my budget and it’s a reasonable price… then I say okay. I don’t come back with a counter offer. I don’t negotiate this at all because my feeling is… if they’re being honest with me then they’re going to tell me what they need to be happy with this. I don’t mind side projects, but I don’t want people to have to do side projects to make ends meet. Quite honestly, if they’re not being honest with me on their salary needs, I’m probably not going to want them on my team to begin with because they’re not being honest with me, period.”

“For most companies these days, their in-house development team is actually what drives the company,” says Evans. They’re the ones that “build the products that the company sells, or makes it possible for the companies to sell. So, while I’m never an advocate for setting developers up on a pedestal and saying we need to treat them like Demigods, I do think you have to respect the fact that you have to treat them differently. You cannot just say, ‘we have a cookie cutter, this is how we treat people’, Developers have different needs,” Evans says. “If I start a job and they hand me a laptop that has been used by three other people and I have to figure out how to make things work, then that’s a smell test that doesn’t pass. Companies have to understand that you’ve got to invest in good tools for developers.”

But how can you compete for top talent when Google and Facebook are offering top salaries with great perks? Evans suggests that you instead compete on respect. “I understand the mentality of free lunches and dry cleaning and all of this. Those exist so the company can keep the developer’s butt in their seat longer, and they exist for no other reason. It’s just a way to keep that developer on campus, focused on the job, for as long as possible.” Whereas, “if a small company builds a culture of respect, where they respect the developer, they understand that their job is a portion of their life and that their job is not their whole life, then you can attract better developers than companies that have the free lunches, dry cleaning, etc.”

The best way that you can show developers respect is to respect their time, says Evans. “I practice what’s called Servant Leadership. It was not unusual for me, when I was running teams, to first thing in the morning, brew up a huge pot of coffee and walk around to each of my developers around 9 am and refresh their coffee… this was just my way of saying my job is to hire good people and get out of the way and to make sure they have everything they need. My job is to serve them and also be what I call the ‘poop shield’. Any poop that comes in from above, my job is to keep it off my team. If a manager needs a meeting with somebody on my team, I’ll go. I will sit in that meeting,” explains Evans.

Ultimately, Evans says, you just need to “treat developers with respect, and understand that they have lives, and the main point of their lives is not to build you the next ‘Uber for Penguins’. You don’t have to put them on a pedestal, but they aren’t galley slaves either. You hire good people, you treat them with respect, you give them the tools that they need and let them do their job. That is the secret to a happy, productive, and awesome development team.”

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More Effective Code Reviews

Derek Prior is a Developer at , where they have a strong code review culture. In this interview, Derek shares the benefits of code reviews and the essential elements he thinks you need to make them effective.

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When it comes to the benefits of code review “everybody’s natural reaction is to say that they catch bugs. That is true. If I have code reviewed that’s going to have fewer bugs than code that isn’t reviewed. But I think that that puts too much importance on the ‘finding bugs’ part,” says Prior. “It’s much more helpful to focus on the cultural benefits of code reviews,” which for him are many. From “sharing knowledge with each other, or keeping up with what everybody’s doing” to “knowing what’s going on in that other part of the code base and finding a really interesting alternative solution to a problem that they hadn’t thought of.”

For Prior, the benefits of Code Review go way beyond simply defect finding — “finding defects is actually, frankly, really hard. A lot of times I’ll talk to people about code reviews, and they’ll say, ‘well we did code reviews, but we still had all these bugs’. But they’re not going to catch all the bugs. You’re looking at the diff, and to know exactly how that’s really going to impact your system, you have to know the entire system”. So whilst “code review is great for defect finding, it’s not a panacea. Instead, I think it’s much more helpful to focus on the cultural benefits of code reviews”, says Prior.

One way to make sure that once you get started with code reviews, you stick with them is to “take a really, lightweight approach to it,” recommends Prior. For instance, “when I finish up a PR, I will paste it into Slack, or whatever. We’ll paste that in and say, ‘Can I get a review for this please?’ and generally, that’s enough, with the way we work, to get your code reviewed within the next few hours,” Prior says.

A fast turn around on code reviews is important, and it doesn’t have to be burdensome to stay on top of them. Prior suggests that there are in fact “a lot of natural breaks throughout your day that you can work these in”. “For me, I come in in the morning” and catch up on any code reviews from overnight. “Then, right before lunch, or in the afternoon, if I’m going to take a coffee break… I’ll look then”. “There’s plenty of times I find, that I can just work these in naturally. There’s no need to schedule them. I’ve worked with teams that try to schedule them, or try to say, ‘This person is going to be the one, that’s going to be chiefly doing code reviews this week’, and I’ve never seen that work particularly well”.

Instead, you just need to “keep it lightweight and friendly,” says Prior. “The biggest thing that makes this work is, keeping small, discrete pull requests, that are going to be much more easily reviewed if you provide some excellent context. That’s the ‘why’ you’re making this change, not necessarily the ‘what’”. But “ultimately, the big secret to this”, confesses Prior, “is that most of these code reviews only take me five minutes. It’s not a big commitment.”

“Part of what I think makes code review so great, is that it’s a great place to have a technical discussion about your actual software. Rather than in the abstract,” says Prior. He doesn’t subscribe to the idea of using a checklist or specific items, suggesting a more relaxed approach — “just look at things that interest you about a change”. “Maybe you just got finished reading this great book on design patterns. That’s valuable. You’re going to teach somebody something. Or maybe you’re really interested in web security… or accessibility.” For me, says Prior “I harp on naming a lot… I look for test coverage.” Whatever it is, so long as you have “a good blend on your team, of people who are interested in different things” then you “can all learn from each other.”

“The number one thing is context,” says Prior. “When you’re submitting a pull request, you’ve been working on this thing for four hours, or eight hours, or two days, or sometimes even a week, or whatever the case may be. You have a lot of context built up in your head. Some things seem really obvious to you at this point”. The thing to remember though is that “to the person reviewing it, they weren’t there… they don’t have that context”. “It really helps if you’ve been making several small commits along the way, where you’re describing what was in your head,” but regardless, “as you prepare the change… make sure you give a nice description of everything.”

This description should answer the question “Why are we changing it?,” says Prior. Other considerations are “why is this the best solution? What other solutions did you consider? What problems did you run into? Is there an area of the code you’re really unsure about?” These will all “help you get a much better review, by setting up everybody else to be on the same page as you”, Prior says.

Prior warns that “when code reviews aren’t done particularly well, or are overly critical, they can lead to resentment among the team”. One thing that you must be aware of though is that written communication is prone to negativity bias, says Prior. “If I’m talking to you and I give you some technical feedback, and I say, ‘Oh, why didn’t you use this pattern here’, you’re going to perceive that in one way. But if I say that same exact thing written down, it comes off as more harsh. You’re going to perceive that more negatively. It’s much more subject to your particular mood. I can’t influence it with the way I say something. It’s just a fact that, the same feedback written, is going to be perceived more negatively”. So this is something that should be considered in code review too.

Prior recommends an excellent way around this is to “give feedback in a manner that’s more of a conversation. What I like to do is ask questions… Instead of saying, ‘extract the service object here to reduce some of this duplication’, I would say, ‘hey, what do you think about extracting a service object here, to eliminate this duplication?’ They’re very similar comments, but now I’m opening it up to a conversation, by asking you a question”. Another suggestion Prior makes is “clarifying how strongly you feel about a piece of feedback.”

Nevertheless, from time to time conflict will still occur. But for Prior, “having conflict in your code reviews like this, is actually really beneficial… as long as they’re the right types of conflict and nobody feels bad about them afterwards. If you’re agreeing with your teammates all the time, and nothing interesting is happening in your code reviews, you basically have a monoculture. You want everybody bringing their own experiences, and their own expertise, and sometimes those are going to clash with each other”. But if you can “handle those conflicts properly”, says Prior, then that’s “how everybody on the team is going to learn.”

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We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers (and how to fix it)

We typically don’t get trained how to interview, and we’ve all experienced the haphazard approaches of those new to it — poor organization, repeated questions, fizz-buzz… In this interview, , Lead Software Engineer at LivingSocial, tells us how to run interview days, the types of questions to ask, how else we can evaluate technical candidates and what to do after the interview.

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“I like to think of my software teams as little ecosystems, or tiny arcologies that exist in a bottle. They’re not entirely a closed environment, and like any ecosystem anytime you introduce anything new to that realm there’s going to be changes… Any time you hire somebody, you’re changing that ecosystem,” says Miller. “A lot of teams and companies don’t do a really great job of understanding that”.

As a result, one mistake all too many of us make according to Miller, is just “hiring from our friend networks. The friend network is such an important part of how we get jobs, but it also tends to reinforce our monocultures. We tend to be friends with people who are mostly like us, and so those are the people that we’re going to be recommending, and so those are the ones that get hired.” But, “it’s important to have some diversity… and not just the diversity we talk about in terms of gender or ethnicity or race, but age, class, looking at people’s technical backgrounds, do they come out of CS programs versus being self-taught or a boot camp? Industry backgrounds… Were they at startups versus large enterprise companies, or somewhere in between? All those pieces of diversity are going to be influential and improve the health of the ecosystem of your team.”

It’s important to consider each team in this wider context. As Miller explains, “in soccer, they say, ‘run to where the ball will be, rather than where the ball is’” and we all need to hire like that as well. You can start by having “early conversations about who you need to hire, and what you want to look for, what sort of energy and person do you want to add to your team, to influence it into a good direction and then go to those people, find them, whether it be through meetups, or user-groups… and not just your immediate friend network.”

When it comes to interviewing technical candidates, Miller suggests that you start by “splitting up the interview into topics” and then working out “the questions you’re going to ask” about that topic. However, it’s important that “you’re going to consistently ask these to all of your candidates”. It may feel “a little bit like reading a script, but it really lets you compare apples to apples as much as possible,” says Miller.

Another thing she recommends is that, if there are multiple people involved in interviewing a candidate and let’s says “you’re hiring for a front-end developer, you should have one person ask about JavaScript. You should have one person ask about browser interaction, or working with designers. Just split up the interview so that you’re not asking the same questions over and over again”. This helps because it means you’re able “to get really solid signal on a person’s skill sets, what they’re comfortable with, and what their concerns are,” explains Miller.

So what are good types of questions that we should be asking? Miller suggests that we “focus on questions about decisions that they’ve made, what choices have they made, and what choices would they make again in the future?” You want to understand whether “they’re reflective about mistakes that they’ve made. Is a candidate looking for opportunities to improve, and how do they actually go about it?”

Then you also want to get a feel for whether “they make plans for themselves, like how they would improve a certain skill set, whether that be a technical skill set or a more soft-skill set, for example, management, or project shepherding for example. Those are the kinds of questions that I think really get you at the heart of, not necessarily what somebody knows, but what they’re capable of.”

“I’m not a big fan of whiteboarding,” says Miller. “I think that’s something that we just automatically do, and we don’t think about what questions we are trying to answer by asking a candidate to solve a problem”. Instead, she recommends “pairing on projects, like actually working with somebody. It doesn’t have to be a formal or traditional pair-programming situation with one computer and two people, talking through the technical choices that they would be making as they programmed on something”.

Miller explains that “at LivingSocial, we do a code challenge… but as a launching pad to having a discussion with a candidate.” Then as they’re undertaking that exercise you can ask questions, like “why did you choose this technique? How would you do it better? What if we sat down and refactored? That’s one really good way to get to the heart of why they are making the decisions they’ve made.”

Another approach Miller suggests is “asking the employee to explain something to me, or teach something to me”. This is great for understanding “how well they communicate about something that they’re a local expert in but their intended audience is not. Could they then go off and learn a new framework, or go have a meeting with, perhaps, a stakeholder, or a client, and come back and explain what the actual requirements are to me, to distil down what I need to know?” After all, Miller says that “communication is such a big part of what we do in this job, testing for that essential skill in a really clear and explicit way can be really useful and get you a really good signal about who that candidate is and how they’re going to fit into your organization.”

“Once you’re done with your little section of the interview, you should immediately go back to your desk and not get back to work, but write down what your impressions were. What were the pros and cons, the bullet points, and find something good about the candidate and something not-so-good about the candidate, something that you wish they did have. Don’t pass this feedback back to the group but pass it back to a central person, like the hiring manager, so you’re not coloring the impressions of other people.”

For Miller, this immediate but individual feedback is important to capture so that “when you get back into that room with everybody else, whether it’s virtual or real, to really discuss your opinions… you can’t be swayed by the impressions of somebody else. For example, if you were supposed to interview them about JavaScript, and the senior JavaScript person, who’s got twenty years of experience in JavaScript, just really did not like that person, how would that color your opinion if you had to give it in that moment? If you wrote it down previously, no, this person really is good at JavaScript, then you’ve captured that honestly and you can really give honest feedback.”

When it comes to measuring and improving your hiring process, Miller says that “it’s really hard to look at who you hire and decide whether you have a good or bad process”. Instead, she recommends taking a “look at who you don’t hire. You can look at that in terms of what were the false negatives? Did we bounce this person out of the process for a specific reason and then it turns out that that reason wasn’t good, based on where they ended up going to work?” For developers in particular, “it’s really easy to LinkedIn stalk people, and peek into their GitHub profiles… to see what they’re doing a few months later. It can be really useful to four, five, or six months down the road, go back and look at the candidates that you passed over and see what they’re doing.”

Another aspect that Miller thinks you should consider is “understanding what your pipeline of candidates consists of. At each step, you have a certain amount of leakage, because people just simply don’t make it through the process or they abandon the process. How many people are you losing at each step, and is there one step that you’re losing a lot of people at? Maybe you need to refine that step, remove it, or move it earlier or later in the process based on what your organizational needs are. I think it’s also important to look at who you’re losing as well. Are you losing junior developers at a step that you really don’t want to be losing them at? Are you losing more diverse candidates? Are more women abandoning your process at a certain step than men are, and understanding, or questioning at least, your process to see, is that a problem? Can we fix it? How do we fix it?”

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How to Onboard Software Engineers

, an independent Product Engineer, provides us with advice about onboarding new developers. In this interview, she covers the benefits of onboarding, its essential elements, areas to focus on when getting started and common mistakes made.

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here are 2 ways to get great engineers at your company. You can steal them or you can make them.” says Heddleston. “In this day and age, you’d probably better have outlets for both”, but you should at least have “a sustainable program of bringing on junior engineers”.

“We spend a huge amount of money recruiting and sourcing engineers” and then “we pay them huge sums of money to work” for us. But all too often when it comes to onboarding these valuable engineers, the approach is just — “you’ll figure it out,” says Heddleston.

The result is that “we’re underutilizing people, which is expensive for companies, and people are unhappy when they aren’t fulfilling their potential and that can lead to attrition”. The answer to this problem for Heddleston is onboarding. “The return on investment is incredible… you get so much more out of employees who are happy and productive and feel integrated into the team.”

“The goal with onboarding is what I call reliable independence”, says Heddleston. This is when “someone is able to reliably and independently build software on your team. For someone who is really senior, that might take 2 weeks… for someone really junior, that might take more like 6 months.”

However, according to Heddleston, the time-frame for reliable independence “varies hugely depending on the size of the company and the quality of their internal tools.” A common issue among fast-growing startups, for instance, is that “everyone has to come in and manually set up everything… and that’s just going to bottleneck your company.” So before you even start to think about an onboarding program, first take stock of your tools. Heddleston recommends that new hires “shouldn’t spend a lot of time having to do all these installations that you do once and that have no learning value”.

Once your tooling is sorted, “the second thing is to put together a Trello board and come up with some goals of what you want to see. You can section it basically by the rough seniority level of someone coming in: senior, mid-level, junior”. This helps because “someone who is junior is going to need a little bit more hands-on attention and someone who is senior is probably going to want freedom earlier. Then just set up goals of what you want to see them doing in the first day, the first week, the first month.”

So an example goal that Heddleston suggests is “being able to ship something on the first day”. “This new engineer comes onboard and in their first day, they actually push something to production. Even if it’s just a small bug fix or… some config files that you might need for something, it’s a really nice thing to feel like you can contribute on your first day.”

Beyond that, goals should fall into what Heddleston says are the “3 major categories that people need to develop in order to become reliably independent. They’re each about a third of what someone needs to know. We focus a lot on technical knowledge… but another third is company structure, the internal tools that you have, the way that you build, the way that your code is set up.” The final third “is personal development, things like confidence, the ability to research problems, the ability to debug independently and judgment.”

Your program should also take into account the fact that “people are going to come in stronger in different categories,” says Heddleston. “Everyone is going to come in not knowing that much about your internal company structure, but some people might have more confidence, more debugging skills. Some people might know a lot more about the technologies that you use”. So the goals should be flexible and focus on “filling in the gaps in the areas that they aren’t as strong in.”

Who is involved in onboarding new hires is often an area where mistakes are made. According to Heddleston, often “the common first approach to onboarding is to place new employees with really senior mentors, but mentoring is actually really hard. It’s a lot like teaching in the sense that it’s very emotionally draining.” What happens then is that you can “burn out all your senior mentors”. So instead she recommends that you “spread out the load, and instead of pairing every junior who comes in with a super senior engineer, you pair them with the last people who joined”. Heddleston says this is a much better approach anyway, because “the best person to teach something is usually the last person who did it.”

What’s more “really senior people are not necessarily that great at teaching junior people. They’ve forgotten what it was like to learn things for the first time so it can be really painful. It’s nice to have the intermediate people turning around and teaching because they grow a lot.”

Regardless of who is involved, one pre-requisite that Heddleston recommends is “executive level sign-off” — “there’s nothing worse at a company than fighting a Director of Engineering” who doesn’t believe in the goal.

When setting goals you should understand that “one of the tenets of expertise is the ability to recognize boundaries and scope really well. Whereas, one of the tenets of being a beginner is that you cannot recognize boundaries and you are unable to scope problems”. So Heddleston cautions against making the mistake of “expecting a junior engineer to be really good at scoping a feature. That’s one of the skills that they have to learn. Whatever you give them to do, just scope it. Then let them go play. Give them a feature that’s really well defined, that has a clear area where they’re working on and then let them go and fumble around with it.”

“The final thing for junior engineers, and beginners, in general, is helping to bolster confidence,” says Heddleston. “People think that confidence follows skills, but it’s usually the other way around where skills follow confidence. If someone feels good about what they’re doing, they’re more likely to explore it and ask questions and to believe that they’re able to solve the problem”.

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From Technical Hiring to Culture Fit

discusses technical hiring and the importance of culture fit. She covers everything from identifying the important parts of your culture, to the essential steps in technical hiring, and the best questions to ask technical candidates.*

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“Cultural fit will trump all technical skills,” says Rothman. When we think about what we’re looking for in a technical candidate, “we often think about this laundry list of technical skills that we need.” But that’s the wrong approach - “our ability to collaborate with each other or to problem solve together or alone… are the things that really matter,” says Rothman. She recommends a focus on cultural fit first, where culture is “not about Foosball. It’s not about the color of the walls. It’s not about the desks that you have. It’s about what you can and cannot say in the organization, how people treat each other, and what you reward. That’s the culture that you’re hiring into.”

To understand the key elements of your culture, Rothman suggests that you “look at a successful project or even a series of successful hires. What do they have in common? Did they problem solve together? Did they ask each other for help? Did they say, ‘we’re going to use this particular tool for this?’” So you can begin to understand your culture by considering “what success has looked like in the past,” says Rothman, and then thinking through the people you need to deliver that going forward.

When it comes to culture fit and diversity, Rothman says that “the biggest thing is to acknowledge that we are all human and we like people like ourselves.” But she says that we shouldn’t just “leave it at that” as “the best products come from diverse teams”. It’s all too easy to say “‘I’m only going to recruit from schools I went to or schools I know about and I’m only going to recruit from my little, tiny circle of friends’, but then “you’re never going to get the diversity that you want. You have to open up your recruiting, your sourcing, and say ‘where am I likely to find people, great people that I want?’”. Otherwise Rothman warns that we can be “insular in our hiring”, and suggests that “it’s time to expand horizons a little”.

When it comes to hiring for a new technical role, Rothman suggests starting by “doing an analysis of the problems that you want to solve with a new hire”. After all, “if you’re not clear on what the problems are, you’re not going to be able to solve those problems.” After that “do a job analysis,” this “is essential in understanding what you really want. What are the essential non-technical qualities, preferences, and skills and what are the essential technical skills?” However, she stresses that when it comes to this, “you really need to think about what’s essential versus what’s desirable.” You want to avoid ending up with a “shopping list of many, many technical skills.”

What’s more, according to Rothman, “the idea that people can only learn one language and we have to have this emphasis on ‘if they don’t have three years of Ruby’ or something, then we cannot hire them. That’s just nuts.” Your time is better spent “really thinking about what kind of people do I want in this role”.

Then you can move on to writing “a job description from the job analysis. You can develop your phone-screening questions. You can decide if you want an audition first, second or third, and you can set up the interviewing”. But regardless of what you do, Rothman cautions, you should “always check references.”

“I really like behavior-description questions,” says Rothman. An example being something like, “tell me about a time that you had to choose between these tools”. In that example Rothman says it’s important to get the candidate to “tell you about the project, and tell you about the context. That actually gets you the detail that you need.”

She also recommends avoiding “hypothetical questions, or you asking irrelevant questions like, ‘tell me about your weaknesses.’” Instead, Rothman suggests a better question would focus on “giving me an example of, or telling me about a time when” as these will give you “a really great foundation for a conversation.” She remarks that she’s also received “very surprising answers and a lot more insight into what the person can do” by asking the question “what have I not asked you yet?”

Beyond questions, Rothman says — “I like auditions also. That’s where you actually see people doing the work”. They don’t have to be very long, “twenty-minute auditions” work well, but “if you’re hiring technical people, watch them do the work and that’s all you need to know”.

Finally, once you’ve actually hired someone, Rothman says that “the first day is so, so important.” However, “I cannot tell you how many people I know who don’t have a desk on their first day, don’t have a computer, don’t have a login, don’t have a password. There is no way for them to contribute.” So Rothman suggests having a checklist of those little things to get people started.

“The other thing I really like is this buddy system. The team has some level of productivity. When you have a new person, the productivity level dips because that person’s asking questions, they don’t know what to do.” So “one of the things you can do is have a buddy system where you have someone whose job it is to shepherd this person through the next couple of weeks or a month”. It’s basically their job to “tell the new hire where the bathrooms are, how do I compile, where do people go for lunch.”

Finally, she also likes “what Arlo Belshee calls ‘promiscuous pairing’”. That’s where you “pair with somebody for twenty minutes or forty-five minutes… and then I go and pair with somebody else”. This is a great way to “learn how everybody uses the tools and technology and… to learn that really, really fast.”

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Selecting Software Development Metrics

is a consultant specializing in improving software development and delivery methods. We spoke to him about software development metrics — the factors to consider when selecting metrics, examples of useful metrics as well as common mistakes made in applying them.*

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“I don’t actually find metrics to be an interesting topic,” says Nicolette. “But I think it is a necessary thing. It’s part of the necessary overhead for delivering. If we can detect emerging delivery risks early, then we can deal with them. If we don’t discover them until late, then we’re just blindsided and projects can fail”.

Through his work Nicolette has worked with countless technical managers, but he’s observed that “a lot of managers, team leads and people like that, don’t really know what to measure”. What usually happens is that “when people adopt a new process or method”, usually one of two things happens, says Nicolette. Either, they’re “only using the process in name only, or they’re trying to use it but they’re not used to it yet, and the metrics don’t quite work.” Or despite changing methods, they continue to measure in the same way — “people tend to use the measurements that they’re accustomed to. They’ve always measured in a certain way, now they’re adopting a new process. They keep measuring the same things as before.” So the metrics don’t quite match the process and they wrongly interpret a problem with the process itself.

Another common mistake Nicolette has noticed with development metrics, is that “people either overlook or underestimate the effects of measurement on behavior. We can be measuring something for some objective reason, but it causes people to behave differently because they’re afraid” that it will negatively impact their “performance review.” So Nicolette says, “I think we have to be very conscious of that. We don’t want to drive undesired behaviors because we’re measuring things a certain way. That not only breaks morale, but it also makes the measurements kind of useless too when they’re not real.”

Nicolette suggests that when it comes to metrics, all we really need to do is “look at the way work actually flows in your organization and measure that.” Now, of course, that’s easier said than done. But he asserts that there are really just “three factors to judge which metrics are appropriate.”

“The first factor is the approach to delivery,” says Nicolette. There’s traditional, which is where you “try to identify all the risks in advance… lay out a master plan, and you follow that plan.” Or there’s another type, adaptive, where “you start with a direction and an idea of how to proceed. Then you solicit feedback frequently so you can make course corrections.” According to Nicolette, the delivery type, “traditional versus adaptive… has the biggest impact on which metrics will work.”

Nicolette says that “the second factor to look at is the process model.” “Nobody does anything in a pure way, but if you boil it down I think there are basically four reference models we can consider. One is linear… the canonical steps that we go through from requirements through to support. He says that “the next one would be iterative, in which you revisit the requirements multiple times and do something with them. The third one that I identify is time-boxed. It’s really popular nowadays with processes like Scrum and so on. The fourth one is a continuous flow. This is popular now with the Kanban method, and it’s also being adapted into Scrum teams quite a lot. And it’s where we’re really interested in keeping the work moving smoothly.”

But Nicolette is a pragmatist and knows that any “real process is going to be a hybrid of these, but it’s been my observation that any real process will lean more toward one of those models than the others, and that’ll give us some hints about what kind of metrics will fit that situation,” he says.

Lastly, the third factor Nicolette says impacts which metrics are relevant “is whether you’re doing discrete projects or continuous delivery”. “I look at those three factors, and based on that you can come up with a pretty good starter set of things to measure, and then you can adapt as you go from there.”

To understand how these factors can be applied, here are some example scenarios, detailing the relevant metrics.

Scenario: An agile team, working in short sprints, who are struggling to ship a new product.

Nicolette says, that “if they’re using Scrum basically correctly, they could probably depend on the canonical metrics that go with that, like velocity and your burn chart. You might look for hangover, that’s incomplete work at the end of the sprint. You might look for a lot of variation in story size, when you finish a story in one day and the next story takes eight days.” Interestingly, “you can always use lean-based metrics because they’re not really dependent on the process model… so they could look at the mean cycle times as well as the variation in cycle times and get some hints about where to go from root-cause analysis. Metrics don’t tell you what’s wrong, but they can raise a flag,” says Nicolette.

Scenario: A hybrid waterfall-agile team working on a long-term project, wanting to know what’s possible to deliver by a certain date.

“To know what’s possible to deliver you can use a burn chart, burn up or burn down as you prefer,” suggests Nicolette. This would help them see “according to their velocity, how much scope they can deliver by a given date. Conversely, you could see by what date approximately they could deliver a given amount of scope. It depends on what’s flexible. In this kind of a project, usually neither is flexible, but at least you can get an early warning of delivery risk.”

“One thing that might surprise some people,” says Nicolette, “is the idea that agile methods can be used with traditional development. We need to decouple the word ‘agile’ from ‘adaptive’ because quite often it is used in a traditional context.”

Scenario: A team wanting to optimize their working practices to stay on top of a bug queue.

Typically “you want to be somewhat predictable in your service time,” says Nicolette, “so that when a bug report comes in people have an idea of when they can expect to see it fixed.” To be able to calculate this “you can use empirical information from past performance with fixing bugs, and your mean cycle time will give you approximately how long it takes to fix one.”

However, “I like to use the Kanban method for these kinds of teams because it defines classes of service. You’ll find that every type of bug doesn’t take the same amount of time to fix,” cautions Nicolette. So “based on your history, pick out different categories. You can identify the characteristics of particular kinds of bug reports that tend to fall together, and you can track cycle times differently for each of those classes of service.”

Scenario: A CTO who wants to monitor how teams are performing and ensure code is of high quality.

Nicolette recommends in order to measure “how the teams are performing, you need measurements that are comparable across teams and comparable across projects.” To to this end, he recommends “tracking throughput, cycle time” and “process cycle efficiency” as “those roll up nicely.” However, he warns that “some other metrics don’t roll up so well” — “like agile metrics, particularly velocity, which is really different for each team”.

“The other question about code quality, I think should be a team responsibility. Then they can use metrics, but they don’t need to report them outside of the team. Usually, things that they can get out of static code analysis tools will help them spot potential quality issues, but I wouldn’t share very detailed things like static code analysis… outside the team, because then team members will feel like they’re going to get judged on that and they’ll start gaming the numbers.”

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Become the Leader Your Engineers Need

*Oren Ellenbogen is the author of ‘Leading Snowflakes’, and in this interview, he discusses some important tips for those moving into Developer team leadership. Read more interviews with some of the world’s best developers on our *blog or follow us on Twitter.

“I would definitely advise you to earn your teammates’ trust first,” begins Ellenbogen. “If you want them to follow your authority as a manager, you have to make sure you know how to build the trust of others, starting with your teammates. Figure out a way to earn their trust - maybe it’s your technical skills, maybe it’s your business understanding, maybe it’s a mix of everything. But don’t take it for granted and think that just because you have a title, that everyone should do what you say.”

With your credibility established, Ellenbogen suggests you then “clear the path to get more feedback”. He explains that “as engineers we have the luxury of a really fast feedback cycle. We have code review, we can deploy code and see tests running, and run it in production.” But we don’t have such established mechanisms in management decision making. However, Ellenbogen says that this should not stop you — “great engineering management develop good ways to bring in feedback, rather than just sitting in the dark and feeling alone.”

“A trick that has really worked well for me”, says Ellenbogen, is code reviewing management decisions. Ellenbogen took “the concept of code review and applied it to management.” By this he explains that he would “capture one or two of the dilemmas that I had during the day” and then he would ask some trusted colleagues “what they would do in this situation”. What he found was that by “just having a discussion around the dilemmas you have, you can really open up the way you are thinking,” explains Ellenbogen.

Another key aspect for any engineering leader is “to know the business inside out,” says Ellenbogen. “I know there are many engineers and engineering managers that feel that business is not our job — it’s the sales guys, it’s the marketing guys… but you can spend many, many days at the office writing software just to find out that nobody uses it.” So if you want to do what’s in the best interests of your team, then figure out the business so you can “understand the risks, understand the current capabilities that will help your business scale and how you can convey the message to your teammates,” suggests Ellenbogen.

A concern for many considering a move into management is whether they still get to code. But Ellenbogen suggests that at least at first, “I would advise you focus on feeling comfortable with your role as an engineering manager.” Coding is a safe activity for any developer, so “if you are finding yourself always shutting down and getting back to writing code all the time, that is kind of a red flag. That means you should probably just avoid writing code and focus more on the people aspect, or on the business aspect, and stop writing code,” says Ellenbogen. “You have to feel like your teammates are being productive and you are not being called on to save the day. Once you are feeling more comfortable with that, then you can go back to writing code.”

But it is important that you do still write code in the long-term, says Ellenbogen. At the very least you want “to keep your technical skills at a high level” so that you can “make sure you are a part of the conversation when your teammates need you”. When you do so, “focus on fixing bugs, dealing with nasty performance issues, reducing technical debt… or work on tools that will increase the productivity of your teammates.” But regardless of what you do, “you should avoid being on the critical path.” Interruptions are common and you don’t want to be your team’s bottleneck.

To get the best out of your team, sometimes it’s necessary to push members out of their comfort zones. But what’s the best way to go about this? “Start by setting an example that people can emotionally connect with,” advises Ellenbogen. “I shared my struggles with the team… I was just honest with my teammates… but later on when I talked with them about pushing them out of their comfort zone, just being able to relate to the way that I have been honest about my struggles just made the conversation a lot easier.”

Beyond that, Ellenbogen suggests that you provide “examples from inside the organization so they can see how it could be. For example, if I want to push someone out of their comfort zone regarding the way they are communicating their progress, I would forward emails from other teammates or other teams in the organization who are doing a brilliant job at it,” explains Ellenbogen. They can then pick a few things up from these and we can then “talk about it next time in our one-on-one and have a discussion around that.”

“Often engineering managers try to own everything,” says Ellenbogen. “They try to own the people aspect, try to own technical aspects, strategy, business”. There’s just one problem with this approach — it doesn’t scale. So what you must do, according to Ellenbogen, is “leverage the fact that you have great people working with you”. He recommends that you delegate ownership of key areas like code quality, to team members with a passion for them. Regardless, “I make sure that every time someone comes to me and says, ‘hey, we have a problem that we need to fix’, I write it down. I never ignore it,” says Ellenbogen. Then “I make sure we pick a few things we want to work at every couple of weeks or every month… so the team feels like things are not being ignored.”

Finally, a key part of the success of any team isn’t just individual team brilliance, but your ability to work well as part of the wider organization. To this end, Ellenbogen suggests that a great first step is to “share your plan for the next few months or the next few weeks with your peers”. “It might sound obvious,” says Ellenbogen, “but from my experience, very few do it.” He suggests that you “try to share as much as you can with others so they can understand what’s the plan and where you are heading.” Then follow this up by “asking for their opinion” and getting feedback from their perspective. Then “if things change, and that is alright, make sure that you keep everyone in the loop.”

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Growing Self-organizing Software Teams

, author of ‘Notes to a Software Team Leader’, discusses how you grow self-organizing software teams. He covers how to develop team members, different phases of leadership, and some common mistakes made by new tech leads.

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Often developers can be reluctant to put themselves forward for leadership roles, but Osherove says that whilst it can be scary, “it’s not something that should block you”. In fact, if you want things to change, then you should actively seek it out. “Remember all those things that you’ve always wanted your manager or leader to do? You can actually get to do them… It’s a great chance to change the environment, and not just bitch about it,” says Osherove

In his book, Osherove explains that “a team leader grows the people on their team,” and he thinks that this should be the key thing driving your behavior as a lead. “It’s almost required,” says Osherove. “If you don’t do it, you’re basically stopping in the same place and you’re not actually changing anything”. Furthermore, “if you want the team to do unit testing or test-driven development, but the team itself thinks it’s not such a great idea, how do you actually get them to do it without growing them in the right direction?”.

“Another thing that happens is that a lot of teams are actually not in a position where they can actually make good decisions,” says Osherove. So “as a leader, you are the bottleneck. They come to you with every little decision”, but “what we want is for a team to grow their skills so they can handle the current reality that they’re in”.

Osherove says you should ask yourself “are you the bus factor? In other words, if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, could the team continue to function without you? If the answer is no, then you don’t really have a team. What you have is a bunch of people to help you”.

To gauge whether you’re moving in the right direction with this, each week ask yourself whether “the team need me more or less than last week? If they need me less, if I make myself less needed, if I remove myself from the equation, not just by disappearing but by enabling the team to do the things that I know how to do, then I’ve basically made them better”.

In Osherove’s view, there are three main phases of leadership. There’s “survival mode, where you don’t have time to learn, you don’t have time except only to react; learning mode, where you’re supposed to do things and fail and learn and do things slower; and self-organization, where the team can handle their situation without requiring the leader”.

Osherove explains that “you know you’re in survival mode if you don’t have any time to do the things that you would like to do, and you keep reacting instead of planning. Even if you have time to send people on a two-day course, it doesn’t mean that you have time to implement what they learn. If you don’t have time to do slow practice, you’re in survival mode.”

Of course, life is rarely as simple as being in a specific binary state. But Osherove explains that “it could be that a part of the team is in survival mode and a part of the team is self-organizing. If you have a large enough team, you might start to get cliques where some people are doing okay, whilst some people are definitely buried deep”. But “the way I see it is that it always hunkers down to the lowest common denominator. That means that if a part of the team is in survival mode, your team is in survival mode”.

“I think one of the most common mistakes,” says Osherove, “is that they tell people what they want to hear instead of telling them what the reality is, because they’re really scared and they want to make a good impression”. But, “we get paid to do good work and to say if there’s a problem,” although it really “takes a while to learn that.”

Another common mistake that Osherove highlights is not considering the mode their team is in, and the appropriate phase of leadership to apply. For example, “in learning mode, you definitely want to be a coach. You want to teach people. You want to give them time to do it. In survival mode, you usually want to be command-control. You don’t want to start coaching. You don’t have time to coach. You have to get people out of survival mode and into learning mode. If you mix those things up, you have a problem. Suddenly, you’re not really helping the situation. Similarly, if you have a self-organizing team that already knows how to work, already knows how to do something, and you treat them as if they’re in survival mode with micromanagement and command-and-control, you’re going to lose your team very, very quickly.”

The particularly difficult part though, says Osherove, is that “the mode can change from day to day. You have a new project, and suddenly you are back in survival mode.”

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How We Combat Imposter Syndrome

At Fog Creek we’ve always put a top priority on hiring people who get things done, which means we’re a company that welcomes a lot of generalists. We hire capable people, but we don’t expect our new employees will come in knowing how to do everything their jobs will require right off the bat. Our goal is to give our new employees a full 3 months of room to spend on just learning.

But giving new employees this flexibility can also increase one unintended consequence: imposter syndrome.

It makes sense, right? You get this amazing job at this really forward thinking company, even though you might not be an expert at every detail of every subject mentioned in the job listing. It’s stressful!

Because we believe strongly that a good quality of life and an environment that builds happiness and productivity are integral to our success, we have to combat this imposter syndrome. We like to do it early and often during an employee’s first 90 days at Fog Creek. We’ve got a few methods.

During a new employee’s first week we lay it out flat: don’t panic! It’s written as part of our social rules (which are heavily influenced by our friends at The Recurse Center, formerly Hacker School) and it’s required reading for everyone’s first day at Fog Creek. Here’s the key piece:

Telling someone not to worry doesn’t do the trick alone. At Fog Creek we give all of our new employees continuous feedback during their first 3 months to make sure their goals and the goals of their team are aligned. At 30, 60 and 90 days we do a check in with all of our new employees. A few days before we ask them to prepare answers to the following:

We ask each new employee’s team lead to answer the same questions, then we go over the answers to make sure they’re in alignment. And we fix any bugs that we identify.

How does this help combat imposter syndrome? It gives our new employees a concrete answer to that most nagging of questions — am I doing OK? Am I meeting the company’s needs and expectations?

The goal is simple: make sure everyone on our team feels confident and comfortable in their place at our company. If that sounds like something you want to get from your employer, maybe you should come join us at Fog Creek.

We noticed an interesting article yesterday:

Everyone Wants to Work at a Tech Company

At Fog Creek we definitely see people interested in working in tech — but at a different kind of environment. Tech doesn’t just mean “giant billion-dollar company”. Over the years we’ve had supremely talented team members join our scrappy shop after considering offers from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other tech giants. Some even worked at those companies first, and then chose to join us, growing to become senior members of our team.

So why would a developer get an offer from the biggest tech company in the world and still decide they’d rather work at Fog Creek? What we’ve found is that they love the fact that by working at Fog Creek, they can make an impact on the tech industry that is on par with our much larger compatriots, while working at a much more human, and humane, company. We make tools that nearly every coder uses daily, like Stack Overflow. We built Trello, and we created FogBugz, our stalwart suite of tools for making better software, which is running better than ever. We’ve got even more fun and innovative stuff coming, despite having a team small enough that we know the names of each other’s’ pets.

How do we do it? It’s pretty simple. We hire the most skilled, capable people, treat them with genuine respect, give them the means to succeed, and they create valuable products we’re proud to sell. That’s it. That’s the secret sauce. Well, it’s not really a secret. Maybe it’s just sauce.

We truly believe work should be rewarding and enjoyable — that’s why we all joined Fog Creek in the first place! If that sounds good to you, we’d love you to join us. Help us build the tools that will build the future.

Why We Don’t Offer Unlimited Vacation

At Fog Creek we’ve always tried to be generous with our time off policies. From parental leave to sick days to vacation, we believe in work life balance and we encourage our employees to take time off when they need it. But we don’t have unlimited vacation days.

**Here’s why: **the unlimited vacation day policy feels like a scam…and that’s because it is. Studies show it can lead to employees taking less time off because of the social pressure to work and the uncertainty about what’s appropriate.

The main issue with the unlimited vacation day policy is it puts the onus on the employees to decide how much time is appropriate to take off. It’s a loaded decision, one that comes with unspoken bias and judgements, especially if expectations aren’t clearly communicated. When people don’t know an exact policy, they’ll err on the side of trying not to get in trouble. For employees it can make taking vacation feel like a trap, rather than the stress relieving experience it should be. No good.

Instead, at Fog Creek, our vacation days accrue. All of our full time employees with anywhere up to 3 years of tenure get 20 vacation days, which is well above the national average. After the 3 year mark, we bump our employees up to 25 days.

Giving our employees a concrete and generous number of vacation days sends a clear message — we know you need time off! Your work life balance and mental health is as important to us as it is to you.

Not only do our vacation days roll over, we’re lenient about an employee going over by an extra day or two. Another important point: We don’t count our sick days towards vacation — if you’re sick, you’re sick, and you should stay home because you’re sick! Nobody should have to take a vacation day because a toddler in your kid’s preschool decided to share Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease with the class.

The goal of our vacation policy is straightforward, and it’s the same as ever benefit we offer our employees: we want to make sure unnecessary stressors don’t keep our team from living well. If that sounds like something you want to get from your employer, maybe you should come join us at Fog Creek.

Support & Continuous Learning

Support is a big word at Fog Creek. We support our products, we support our customers, and most importantly we support our employees.

One of the ways we support our staff is through our investment in continuous learning.

“I have the opportunity to learn something new every time I come to work. If there’s something I want to become an expert on, I will be given the room and the time” — Rachel Sharp, Fog Creek SysAdmin

We give each of our employees $3,500 a year and 3 paid vacation days to use to cover the cost of attending a conference — and that’s not just for coders or technical employees, that’s for everyone on our staff. When they return to the office (or to their remote office if that’s the case) we encourage our employees to share what they’ve learned with a write up or a tech talk. Our team members can even use their dev dollars to bring speakers to the office for workshops, and when they do, we triple the budget, since it’s benefitting so many people on the team.

Why do we go to these lengths to support our employees? For one it means we’re often able to promote from within. For example, members of our support team have gone on to become SysAdmins, Project Managers and Developers, and two of current Sr. Engineers started their careers at Fog Creek as interns in 2007 and 2008. And while we want everyone to stay at Fog Creek and do the best work of their careers, we also know that enhancing and improving our team’s skills has helped them go on to succeed later in other organizations as well.

On a philosophical level, we do it because we believe the employee/employer relationship should be reciprocal. Our job is not just to pay our employees with hopes that they, in return, will do what we say and make us look good. Rather we give our employees the tools they need to succeed at work and in their careers and in return they feel trusted and supported enough to come up with big ideas that we can then…you guess it…support!

It goes back to our core belief: We hire the most skilled, capable people, treat them with genuine respect, and give them the means to succeed. If that sounds like something you might be into, check our our open jobs!

The Perils of Hallway Decisions and 4 Ways to Banish Them

Suddenly you hear about a decision that directly impacts you but was made without your input, which means the decision was made without some key information. Or even if that’s not the case, you’re still left wondering exactly how and when the decision got made and before you know it, you’re stewing.

Hallway decisions such as these, when they happen occasionally, can be frustrating. When they happen regularly, they undermine an employee’s sense of agency and have a huge, negative impact on engagement and morale. In the long-term, they’re a surefire way to get people updating their CV, and looking out for what’s next.

Perhaps most worrying, though, is just how easy it is for hallway decision making to occur, even accidentally. They’re often the result of some impromptu meeting — perhaps you bump into someone in the hallway or whilst at lunch (For Rachel in Friends, it was during smoking breaks!) and you just get to talking. It can also be difficult to keep up with exactly who knows what about a topic that multiple employees are engaged in discussing.

For companies with remote teams, this is especially true. When you work remotely communication around decisions is all the more important, but also more difficult to get right. This is something we know at Fog Creek only too well — having staff spread across the world.

To guard against this happening, we’ve put in place measures that are designed to systemize communication around the decisions we make. Reducing the likelihood of accidental oversights in communication, helping us to improve transparency about decisions and allow for feedback as much as possible. There are 4 main ways we achieve this:

The Company Report board is a Trello board, which everyone in the company is subscribed to.

Designated people, usually team and project leads, provide regular updates about progress and changes. These updates aren’t about the day-to-day minutiae, but are deliberately brief, giving just the top-level detail so that it’s not overwhelming. Updates are fed into a channel in Slack too, so it’s easy to keep up to date.

We also hold a monthly all-hands, Town-Hall style meeting, imaginatively called “Town Hall”. For the most part, top management provides an overview of major activities happening around the organization but nominated team members also demo what they’ve been working on too. Such as showing off new features or prototypes of products. People are encouraged to ask questions, and the discussion about different points often continues on in the #townhall Slack channel afterward too. These meetings are recorded, so everyone can catch up on them even if they were out that day.

As a software company, specs (or functional specifications) have long been part of our product development culture. “No code without spec” is the mantra we’ve followed since before The Joel Test, so all product changes have one. These specs are shared with everybody within the company, and anyone can comment on them. Not everyone needs to provide feedback, but everyone from Sales to Support and Marketing as well as other Engineers, are encouraged to do so. After all, it’s far easier to fix up problems at the design stage, before you’ve begun coding. They’re kept on our internal Wiki as a historical record too.

People are requested to post notes to our #notes channel in Slack about any meeting they have that isn’t a one-to-one. It’s optional, but many do — providing a summary of what was discussed, why, as well any outcomes and points to revisit later.

These measures combine to improve people’s awareness of planning and problems the company is solving. By providing these simple, lightweight ways of communicating what we’re working on and thinking about, they help to ensure no-one is surprised by any announcement. They also provide a mechanism for folks to give feedback and make sure their input is considered before a decision has been made.

Of course, it can still happen from time to time — emails get missed, Slack updates get over-looked, or the detail provided was understood to mean something different. But, for the most part, they help us to maintain transparency and banish hallway decisions to the things we just hear about in comedy show re-runs.

Companies We Love

Obviously, if you want a great career in tech, our first choice is that you come work at Fog Creek. But we wanted to take a moment to do something unusual, and highlight a job listing from another organization: Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a really amazing non-profit with an inspiring mission to, “to provide a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” They started as a team of 1, and have grown to over 80 people, including one of our former colleagues who was among the first to join founder Salman Khan in his quest. Or, as they stated in their job listing:

We’re proud that working at Fog Creek is a credential that permanently upgrades the careers of everyone who comes through our doors. And that’s what we see when other organizations are proud to have our alumni on their teams.

We’re always inspired by companies like Khan that are actively engaged in the fight to make education and tech more inclusive and available to everyone, and see that work as directly connected to the values that our team members try to support every day. Khan Academy is worth a look from anybody who wants to learn, and if you’re looking to build your skills to succeed at Fog Creek or beyond, come give us a look.

What it means to not worry about healthcare.

At Fog Creek, we often discuss our values and policies because we’re really proud of them. Today we want to describe a real-world example of how our health and parental leave policies serve our employees to demonstrate what we mean.

Fog Creek’s parental leave is designed to implement one of our founding principles: we hire the most skilled, capable people and treat them like humans, with the utmost respect. One of our employees, Jacob, generously agreed to share his family’s story to illustrate the difference this makes.

Jacob is a senior member of our technical staff. He was a summer intern at Fog Creek in 2006, joined full time in 2007, left at the end of 2009 to work for another company, and then rejoined us remotely in the Spring of 2013. At the end of that year, Jacob and his wife were facing challenges having a baby. It would not be possible without medical intervention. Luckily, they had access to specialists who could help them.

During that unsure time, Fog Creek’s policy of providing truly comprehensive health care gave Jacob peace of mind. Our plan covers all our US based employees. The basic concept is: Your insurance is free. You pay nothing. You have no copayments, no deductible, you don’t pay for any doctor visits or prescriptions. It is by far the best health coverage deal you will find at any employer in America.

We’ve had this policy at Fog Creek for over 10 years. What we’ve learned is with that kind of coverage, employees like Jacob have an easier time navigating even the most fraught and challenging life experiences. Jacob put his faith in Fog Creek to make good on our promise of all inclusive health care, and we worked to show that faith was justified. A year later, Jacob and his wife Jennifer found out they were pregnant.

The next 9 months were full of check ups, genetic screenings, ultrasounds, and prenatal visits, all of which Fog Creek covered. When Jacob’s wife went into labor in January of this year, our health care let them focus on recovery without worrying about the cost of hospitalization. Jacob did not pay a single bill out of pocket and, in January, their beautiful son, Jackson, was born.

As a resident physician caring for sick patients in the hospital, Jacob’s wife does not have the time flexibility of an employee at Fog Creek. She and Jacob decided that he would be the primary caregiver of their newborn. At Fog Creek we give all new primary caregivers, including adoptive and foster parents, 12 weeks off at 100% pay (employees who are in their first year scale up from 3 weeks of leave at hire to the full 12 weeks). Combined with vacation and flex time, Jacob was able to spend the better part of 7 months taking care of his new baby.

Our policy had its intended effect of making a major life transition as easy as possible for our employees and their families. For Jennifer, going back to work was easier knowing Jacob would be with her son all day. For Jackson, Jacob thinks their time together made a huge difference on his early personality.

“If he’d only had 6 weeks or something it would have been different for sure.”

Many companies use well-intentioned but vague language to describe the benefits they offer, and the goals behind those benefits. We’re very grateful to Jacob for being brave enough to share his family’s story, with the hope of outlining not just how we want to treat our employees at Fog Creek, but how every company can invest in supporting their employees and their families.

If those values make sense to you, and would help you do your best work, we hope you’ll come join our team.

Rethinking Intelligence

In this Tech Talk, Nancy Hawa, Support Team Lead here at Fog Creek, explains why we need to rethink our attitudes towards intelligence. She puts forward a broader, more inclusive theory of intelligence than the one typically held by many in Tech. We’re encouraged to think of intelligence more like a skill, and we learn why it’s important to do so. Finally, Hawa shows us how our biases and judgments of others can impact outcomes and what we can do about it.

At Fog Creek, we have weekly Tech Talks from our own staff and invited guests. These are short, informal presentations on something of interest to those involved in software development. We try to share these with you whenever we can.

Contents #

Why We Should Rethink Intelligence
What Do We Believe About Intelligence?
Skills, Not Intelligence
Measuring Implicit Attitudes
Confirmation Bias
The Impact of Being Judged
Why Diversity Matters

Transcript #

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the talk:

I developed a version of this talk while I was a student at Flatiron School. It was substantially different from what I’m talking about now, but the reason I gave that talk was that I noticed that many of my classmates were feeling really, really frustrated. We did this thing called ‘Feelings Friday’, and everybody would talk on Friday about how they were feeling. At some point, the instructor said that he was going to go into hard mode the next week because it seemed like we were doing well, and one of the girls started openly sobbing. People were feeling frustrated, and they were feeling dumb, and it’s because, I think, the tech community, or when you start getting into coding, there’s this almost cult-like worship of intelligence. It’s a very limited idea of what intelligence is, and I think it can be really bad for most people trying to come in from the outside, and also bad for us if we’re already on the inside. I’m going to talk about why that is.

So, what do we already believe about intelligence? I think everybody has seen something like this. You’ve all heard the term IQ score, and we have people take tests, and then we put them somewhere on this distribution and most of the people are in the middle, smart people, are over on the right, and the dummies are on the left. This is a very simple, one-dimensional idea of intelligence. You are smart or not so smart, or somewhere in between.

I think that, intuitively, we also have an idea of intelligence that looks something like this — where there are people who have word smarts or math smarts in varying degrees. Maybe you’re someone like this who has a lot of math smarts, but you’re not so good with the words. Or maybe you have a lot of word smarts, but you’re terrible at math. Or maybe you’re just bad at everything. I think that people map onto this partly because they make us take the SATs in high school. We get scored on both of these things.

Then, if you’re me, you go to education school, and they show you another diagram. One that says there are eight kinds of intelligence, and they are all equally valuable, and all equally meaningful. If you’re like me, the first time I saw this, you look at this, and you think this is bullshit because word smart and math smart are the real smarts. Probably some of you are thinking, really, it’s just logic smarts and nothing else matters at all. That’s not an abnormal thing to think, but it’s not a valuable thing to think.

I have come to believe that all of these things are equally valuable. I was initially like, “nature smart”? that is ridiculous. That is not a kind of intelligence. But, the way we talk about these different kinds of intelligence just casually can be very devaluing. We call people who are good at logic ‘smart’. We call people who are good at music or art ‘talented’, and that word talented is almost disparaging in that context. It’s like saying there’s smart, and then if you’re good at music, that’s not because you’re smart. That’s something else. We’re not going to give you the word smart. I think that that’s bad. The important thing to take away is that any of these things are things that you can develop. If you have any of these things, you can use it to develop any of the others. There’s a lot of evidence that you can get better at math from music, or better at music from math.

If we think about all of these things not even as kinds of intelligence, but just as skills that you can develop independently, we get to a completely different place.

Intelligence is immutable, but skills can be learned. We think that people are as smart as they can ever be. People who take the IQ test at three or five, the idea is that we’ve determined how smart they are, and that’s how smart they’re going to stay. But you can learn new things. Judging people by intelligence early, and putting a label on them and saying you are or are not smart, is damaging because it makes them feel as if the learning part is not the main thing, and the learning thing is.

The bigger thing of what I’m going to talk about more is that “smartness” is very culturally charged. The very idea of ‘smartness’ is culturally charged. How smart you are, according to conventional standards, is also affected by culture. So, surprise, this is also a talk about diversity.

Greenwald and Benaji developed a method of looking at implicit attitudes that has been used a lot since. The problem that they were trying to solve is, if you want to guess what someone’s attitudes about something are, about race or about gender, it’s hard to figure out because you can’t ask them. Most people don’t say that they’re racist or sexist, and a lot of people don’t even know. A lot of people would honestly and truly answer I am not racist, I do not have any biases about race at all, and they are wrong, and they do have attitudes that are about this. So they wanted to come up with a way to measure peoples’ biases.

What they did is, and this is a computer task, and you sit there, and I am using one about gender and science. There’s a lot of different versions of this. They say, all right, put your finger on the E and the I key. If you want to move this word ‘boy’ to male, you press I, if you want to move it to female, you press E. Then you go through and you see a list of words like boy, grandmother, grandfather, father, and mother, and you have to identify if they are male or female. So this one is male. They time how long that takes you to do it.

Then they do the same thing, but with liberal arts or sciences, and I have to put literature toward liberal arts and chemistry toward science. Then they give me both at once, and they say you’re going to get chemistry and grandmother, and you have to put chemistry and father over here, and sociology and mother over here. Then they switch it, and female goes with science, and male goes with liberal arts, and they are timing me again, and the difference between how long it takes me to do the task where male is with liberal arts and female is with science, and how long it takes me to do the other one shows something about me. If it’s really hard for me to do this association test with men on the liberal arts side and female on the science side, that shows that I have male/science, female/liberal arts association.

They also do this with race where they show black and white faces and good and bad words, and you have to send black faces to the good side, and white faces to the bad side. The first time I was asked to do this, I was in college and I took the test, and they tell you at the end how racist are you. I can tell you that I am certified not racist by this test, but I also can tell you that I felt the challenge of putting black faces on the same side as good words. Like, a black face goes with the word terrific and a white face goes with the word terrible. I hope you won’t all judge me for that.

What we find is that there are really strong links in people who say they are not racist, like me (I say I’m not a racist), and people who believe they are not racist, to people who believe that they don’t have this implicit association between gender and scientific-mindedness, and people are wrong. They don’t have this kind of study specifically for words of intelligence, where you would sort it into smart and stupid. But I’m going to take a leap and say that I think that people do have those associations. People who have trouble sorting white faces to bad words and black faces to good words, many people are going to have these kinds of implicit associations, and it’s something that goes across races and genders and social statuses. People are really surprised by what they find.

This means that it’s sort of unavoidable that you’re going to make snap judgments about how smart someone is when you meet them. Or how good at science a woman is going to be when you meet her. This is really dangerous. The fact that looking at someone is going to be enough for you to color your opinion of how smart they are because of something called confirmation bias.

Basically what confirmation bias says is that if you believe something, when you get evidence, you’re going to listen more to evidence that confirms your belief than you will evidence that goes against your belief.

This is another study that they bring people in and say, are you a proponent or an opponent of the death penalty, and they write down how everybody stands. Then they say, okay, we’re going to have you read two studies about the death penalty, and we’re going to see how you feel about it afterwards.

They give them a card with a one sentence summary on one side of it to see if that one sentence summary affects their beliefs. It turns out that that one sentence summary doesn’t really affect anything because they already have the belief before. If people who start out as proponents of the death penalty, the study showed how much people’s views changed as to whether they become more in favor of the death penalty or less. People, after the pro-deterrence one, proponents of the death penalty are changed — they’re even more pro-death penalty. After reading the anti-deterrence one, they’re a little bit less in favor if they just see the results. They don’t read the study, they just see the results. But seeing the results of both, they get both studies, one says one thing, one says the other, and they’re fake, they’re designed to be about equivalent. But if participants got the evidence on both sides, they were even more on the side that they already believed. So, if you get evidence on both sides, the same evidence, you just believe what you already believed more.

So if you believe something and are presented with neutral information about it, and these people are presented with the same two articles, if you were opposed to the death penalty, you are now more opposed to the death penalty. If you were in favor of the death penalty, you are now more in favor of the death penalty from reading the same things. If you don’t just get the results, you get all of it, you just get more and more and more believing what you already believed. Even if you read the thing on the other side, that still makes you more sure that you were right if you have the whole thing and not just the results.

Why that matters, why confirmation bias matters, is that we also know that people have confirmation bias about their opinions of people they meet. So if you meet someone, and your initial impression of them is that they are not smart, perhaps because of a bias that you have about their race or their gender or what they look like in some way, you will find evidence to confirm your belief. We know that this is a human way of thinking. We want to find evidence that confirms our own opinion.

However, there’s research that shows that one way to limit the effect of confirmation bias, is to tell people that confirmation bias is a thing, explain it to them, and have them thinking about it. So it’s possible that jus by reading this, that I have just fixed you

But, this is something that we should be thinking about because if you get an opinion in your head that someone is not smart, that’s something that you think cannot be changed. Whereas if you’re thinking about whether or not they have the skills that is something that’s not immutable in your mind in the way that intelligence is.

In this study with students at Princeton, and one limitation of the psychological research is that 90% of it is conducted on 18–22-year-olds. So in this study of Princeton students, there were 40 black students and 40 white students. They’re asked to perform a task that’s related to golf, where the better you do, the fewer strokes you have is better. So low scores are good.

There were four conditions. There’s the natural athletic ability condition. These students are told that this is a test of natural athletic ability. The athletic intelligence group is told that this is a test of athletic intelligence. Both the race prime and the control group are told that it is a general test of athletic performance, but the race prime group is asked before the task what their race is, and the control group and all of the other groups are not asked about their race until after they do this golf. They measure two things. One is how many strokes does it take you to do whatever this golf thing is, and the other is before the golf thing and after the golf thing, they do a five question measure of your anxiety level.

The results on the number of strokes show that with white people if they’re told that it’s natural athletic ability, it takes them 27.8 strokes. But, if they’re told that it’s athletic intelligence, they do much better. They do much better if they’re told that it’s a test of intelligence. Black people do much worse if they’re told that it’s a test of intelligence. So saying to a black person, this is a test of your intelligence, makes them more likely to perform poorly. Saying to a white person this is a test of your natural athletic ability makes them more likely to perform poorly. Asking the participant about their race before their start makes them do much worse if they’re black, and doesn’t have much of an effect if they are white.

Let’s look at anxiety. So the black people were much less anxious when they were told that it was a test of their natural athletic ability, but they felt much more anxiety when they were told that the test was about intelligence. Both levels of anxiety interestingly go down if you ask them about their race. And we know from many other studies that this effect is replicable. They also did a study at MIT, for example, with Asian women and divided them into three groups. One group was asked about their gender. One group was asked about their race. And one group was asked about neither. The women who were asked about their gender taking a math test did worse. The women who were asked about their race did better. So we know that priming people and talking to them about their race has an effect on their performance. We know that the anxiety level effect of stereotype threat is real, it’s duplicated across multiple studies.

The Pacific Power and Lighting Company, a power company that had power lines going through the woods, over the Cascades Mountains. Every spring they’d have lots of ice storms that created a large accumulation of ice on the lines, which you can imagine would be damaging. The towers can fall, the lines can break. The method used to remove the ice was to send linemen into the field, have them climb these poles, and then they had a pole with a hook at the end, and they had to climb to the top and then shake the lines off to get the ice off. It was dangerous and really, really unpleasant.

Everybody involved agreed this is a problem that we want to solve. They did a lot of brainstorming sessions with no results, and then they brought somebody else in. They could have defined this as an engineering problem and said we’re going to just talk to our engineers about it. They could have said we’re just going to talk to the linemen and their supervisors and have them hash it out, but this consultant guy that they brought in said, no, everybody in the company will be involved. It’s going to be accountants, secretaries, people from the mail room, everybody.

They didn’t get anything out of it for a little while, and then they’re on a coffee break and two of the linemen are chatting, and one of them is telling a story that he comes down from one of these lines, and he sees a bear and the bear chases him. Somebody else says, hey that’s an idea. Let’s just train the bears to climb the poles, because they’re so big and heavy that their weight would knock the ice off. So this is not a productive idea, they’re not going to train the bears. But, they’re joking and laughing, and somebody else says, well we don’t need to train the bears. Let’s just put honey-pots on top of every pole because then the bears will go up on their own. Again, not a great idea. But this isn’t a serious brainstorming time. People feel free to just say anything. Somebody else says all of those fat cats in the main office, they fly around in helicopters. You should just use those helicopters to put the honey pots on the top of the poles, and then all those fat guys will have to get some exercise. Still not a great idea. But then someone speaks up and says that they were a nurse in Vietnam, and they would bring the injured soldiers from the helicopter. There was so much down lash from the helicopter with dust flying, I bet that if you just flew the helicopters near the power lines, that would shake the ice off. And that was the solution.

The solution to what could have been defined purely as an engineering problem came because they put a bunch of people who were different from each other in the same room, talking about the same problem.

Your perception about someone else’s intelligence may not have very much at all with what you’re trying to measure. Prioritizing intelligence can be exclusionary, and that exclusion does matter. Diversity does matter.

How We Use FogBugz for Recruiting

If I told you I ate my own dog food, would you think I was gross? Or would you know what I meant? That at Fog Creek we use our products internally as a kind of quality control and real-world test case.

Well, it’s the latter. I swear! One way we eat our own dog food at Fog Creek is by using FogBugz as an Application Tracking System (ATS) for all our recruiting. We’ve used FogBugz in this fashion for as long as our company’s been in business (some 16 years and counting!), and it works really well. I’ve outlined the process below so you can replicate it within your own company too.

The first step is to have an Admin create a Project that will act as your Inbox. At the Creek, all applications from candidates sent to jobs@fogcreek.com arrive in our Inbox. Every case is initially assigned to “Recruiting” which is a catch-all account we created so as to not overwhelm. I sort the inbox reverse chronologically by Area, so the most recent, “Not Spam” cases are the ones I see first.

Note: these are screenshots from our actual recruiting inbox — the names and cases are blocked out to protect our applicants!

We’ve set it up so every candidate who applies to a position at Fog Creek receives an auto-response from our Recruiting Robot with information about how recruitment works at Fog Creek.

With this response, candidates don’t have to worry if you’ve received their resume or not, and the fact that it’s canned, but still has personality sets it far apart from the generic forms most ATSs send out. We get loads of love for our robot — it sets the tone that this recruitment process actually won’t suck.

Moving on: We’ll use the story of a fictitious candidate who applied for a QA position at Fog Creek to walk you through our application process.

As the de-facto Head of Recruiting, I’m the first to take a look at each resume and cover letter. If you have a larger team, you can assign any member you like to this task. When I click into my applicant’s case, I see that Martha loves Fog Creek and that she wants to join our QA team.

Using the “Correspondent” column on the left, I can also see that Martha’s applied to Fog Creek before.

As the robot promised, we get back to every applicant, moving forward or not. If Martha were lacking, I’d reply to her email with a polite rejection using a snippet. Luckily for her, Martha has passed my initial screen. For my next step, I’ll move her from the Inbox to our Recruiting Queue, another Project in our FogBugz instance.

At this point, I also update the case’s Area — which corresponds to the position to which the candidate is applying — and the Milestone, which correlates to the whichever stage of the interview process the candidate is in. At Fog Creek we have 10 potential milestones, which include things like ‘Sales Pitch’, ‘SysAdmin Take Home Problem’ and ‘In-person with CEO’ — you can set your milestones to match whatever recruitment processes you have in place.

Lastly, I assign Martha’s case to Jude and request a resume screen. I’ve updated the “Due” date on the left side of the case and given Jude 1 full day to complete his screen. This is a great way to get rid of one of tech recruiting’s worst bottlenecks — waiting on developers to screen resumes! Lastly, I’ve subscribed to the case to make sure I see all updates. For example — if the candidate writes back in, I’ll get an email alerting me to the correspondence.

While Jude is reviewing Martha’s resume, let’s pause, and I’ll tell you a bit more about the Recruiting Queue. And just so you know — you’re about to get a super exclusive look into our actual queue — you are so lucky!

I organize my queue as follows: All active cases, sorted by Area (Position), then Milestone (Stage in the Process). Currently, I’m hiring on my SysAdmin & Support teams; you’ll see candidates for those 2 positions, plus Martha’s QA resume, below:

I sort this way so I can see how many candidates I have in the queue for each position, and so I can tell, of those candidates, how many are in each stage of the process. I star the cases that require my attention but I haven’t had time to respond to yet.

Sometimes I want to take stock of how many candidates I have in each stage of the process, so I’ll re-sort by Milestone to see how many “code screens” or “in-person interviews” are taking place this week and next.

I try to evenly distribute the load of recruiting and not put too much work on any one person. When I want to double check to make sure I’m meeting my goal, I’ll switch it up and resort by “Assigned To”

Yikes! I’ve got a lot of work to do. So let’s move on quickly!

Back to Martha: Jude has now completed his screen and (hurray!) Martha is moving on to the next round, which is a code screen. He’s assigned his case back to me, the Recruiter, to move her forward.

Because I subscribed to the case, I got an email with Jude’s assessment. I click into the case, change Milestone to “code screen”. Then use my snippets again to reach out to Martha and schedule an interview. I can email her right from FogBugz, which is handy for keeping all correspondence in one place.

Before I send, I’ll also update the “Due” date. I usually give candidates a day or two to respond.

Once we’ve gotten to the in-person stage, I notify each person interviewing Martha so they can add their interview times to their calendars. I keep the case assigned to myself as I’ll be facilitating the interview while Martha’s in the building.

After each interview, the interviewer edits the case with his/her feedback on the candidate’s performance. In Martha’s case — all hires! (we only hire those we all agree on, here’s why)

The next stage is the fun part of recruiting — the offer stage! Hiring people is the best; it’s also full of conversations that include personal and private information that a potential new employee doesn’t necessarily want to share with their potential new co-workers. To preserve Martha’s privacy, I move Martha’s case from the “Recruiting Queue” project to “Hiring” which has limited access. We have 2 Milestones in Hiring — Offer & Onboarding. Right now, Martha is in the Offer Stage, because we made her an offer. If Martha accepts the offer, she’ll move to “onboarding”. After her first month at the company, she’ll move from “Hiring” to our “Archive,” another secure project with access limited to admins, so that no employees can see what their coworkers said when hiring them.

And that’s it! We’ve gone from application to hire entirely within FogBugz. So, if you’re frustrated with the ATS your recruiting team is using, or if you’re a recruiter looking for a new system, I’d definitely recommend FogBugz. It’s simple, clean, easy to use, easy to teach(!) and reliable. If you have questions or want more information on how this works, find me on Twitter or email me — allie@fogcreek.com.

Want to hire the best developers? .

Scaling Servant Leadership

In this Tech Talk, Jude Allred, CTO here at Fog Creek, explains the methods he uses to scale Servant Leadership. He explains why relying on rapport doesn’t work and describes a number of techniques that you can employ to successfully apply servant leadership across multiple teams and departments.

About Fog Creek Tech Talks #

Contents #

Rapport Doesn’t Scale
Techniques to Scale Servant Leadership
Starter Engines
Diminishing returns in consensus
Decision making as a service
Setting up and Promoting Channels of Communication
Servant Leadership as a Constraint

Transcript #

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the talk:

Servant leadership is, to me, a set of principles that mostly come down to you want decisions to be coming from the most informed people and that’s usually the people closest to the problem, not people overseeing the problem. Therefore, you want your leaders to be focused on removing obstacles from those people and giving those people the context so that they can make those decisions effectively. My third point is that you want the individuals to have really high autonomy so that they can be creating initiatives and acting on them, and then the other edge of the sword is you then depend on that.

It’s not enough to just give people autonomy, and then when they don’t use it, take command and do stuff anyway. That’s probably the real challenge — if you give them the autonomy, and then you depend on people executing on that autonomy and taking that initiative in order for your organization to move forward. Not every situation that can come out in management fits neatly into one pile or the other. In incredibly tactical situations or under extreme time constraints, where you have a dedicated expert and you just want everyone to follow through with that because let’s say you’re being hacked. You have one person on point countering the hacker and the other people supporting them. You can be a little bit more command and control. You don’t need to be absolutist in saying, “We must solve this with servant leadership.” That said, I would feel mighty proud if I was able to. This is what servant leadership is for me.

Rapport Doesn’t Scale #

When I was a 2-month-old team lead at Fog Creek, I started coming up against a communication challenge that was new for me and was invalidating my previous strategies. My favorite way to communicate still, but I can’t use it all the time, is to have such a strong rapport with someone that we can trust that we’re building towards the same thing and then we can communicate at high bandwidth as engineers. We’re sitting next to each other, or at different computers, but building the same thing, and we all know we share a specific goal or a thing we’re trying to solve. If I see a way you can do your job better, I can just tell you, and that’s not abrasive. That’s pure constructive criticism and vice versa. You don’t have to coach that. You don’t have to be delicate. You can just trust that you’ve built that relationship, and then you can leverage it to communicate quickly and efficiently.

The other part of this that I like about having that really high bandwidth communication, is it gives me more social permission to sit down with someone and share a bigger blob of context. This takes a lot of time, but if there’s a challenge I’m trying to solve and I want your help with it, I would much prefer to be able to sit down with you and explain all the reasons why it’s a challenge in the first place, why people in the organization care, the people who are being affected, the things that can be made better. Just all the bits of the story except for my conclusion.

I want you to see all the context, and then one thing that could happen is that you then come to the same conclusion that I do. My confirmation bias jumps in, but if that happens, cool. We’re on the same page, and you should be able to advocate for it just as much as I can because no part of your representation of it is we should do this because ‘Jude said so’ or because ‘Jude thinks so’. It’s going to be because we look at the same set of information and you came to the same conclusion. Furthermore, you should now care about it as much as I do, and any difference there is going to come down to maybe we have different value systems, maybe we have different risk tolerances, or most frequently, maybe we just have different information, which is the most interesting one. If you came do a different conclusion than me because you have different information from me, then we can both learn. I love it if I can do that.

In general, this is me practicing my take on an important tenant of servant leadership in the team lead role. I’m not giving you my decision as a lead. I did the legwork of getting you the information to make a good decision, and I want your recommendation. If I don’t agree with it, I investigate more. I don’t push. Through this and perhaps fortune or some mismatch of happenstance, I never had a strong disagreement with any of my team members.

So that was my communication technique as team lead talking to individuals on my team. I wanted that across the board. That’s what I learned. I learned to do this and it worked very well for me, but now I’m a lead. And when you’re a lead, you’re not just communicating with the folks on your team. You are communicating up to someone coordinating other leads, and you’re communicating across to the other leads.

This got me in trouble because there were, even in our small size, there were people in the organization with whom I hadn’t and never would spend enough time with to build the rapport to have the social permission, to have social high bandwidth communications. And even if I did, having that depth of communication with all the leads can be really time inefficient. Rapport doesn’t scale. At some point, if you move into management and as you get further and further from direct reports or simply as your organization gets larger and larger, there will come a point when you will never, ever actually be able to have rapport with all of the people who it is essential that you communicate with effectively, so my strategy had to change.

Techniques to Scale Servant Leadership #

Servant leadership at scale has to be indirect. My servant leadership as an individual contributor or as a team lead could be very direct, and then at higher levels, I can’t have those direct channels. I have to do other things. Those other things manifest more as communication structures. I construct predominantly for other people, or for feedback to come forward, or for structures in the organization that makes it easier for people to take initiative or act autonomously.

One technique is starter engines. One thing that is a recurring pattern that I see is one where there’s a hole that needs to be filled and you have people with autonomy and the ability to fill that hole, but they’re just standing on the edges looking in, not actually solving it. There’s a number of reasons why that can happen, and there’re a few things that you can do to overcome that. One that we’ve employed a number of times is like the thunderbolt from Zeus. This is generally Joel saying, “No, let’s just do this thing,” and then we do it.

There’s a nuance here though that’s very important. At the start of last summer, Joel helped us build a starter engine. This was a marketing plan of just development tasks for Fog Creek. The items on the plan were not really of consequence. They could have been. Indeed, many of them were capable of being of consequence, but the point then wasn’t to fulfill the items on the plan. That’s a step. The starter engine here was here’s a list of initiatives that you can do, and all of them are targeted around moving the needle of the company, and we’re optimistic that some of them will. There were 17, I think. Some were long horizon. Some were short. Some we had much more confidence in than others, but they were all experiments.

The deliverable here wasn’t executing on all of those things, although that would have been great. The deliverable was creating the habit, so that the next set of things could be done without needing someone like Joel to come in and say, “Here’s some things to do.” So now the engine is running. Another way to look at it is if you already have a habit for a thing, it’s easy to continue that habit, whereas if the habit is absent and then you want to do a thing, you have two problems. First, you need to get up the energy to do the thing. Second, you have to get up the energy to start the habit. If you’re looking at promoting an intrinsic motivator, the more that you can do build the habit, then the less of a natural objection there is to take the next step. In a grander sense, I view this as structures, which assume success.

Consensus is great, but if the decision doesn’t matter, then at some point, you’ve got to say, “Well, if we’re in 80% consensus and the cost to us of being wrong is very cheap, then it can be more expensive for us to get to 100% consensus or 90% consensus than it is for us to just accept that we’re wrong.” Some people hear servant leadership and they think that means full consensus. That is false. If you can get it, great. If you’re operating with zero consensus on anything, then that’s a weird thing, but being aware of the diminishing return curve in consensus is pretty important because that last little bit can be most of your communication, and if an early assumption in the pipeline fails or new information comes in, then it can just be a complete and total waste.

Decision making as a service is a fun little servant leadership thing. Another thing that I’ve seen prevent autonomous initiative taking people from putting forward a decision is that they’re just nervous that they’re wrong. Maybe they’re only 90% sure of something and maybe you’ve been with us for 6 months and you’re afraid that we’re going to make a big company decision based on your opinion and then it’s going to be wrong and you’re going to get fired. You wouldn’t be, but you can still have that nervousness, and also you don’t want to feel bad if it doesn’t go right. But, if it’s a decision that needs to be made, and you’re the absolutely the most informed person on that subject and you have the best recommendation on that, then we should go with your decision.

So a thing you can do in that situation as a servant leader. If you’re a team lead, although you can do this for your peers as well, is to let the decision come from them but then back it up and take the blame yourself. Then I can champion it, and I’ll give credit where due at every opportunity, but if it goes wrong, I’ll catch it. I’m being the manager. I’m being the leader. This is on me, and that’s good and that’s fine because we’re doing this together. Sometimes we’re going to be wrong, and that’s okay. If we can alleviate the fear of failure from the people putting forward creative, inventive ideas, then you’ll get more creative, inventive ideas. Another type of decision making as a service is when a decision just freaking doesn’t matter. “It’s blue, moving on”. I’ve seen this ruffle feathers, but I’ve also seen this save a tremendous amount of time.

The theme of all these points, I’m talking about service leadership, but I’m also really talking about communication. The thread of all of these is setting up and promoting channels of communication that help people engage, and it’s all iterative.

Servant Leadership as a Constraint #

One of the big distillations I have for myself is the view of servant leadership as a constraint. It’s very easy to come to conclusions and then put them forth or give strong directions and commands and whatnot. But, it’s less effective most of the time. The only time I think it could be effective is if I happen to be the most informed person on the subject, but that in itself is a failing because the people working on the subject should be the most informed about the subject.

For me, I view servant leadership predominantly as a constraint upon myself, which pushes me to be more effective by not giving up and falling back to just giving commands. I don’t give orders. I’m instead trying to suss out the best decisions or the best directions and bring them to life in the organization, and I’ve talked about some of the techniques.

But remember, it’s a spectrum. If you want to lean more into servant leadership, then just pick a part of the spectrum and do so. As someone in management, I would say try to communicate context over conclusions, and to scale that — build structures that promote it.

Move Your Career Forward, Come Work at Fog Creek!

Fog Creek is unique in about a million ways. We’re a small tech company, but the products we’ve created touch millions of people, on the scale of Google or Facebook. We’re different — we believe if we hire the smartest, most capable people who can get things done, that’ll they’ll create amazing products we’ll be happy to sell. And for 16 years, it’s worked.

Want to know a bit more about how we set ourselves apart from the crowd? Check out this handy info graph:

Now here’s the best news — we’re hiring! If you’re ready to join a company that invests in it’s employees just as much as it’s products, then check out our careers page. Who knows, we may be looking for exactly you!

If there’s not a position available that currently matches your skill set, don’t fret. We open up new spots across teams all the team. You can find our most recent listings on our careers page, or on Twitter.

Why did we make Glitch? Because you’re not an idiot, Web Development’s just gotten too hard

So, you’ve got a great idea for an app that you want to create, but where do you start?

For those of us who aren’t developers, we usually do one of two things:

Convince a developer friend to build the thing for us. That’s great, but you can’t always find one, and by now you’ve probably hassled them about building so many things that they’ve stopped returning your texts…
Try and build it yourself. This is the route I’ve tried myself many times before. Here’s how that usually goes — let me know if this sounds familiar at all:

I start by trying to setup my web development environment, configuring a server, and messing about with a database. I’m usually trying to follow some online guide about how to do those things, plugging in terminal commands, which only sometimes return what it actually says it should. And then the rest of the time I’m trying to understand the hot new tech I’ve been recommended, because apparently, it’s a must!

The outcome? With only a few hours a week to try and work on side-projects, I usually end up a few weeks down the line having gotten stuck on several silly dev environment issues. These only acted to remind me of my limited coding abilities, and by now I’ve convinced myself that my idea sucked anyway. Of course, I’m not even close to having built an MVP to show to folks for feedback. And so, I give up.

That, to me, is modern web development. A frustrating mix of needless technological complexity and imposter syndrome, that leaves me feeling like an idiot.

But even if you are a professional developer, it’s all too easy to spend your time messing around with setup and configuration issues, distracting you from building whatever it is that you wanted to create.

This is why we’re working on Glitch. It helps you avoid such outcomes by helping you in a few ways:

A lot of existing options claim to make things easier, and they might. But they start you off staring at a blank screen, and you need to know how to put everything together — kind of like trying to build flat-pack furniture without a set of instructions. The result is you’re left looking up on Stack Overflow how all the things should really go together.

So with Glitch you can start by remixing a full, working app, and then you just need to personalize it, or build up on it to make it do exactly what you need it to. For those with more advanced skills, you can remix smaller building blocks, like frameworks and libraries.

You don’t have to go it alone, you can work with and learn from others. But, that doesn’t mean you have to know the ins-and-outs of Git either. Our built-in editor allows multiple people to edit code at once and undo mistakes as they happen, just like working together in Google Docs.

The go-to idea that a lot of people jump to when trying to make development tools for folks who aren’t necessarily developers, is some form of ‘visual coding’ — where you piece together pre-made parts to create an app. And that seems like a good idea, but such solutions have never really taken off. We think that’s because with that approach, you can only build the things that its creators have already thought about, preventing you from being able to wield the full power and flexibility that programming provides.

So we’re not doing that. We provide a real development environment and your app is hosted on the exact same industry standard infrastructure that the best developers use to run their own apps.

So you’re not restricted by what you can build, but we take care of all the messy bits for you. So while you code, we’re automatically deploying and hosting it for you. And, we seamlessly upgrade your servers and the cloud infrastructure in the background too.

The hope is by starting you off with a working thing, and taking away all the time wasting distractions and annoyances, you’ll actually be able to create the thing you set out to do. And the days of rage quitting, or sobbing quietly at your keyboard will be over!

We can’t wait to see what you create! Give Glitch a try right now, for free.

How to make your app look great on Glitch

An important part of our approach with Glitch is to start folks off from a working example app. Rather than starting with a blank screen, we want Glitch users to see something working as soon as possible, so we’ve made a ton of apps you can use as jumping off points.

But this isn’t some closed shop — anyone can submit an app they’ve created to our community gallery for others to see, use and remix!

Here are a few tips we’ve put together about how to make a really great project listing.

The contents of your project’s readme.md file is what gets shown in the community gallery. Think of them as more like an App Store description, rather than a typical GitHub readme. This is your spot to get people interested in your project, so it should really sell it.

It should cover what the project does, why it’s useful and what users will need to do to get their own version of the project working (adding in API keys etc.). Keep it short — around 100 words total.

Your description is the place to show folks what your project looks like and how it functions. Include a screenshot, or even better, a gif (*we know that not all projects photograph well — backend libraries, utility frameworks etc. don’t lend themselves well to imagery, but even a gif of the example app using your code helps to get some information across.) — *animation conveys things way better/faster than static text or images.

If the setup instructions are more than a few lines, then add a setup.md file to your project and use that to go into the detail.

Be prescriptive and try not to make too many assumptions. We want projects to be accessible to a wide audience with differing skill and knowledge levels. So avoid jargon and acronyms whenever possible. See an example.

Code explanations should be included inline within the code files themselves as comments. And be sure to remove any extraneous dependencies and unused code.

Set your project avatar — it’s a 200x200 file, but they’re often shown at 33x33 and 18x18 on the site and in the app, so they should display well when small.

Also set your project description and a relevant project title, which also functions as your project’s URL.

Once you’ve finished crafting the perfect listing, submit your project URL to The Gallery topic on the forum. You can also share your projects on Twitter. Hashtag them #glitch so we can be sure to see and share!

We’re excited to see what you come up with!

Congratulations, Trello!

So, the news is out: Trello is now part of Atlassian! I’m incredibly excited for my friends at Trello, and especially proud of Michael Pryor and Joel Spolsky, who not only cofounded Trello, but cofounded Fog Creek Software— our scrappy little independent company where Trello was born.

Fog Creek and Trello don’t just share cofounders, we share a lot of the same DNA, and we even share the same beautiful office as our NYC headquarters. The same innovative process that resulted in Trello’s invention has yielded Gomix, which we think has the same potential to change the way people work and collaborate and create. And while there are ways we’ll be competing now (we really do think you’ll love FogBugz as an alternative to Jira!) we’re mostly just proud to see our sibling company succeed.

If you’re feeling nostalgic, or just want to see how a world-class product was born at Fog Creek, we hope you’ll take a look back at some great milestones in Trello history:

Here’s a wonderful look back at how Trello was created at Fog Creek, in conversation with some of the people who were there at the time.

Watch Joel Spolsky demonstrate Trello to the public for the first time at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in 2011.

We’ll have lots more to say in the days and weeks to come, but today we just wanted to celebrate that idea that a smart and simple idea created by thoughtful people can have a huge impact on the way that people work and collaborate every day. We’re happy to see our friends reach a milestone reflecting that success, and we promise to keep trying to do exactly that.

How to trigger multiple applets in IFTTT

IFTTT users have long wanted the ability to create multiple triggers, so that you could for example, turn off your lights and the heating, but turn on your security cameras when you’re set to go out.

We got excited back in November when they made that very thing possible, just with one big catch — only service providers could do it. They’ve promised to make such functionality available for consumers some time in 2017, but we don’t have details yet about how that might work or what it’ll cost. So for those who don’t want to wait — here’s a guide on how you can use the IFTTT Webhooks with Glitch, to add the ability to trigger multiple IFTTT applets for free.

For those new to Glitch, it’s a free service that makes it easy to code and create apps and bots. It’s like an App Store connected to CodePen connected to Heroku. What’s more, we start you off with example projects rather than a blank screen. So for example, here’s a project that implements multiple triggers for IFTTT so all you need to do is configure a few things.

To get started, click the following link to remix the example app. All this does is automatically create an app for us on Glitch, which contains all the code we need to implement multiple IFTTT triggers. Then there are two stages to configuring things: triggering your Glitch app on IFTTT, and letting your Glitch app know which of your IFTTT applets to trigger in response.

In IFTTT, create a new applet by selecting ‘New Applet’. For the ‘if’ condition, select whatever service notification you want to initially trigger your Glitch app. So for example, if you wanted to to trigger things from your iPhone’s lock screen, then you could use the ‘Button widget’ with the ‘button press’ action.

For the ‘then’ condition, search and select ‘Webhooks’, and use the ‘Make a web request’ action. Set the URL to your Glitch project URL — this has the format of ‘https://project-name.glitch.me/' and is what loads when you click ‘Show’ on Glitch. Set the Method to ‘POST’ and Content Type to ‘application/json’. You don’t need to set anything in the ‘Body’.

Your configuration, should look a bit like this, but with your own URL:

Now when that service triggers, your Glitch app will receive a request. All that’s left now is to get your Glitch app to then trigger multiple services in IFTTT.

From your Webhooks settings page in IFTTT, copy and paste the URL value for the IFTTT_MAKER_URL variable into the .env file in your Glitch project.

Then, for each service that you want your Glitch app to trigger you need to create a new applet in IFTTT:

Create a new applet by selecting ‘New Applet’.
For the ‘if’ condition, search and select ‘Webhooks’, and use the ‘Receive a web request’ action. Set an event name, and set that event name against the IFTTT_SERVICE_X variable in the .env file in your Glitch project. E.g. if I created an event name called ‘lights_on’, I would set IFTTT_SERVICE_1=lights_on in .env.
For the ‘then’ condition, search and select whatever service you want to trigger, such as turning on your lights. Click ‘finish’ to create the applet. Repeat this for each service that you want triggered. By the end, your .env file will look a bit like:

And that’s it! With those two steps complete, you’ve configured your Glitch app to trigger multiple IFTTT applets when it gets triggered. So for example, now I can hit the IFTTT Do button on my phone and it’ll turn my lights off, set the thermostat to away, and turn my cameras on.

Got an idea for another IFTTT app? Check out the Glitch community page for example apps and building blocks to help you get started quickly.

Glitch and Tech Pushing Forward

Nobody can miss the new forms of activism and organizing that are taking shape around the world, especially in the wake of the immigration ban recently enacted in the United States.

We’re heartened to see that activists have begun to embrace Glitch as an easy, lightweight way to collaborate around making tools that can make a difference. Case in point: Tech Forward.

Tech Forward, built on Glitch, is an app that lists forward-thinking organizations, tools, and resources. Created by Matt Stauffer, a self-proclaimed ‘race/ethnicity/justice nerd’, Tech Forward’s aim is to help connect those motivated to help work for social progress, with tools and the organizations already doing it.

But Tech Forward isn’t the only activism app created on Glitch. Just this weekend, Ben Salinas, disappointed by Senator John Cornyn’s inaction on the immigration ban, created an app to raise that issue: https://cornynstatement.glitch.me

Meanwhile, Joe Larson made a project to help tweet the latest changes from StayWoke’s Resistance Manual: https://resistance-manual-tweeter.glitch.me

And Roland Crosby has created both https://nominations.glitch.me and https://bernie.glitch.me. The latter went viral, and was picked up by reporters at MSNBC, Washington Post, as well as blogs like BoingBoing.

Gomix’ collaborative features have come into play as well. We don’t make you develop alone, it’s easy to come together and create apps with others. The result of which, are apps like https://action-inbox.glitch.me.

An idea from Ann Friedman was jumped on by like-minded folks who quickly began creating an app in real-time, with people contributing ideas, code and designs.

It’s a great example of how technology can help us come together. So while turbulent political times continue to test our resolve, we’re excited that Glitch can in some small way help people find their voice and encourage action on causes they believe in.

Glitch provides working example apps to remix, a code editor to modify them, instant hosting and deployment, so anybody can build a web app for a cause they’re passionate about.

Against The Whiteboard

Today’s computer programmers enjoy one of the best job markets that any group of workers has ever had. There are abundant well-paying opportunities for many different kinds of working coders. But we’ve seen a lot of programming culture, or the tech world in general, become overly exclusionary. One of the biggest reasons? The interview process.

A lot of tech recruiting and hiring is broken. Coders are regularly asked to jump through bizarre hoops in job interviews, and perhaps the most notorious example of this is that programmers are often asked to implement algorithms or complex coding structures in the artificial environment of a conference room whiteboard. Needless to say, that contrived requirement has started to engender a bit of deserved criticism.

In a world where we can often just find an answer to any coding question on Stack Overflow, we’ve started to see programmers push back against the idea that rote memorization of obscure syntax is a useful way to judge potential contributors.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, is many things, but falsely humble is not one of them. So it was particularly striking to see this tweet from him recently, where he described his inability to complete these kinds of whiteboard tests.

DHH’s confession kicked off a striking conversation where coders of all stripes revealed their own gaps in knowledge.

In fact, that conversation that followed eventually inspired dozens of coders from around the world to share their similar stories. You should take a look at these testimonials — they’re an incredibly rare example of people putting their reputations up for examination in an attempt to make others feel more welcome.

Of course, it’s important to note that even being able to confess to such shortcomings is a privilege that not every coder can demonstrate in today’s tech culture.

This dichotomy has played out in the tech realm many times, especially in discussions about impostor syndrome, which whiteboard coding tests seem perfectly designed to trigger. We’ve seen reassuring and thoughtful essays addressing impostor syndrome by coders like Gina Trapani, but these are often mirrored by underrepresented coders explaining that they can’t take the risk of even mentioning any gaps in their knowledge because their reputations are always at such risk.

It’s a stressful state of affairs all around, and it seems like right now, the whiteboards are only making it worse.

So why do we even *have *whiteboard coding tests as part of job interviews for programmers?

As it turns out, we can see one key reason that this became common practice at tech companies. Joel Spolsky, our cofounder at Fog Creek Software , who’s now the CEO of Stack Overflow, wrote a very influential post on interviewing candidates for his “Joel on Software blog” back in 2000 which includes (after a 2006 revision) the following passage:

Ah hah! So we should all just blame Joel for this bad interviewing habit and now we can get back to our work, right? Case closed. Well, not so fast. In the same piece, which was written eleven years ago, Joel included some very important context [emphasis added]:

It turns out, the point of this entire exercise was to inspire a thoughtful conversation with a candidate about the way they solve problems. It’s important to remember, Joel’s post was written in an era when the state of the art in technical hiring was still people devising more obtuse variations of Microsoft’s “Why are manhole covers round?” interview question. Worse, recruiters were (and often still are) the bane of most coders’ working lives, interrupting them while acting as unauthorized middlemen representing job opportunities that often weren’t even a good fit.

The whole area of tech recruiting was even more of a mess than it is today, and the idea of focusing on how a candidate solves real coding problems represented a huge leap forward in making interviews much more pragmatic and relevant. (This is probably a big part of why Stack Overflow is as focused on fixing tech recruiting as it is on answering coding questions.) But what was once a thoughtful effort has now become a huge source of pain, and maybe even more frustrating than the problem it was originally trying to solve.

Like a lot of cargo-cult tech trends, whiteboard algorithm sketching started to go horribly wrong when people started copying a behavior at a superficial level while ignoring the cultural and emotional context that informed that behavior. In short: **people copied **

In this case, instead of finding out how a candidate solves problems, interviewers ended up asking them to perform a ritual that’s mostly about reciting trivia. The immediate result is lots more stress for interviewees, and perpetuation of structural barriers for people who are already underrepresented in the tech industry.

Where does this end up? With even worse repercussions than we’d expect. More and more industries want to be like the “innovative” or “disruptive” high-tech industry. Yet they almost never have the fluency and literacy in technology to know exactly what aspects of tech culture they should or should not be emulating.

In the current political moment, this unfortunate pattern can result in the absurdity or even injustice, especially in institutions that are already looking for reasons to exclude and raise barriers. We saw this recently when we heard the story of a young, talented visitor to America who was reportedly asked to write functions to evaluate Binary Search Trees just after exhaustedly disembarking from a lengthy international flight.

While this case may be an outlier, overall it seems we’ve ended up close to the worst-case scenario: institutions are dehumanizing people by misapplying a well-intentioned interviewing process that had originally been designed to be more thoughtful and humane than the older questions it replaced.

It’s not too late to fix things. The first step is for us to look at the way interviewing and hiring work in the tech industry, and to make changes to our own processes. If the rest of the world is going to follow our example, then maybe we can cajole them into following along with us as we fix things.

Even though we’ve spent the better part of two decades thinking about this at Fog Creek, our own process is far from perfect. We’re spending a lot of time thinking about how to make sure our process is focused on how real people think, in realistic scenarios they might encounter during actual work, instead of asking folks to jump through hoops they’d never see in the real world.

More to the point, we’re paying careful attention to what we hear from the countless working coders who’ve spoken up about the differences between interview orthodoxy and a truly inclusive and creative environment. Some of that is building a company with a truly collaborative culture, and some of that is creating smart new tools that are inherently about enabling a diverse community to help each other code together in ways that are supportive and welcoming.

But that’s just our work at one company. It’s going to take all of us together to change a tech culture that’s too often turned onramps into obstacles. The first step to becoming more inclusive in interviews may be returning to exactly the principle Joel outlined in his seminal blog post: “my real goal here is to have a conversation about it”.

Welcome to Glitch!

Anybody who’s ever made something they’re proud of can tell you: **People do their best work in collaboration with other creative people. **That’s a lesson that is especially important when it comes to making new technology. And that’s why we made Glitch. It’s a brand-new community where anybody can build the app of their dreams.

Glitch (formerly Gomix, see below) is the culmination of a few years of work from our team, focused on a simple goal: making the easiest way for coders to create and collaborate, whether professionals or novices. Glitch works like this:

And behind all that is a smart and inclusive community of creators, who’ll help you when you get stuck, and collaborate with you to make your ideas real.

But what Glitch does is unique. You haven’t seen anything like this before.

**If you’re already a coder: **Glitch makes every other development environment feel lonely and old-fashioned, as coding starts to feel more like simultaneous editing in Google Docs and less like the chore of reviewing pull requests. Everything you create is automatically deployed in realtime onto cloud servers, so there’s no provisioning of servers or management of infrastructure, just the joy of creating.

**If you’ve **Glitch is the place to start. We’ve got a friendly and welcoming community (we don’t tolerate people being jerks) and you start by remixing apps that already work, running on real web servers that you don’t have to learn how to manage. If you do get stuck, anyone in the Glitch community can come in and offer to help, just as easy as raising your hand.

**If you care about where tech is headed: **You know that people are more frustrated than ever about the sense that people are being left behind or excluded by today’s tech industry. Our company, Fog Creek, has a history of setting the standards of where programming (and tech overall) is headed. With Glitch, we’re firmly saying that tech is headed to a place where everyone can participate and create the apps we’ll be using together.

Today, as Glitch graduates to a full-fledged community, we’re ecstatic to welcome as Glitch’s community engineer, where she’ll be a dedicated public voice for Glitch, working along with you to build the community. Jenn’s been a stalwart of the JavaScript community, a passionate and hilarious public speaker, and has an incredible background in educating coders of every kind.

But you don’t have to take our word for it; you can read for yourself what Jenn had to say about joining the Glitch team. (Be sure to read through to the end for a must-watch video.)

It’s even easier to use Glitch than it is to describe it — give it a try now and you’ll have your first app running in a minute. We think you’ll immediately see how it’s different than any other coding environment that’s come before.

Even though Glitch is fun and easy, these are real apps, hosted on the same cloud infrastructure that runs the biggest sites on the web. You’re not using a toy when you’re part of the Glitch community, you’re just taking advantage of the easiest way to make real apps.

If you haven’t checked out Glitch in a while, or have never seen it before, you’ll be especially excited about some of the newer features we’ve built into the community:

There’s an awesome of apps and bots that already work with many of the most popular web services and developer frameworks. With the notorious well-respected Jenn Schiffer as our community engineer, we’ll regularly have new projects, events and articles explaining how anyone can use Glitch.
Glitch now works on almost every device so you can even edit code on tablets or phones, and your app will automatically update when you make those changes.
It’s easier to bring your code into Glitch — there’s slick new support for importing and exporting GitHub projects, including a button you can put right on your project’s GitHub page that will let new users run it on Glitch with just one click. Because all software has glitches, and we’re going to fix ’em together! Well, okay, that’s not the only reason.

If you’ve been following along, you know Glitch is a new name for our community; our beta launch last year was under the name Gomix. Why did we change the name (again)? Well, we heard from some members of our community that the old name evokes a hurtful slur in some Russian communities, and given our deep commitment to building an inclusive service, that didn’t sit right with us, even though people understand we didn’t mean to be hurtful. But then we realized that in fixing this slight, we had the opportunity to pick a much better name, one that makes it absolutely clear that we’re building a community for everyone.

So: now we’ve got our shiny new name, and we are Glitch for good!

We got the name Glitch thanks to our friends at Slack. Their company started as a quirky and charming game by the name of Glitch and given Slack’s incredible success, they could have simply chosen to keep that name to themselves forever.

Instead, Slack has generously agreed to help us to make sure “Glitch” has a future going forward — not just by letting us reuse the name, but also by teaming up with us to be one of the first companies to really make use of the power of Glitch to help coders build something amazing together. We can’t wait to help show you the brilliant stuff they’ve been cooking up.

We’re thankful to everyone on Slack’s team, especially the founders and creators who made up Tiny Speck, for letting us be stewards of their legacy of building creative, colorful and engaging places for people to be creative.

Okay, that’s enough talk. Let’s go make something!

Glitch For Your API

This is… not so good. If we compare it to the hyper-optimized customer funnels used on e-commerce sites, this method of acquiring platform developers sounds downright absurd.

Why do we still do developer relations this way in 2017?

This is why we made **Glitch For Your API**.

At Fog Creek, we know a little bit about making things developers like. (In the past, our team invented Trello, co-created Stack Overflow, and pioneered bug-tracking with FogBugz, still beloved today by teams that make great software.) Building on that history, we’ve figured out what the industry needs to do to bring API evangelism into the future.

Glitc**h is a friendly community where anyone can make the app of their dreams. And now, it powers Glitch For Your AP**I: the ultimate way to help developers succeed with your platform.

First, we want you to take advantage of all these Glitch For Your API features, today, for free:

Put a “Remix in Glitch” button on your site right now to help any developer** get your API’s sample app running in about one minute**. No dev environment to set up, no servers to provision, no issues with the app not being able to talk to services while it’s running on localhost. They might have to copy & paste an API key, but that’s about it.
Get your team on Glitch so they have the tools to collaborate with new devs in realtime, on their actual running code. If these devs hit any snags or errors while trying your API for the first time, you can help them fix it immediately.
Start by using your existing Node.js sample apps or SDK, which you can automatically import from GitHub so you don’t need to do anything to keep sample apps up to date. You can try this right now! Go to and watch Glitch import your Node sample app.
Help your developer community become** more diverse and inclusive** by promoting sample apps on Glitch, where we have a zero tolerance policy for harassment and abuse, and actively manage our community to encourage underrepresented coders to participate. This is all free for any company and any API platform to use. And all these features will stay free.

See it in action

Glitch For Your API is so much better than the ways we’ve been doing API evangelism in the past that smart companies are already making use of its features today.

You can see the power of Glitch For Your API in action for Facebook’s Messenger API documentation right now. Check out their Quick Start guide, and time how long it takes for you to get from clicking the “Remix in Glitch” button to having working, running code in your browser.

It’s not just the biggest companies or platforms that need this stuff. We’re seeing teams of all sizes make great use of Glitch For Your API as we’ve been previewing the features. Take a look at our friends at Howdy, who’ve fully integrated Glitch right into the README file for their Botkit Starter Kit for Slack.

Instead of explaining all kinds of setup, they focus on what’s unique to their platform.

What could be easier? Nothing, that’s what!

Want to do fancier things like virtual “office hours”, where you can offer live support on Glitch to developers who are trying your API? Want custom subdomains for your Glitch projects so developers can remember your product and your brand? All of that is free, too.

**Drop us a lin**e and we’ll send you a complete guide to how your team can make the most out of Glitch For Your API, too.

A Sneak Preview For Advanced API Platforms

And there’s more. We’re inviting a limited number of companies that use Glitch For Your API to test our upcoming suite of paid features. Want to be among the first wave of platforms to test this out?** ** You’ll get the following capabilities on top of the already-amazing free features:

Developer success analytics: We’ll give you detailed metrics on how many devs try your API each day, and work with you so your sample apps report back whether developers succeed when using your API
A live catalog of sample developer apps: We’ll create a custom, branded landing page that showcases an **unlimited number ***of* sample apps to show off your API — anything from Hello, World to a Facebook killer. Need help building those sample apps? We’ll lend a hand there, too.
Requesting live help: Coming soon, Glitch will allow any user who gets stuck to virtually “raise their hand”, so you’ll get notified the moment any user gets frustrated or stumped while using your API. You can fix the error before they even think of using your competitor’s APIs.
Shape the Glitch For Your API roadmap: We’re inviting the first paid users of Glitch For Your API to help define which features we prioritize, including which analytics to include and even more advanced tools for assisting developers. When fully launched, we expect Glitch For Your API’s paid features to cost roughly the price of sending one evangelist to one event each month. Somebody on your team can stay home and hang out with coders on Glitch instead of handing out t-shirts and scanning badges at a conference. Doesn’t that sound nice? **Get in touc**h and we’ll fill you in on what we’ve got planned.

Let the Apps Unfurl

We’re big fans of Slack here on the Glitch team, especially since most of us are distributed and I, personally, need a vehicle for constant emoji communication. We’ve set our Slack team up with apps — and, most importantly, custom emoji — to optimize our workflow. But one of the most subtle features in Slack we appreciate is perhaps one of the best parts of the platform: Unfurling.

“Unfurl” is what Slack calls it when you share a link into a channel and something special happens. These days, it’s usually a little snippet from the site, or a thumbnail image. But imagine if simply pasting a link into a channel could have all the power of the app that’s connected on the other side of that link. Suddenly, that little link could be rich, and interactive, and just plain useful. Much like you.

Today, Slack has launched App Unfurls, and it’s a feature we couldn’t be more excited about, for two reasons:

First: we’re supporting App Unfurls in Glitch so any link to a Glitch app in a Slack channel will get smart, simple links to let you run the app, view its code, or remix it into a new app. Isn’t that cool? Yes.
And the second reason is even more exciting: You can add App Unfurls right now to any site or app, just by remixing our sample app on Glitch. Use our example as a starting point, modify it to drop in the right information or links from your app, and you’re all set! (If you’ve ever gotten OEmbed support working, this is even easier.) What do you get when you combine Slack’s new App Unfurls with Glitch’s easy starter app? Super smart links to your app that will take the guess work out of what Slack users can do with your app.

Okay, it’s time to give it a try:

Install the Glitch App Unfurler in your favorite Slack channel (you might need permission to do so) and try dropping in some links to your favorite Glitch apps.

Marvel at the shiny links! Ponder what would happen if your app supported these and other smart interactive features, too! What’s extra cool is that you can make an unfurl app that unfurls links of any domain. Perhaps your team wants to see something else when a Glitch link is dropped in — you can make the app that controls that. And if you ever wanted to unfurl authenticated content from your application into Slack when someone links to it, now you can!

Click this link to remix our App Unfurler and make it your own. Once you’ve got a basic version of App Unfurling working, let us know! You can tweet us at @glitch and we’ll share your work with everybody.

That’s it! We can’t wait to see what you build, and a special thanks to our friends at Slack for all the help in getting us ready to make a great App Unfurl experience on Glitch. We’re excited to help with Slack’s efforts to make unfurling even smarter and more useful.

Oh, and while you’re here? Make sure to check out all the different Slack apps and bots on Glitch, any of which you can remix and make your own, to help make your team more productive and happy.

Ready, Set, Glitch!

Last week was a busy week for us on the Glitch team, and it looks like it was also for you: our stellar users who have been making such incredible stuff with Glitch over the past several days!

Tracery is a tool that writes generative grammars, which leads to inevitable fun when applied to Twitter bot implementations. I’m super impressed by 🅱🏋®🔛’s documentation on this Tracery-powered bot and, thanks to them, you can remix it and get your own Tracery bot running in mere minutes!

If, instead of text, you want your bots to use images, Botwiki has you covered. Remix their random-image-twitterbot project and add your own assets and keys with ease!

Who loves animals? *We all do. *Cool human Rob Looby made an app that serves up great photos of their dog, Chewie, who has the most fabulous underbite 😍

It has been great to see everyone exploring the use of Glitch with data visualizations. We’ve got some cool things in the works to connect companies with APIs to those of you making great things using them, but already we’re seeing some great visual data apps:

The quickest way to my heart is color analysis! clara beyer has taken up that precious coronary real estate with this super rad color analysis tool, which visually and mathematically tells the color stories of any hex color value set.

One of the many cool things about building with Glitch is the ability to build the back-end part of the app. A few of you have been taking advantage of this (like the above Twitter bots), but it’s been especially exciting to see some of you trying out some cutting edge offline app technologies, like Service Workers.

You can remix these projects with ease and have an already working progressive web app in seconds. Shouts out to Mariko Kosaka and Jeff Posnick on their *progressive web *projects!

We are infinitely impressed by the wide variety of projects we’ve seen coming from everyone, and we are looking forward to seeing what else you create or remix. If you make something neat, we want to know: respond here or tweet us @glitch and enjoy the rest of your week, okay!

How we won’t screw up Glitch

Glitch is the friendly community where you’re going to make the app of your dreams. And that community is amazing —with everyone from independent digital artists to the most innovative companies in tech all showing up to share their creations. Yay!

Usually, at this point, companies like to get people excited by sharing their roadmap of the features they have planned. But honestly, Glitch users are smart and can probably figure out a lot of the stuff we’re working on. Instead, we’d rather emphasize how we’re going to try to be worthy of your trust.

**No lock-in. **We use totally standard infrastructure for Glitch, including regular old Node.js, and normal JavaScript for your code. You can export all of your code to GitHub with a click, or download a zip file of your code instantly at any time. And it’s gonna stay that way. The key thing that we think will keep you using Glitch is by your deep emotional connection to your fellow members of the community. And that’s not lock-in, that’s love! Aww. ❤️
We’re not gonna take features away from you and then start charging for them. This is one of those tricky things that a lot of companies do when they start building a business model for their product — they ask, “what would people pay for?” And then they realize… oh crap, the stuff people want to pay for is already offered for free. We’ve thought about this pretty carefully so we’ll be able to support our current features going forward. (It doesn’t cost much for us to run your Glitch app, and that cost is going down each month. No biggie.)
**When we do start charging for stuff, we’ll check with you first. **We imagine we’ll add some paid features on top of what Glitch has now (maybe domain names? Everybody loves mapping domain names!) and when we do, we’ll let you know they’re coming, plus get your feedback on what you think is fair and reasonable pricing. Because we want you to be happy to pay for these valuable features!
**We won’t let a bunch of jerks take over the community. **Ugh, this one is so annoying. Usually, when a company is trying to grow a community, they’ll let just about anybody in because they’re desperate to show growth, and that inevitably means opening the door to some small number of jerks, who then ruin the whole site for everybody. Instead of doing that foolish thing, we’re going to grow Glitch steadily and deliberately, with tons of room for new folks, but a lot of thought put into preventing abuse and harassment. I can’t guarantee we’ll get it perfect, but honestly the thought of working every day to build something that’s mostly used by jerks would be awful, so we’re not gonna do it. And honestly, Glitch is growing pretty quickly because it’s friendly, so hooray for nice people.
**We want your fun and weird and “not serious” stuff on Glitch, too. **While we’re ecstatic to feature Serious Tools from incredible companies like Slack on Glitch, we think your artsy or silly or deeply personal projects are vital to the community, too. The same people who spend their day building a complex API integration on top of Glitch’s tools will come home and collaborate on a generative poetry project at night, and that’s exactly what we’re designing for. So don’t feel embarrassed to show all your many facets here; that’s what our own team does, too.
**No April Fools Jokes. **We plan to be mildly funny and confusing every other day of the year, instead.

We hope it’s crystal clear that we’re serious about making Glitch a great community for the long haul. Honestly, Glitch already offers a bunch of features that no other platform has put together before, but we’re not getting complacent about it — there is a lot more to come. And as we dive into building out Glitch’s future, we’re asking you to help us with two things:

Tell your friends. We don’t have a huge marketing budget (Fog Creek is still a small, independent, self-funded company!) so the biggest way you can help is to let other people know that Glitch is something special. We can’t wait to see what you create together. :) Alright, now that you know where we’re headed, go explore Glitch and make something great!

Remix in Spaaaace!

When we say that Glitch is the friendly community where you’ll make the app of your dreams, one of the key reasons we think that’s true is because of the power of remixing.

What does “remix” mean on Glitch? It means you (yes, you!) can reuse the code from another project on Glitch, tweak it or personalize it to make it your own, and share your improvements with the world. But it’s easier to show you than to tell you.

NASA (the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has had a series of logos over the years, each of them differently awesome.

If you’re really into NASA logos, there are lots of different histories of where they all came from and how they’re used. Spend some time learning about how the awesome 70s-era “worm” logo was wrongly set adrift into space.

But back here on Earth, our friends in the Glitch community have found some fun new ways to make the NASA logo a lot more personal, and to show off the power of remixing on Glitch.

First, Dan Reeves (with an assist from Tom Hazledine and Cornwall Geeks) created the “Make your own NASA logo” project on Glitch:

This auspicious start was announced with a simple, fun tweet:

And of course, that’s awesome enough on its own. But in this initial, quick implementation, Dan’s version had a separate text input that you had to type your message into before it would be added to the custom-animated NASA logo.

That’s where the fun of remixing comes in. On any Glitch project, you can view the code for yourself (tip: just go to glitch.com/~projectname to see the code, which in this case is glitch.com/~nasa).

Jordan Scales did exactly that, and made some slight improvements, announced with this delighted tweet:

And you can see the out-of-this-world results for yourself with the new Nasafy:

Or, just check out the Nasafy app, which now has inline editing to make your own fun, animated NASA-style logo. And maybe you can think of a way that you’d want to remix the app yourself to add some more tricks to the mix?

In conclusion, PIGS IN SPAAAACE!

Designing Glitch — Where We Started

So about a year ago, we first launched Glitch (then known as HyperDev) in beta, as a cool way to write a real web-app. It’s been almost two years since DanielX and I first presented the idea to Fog Creek in 2015.

Let’s look back 👀✨

If you turn off the lights, squeeze a lemon in your eye, and squint real hard, you might see some similarities to Glitch today. The asset management stuff wasn’t too far off though.

Real rough, but good enough to help us convey our vision for web development without the boring parts.

The next thing we were told to do is come up with some high-level product principles. These also started rough, but we’ve sharpened them up over time — and as the team has grown:

(Secret principle #6 is steal from Trello whenever possible)

While we haven’t nailed all of these yet, we’re steadily working towards them.

Having these tentpoles made it easier for us prioritize and push for doing the right things — and to figure out what to cut:

Early on, starting a new project meant making a couple of tough feeling choices. And instead of actually making something, you’d be off researching the joys of Ruby, debating it’s performance and wondering whether you should use Ember, Angular or whatever’s hot on the streets this month.

This was also an example of us being too opinionated and trying to be too prescriptive about the ‘best way’ to code.

This clearly violated our first product principle of getting you started fast. So throwing this out and relying on our users to make interesting, remix-able projects felt like a better call.

Sidenote: I thought using emojis as an interface element would be at least slightly controversial in 2015. 🌈.

To make it easier to do common coding tasks, I wrote a feature that would let you search and insert pre-made code snippets into your document to do things like init a Slack bot in a js file or scaffold an animation with keyframes in some css.

This made sense in theory, and was easy to sell people on as a magical feature, but it turned out to be too magical to actually be good:

In user tests, no one seemed to know what they expected the feature to do. In Fog Creek hackathons, nobody really used it even after they were told what it did.

There were also a lot of hard, scary questions around this feature like:

Where would the snippets come from? Who would write and maintain them?
How would we do non-trivial snippets that required changes across multiple files? (Silently editing files the user couldn’t see sounded sketchy.)
Should we add packages to projects if a snippet required it?
Would we be endlessly porting and updating snippets people relied on? So eventually we cut the scope of this and simplified it into the ‘Add Packages’ button that appears when you’re in package.json. This feels way more predictable, and will be way easier to maintain and adapt to other languages and package management systems.

Another feature that lived for months in the beta was the ability to change the language of your document and have it auto-magically just work. So if I was in a js file and I wanted to step up my game, I could select coffee and be cool AF.

Language selection made it easy to experiment with languages and was a nice, contextual way to show users our currently supported languages. People seemed to like it. When it worked.

In order to do this you had to be using our hyperweb-init library in your project. hw-init did a bunch of things, like setting up express, language compilation and watching. In theory, I thought this might make getting started easier because new users wouldn’t have to trace through boilerplate init code in server.js

But actually what happened in testing is that people actually felt less comfortable when they couldn’t see their express init code. Again we crossed over into too magical territory.

Additionally, going from something like js to coffee was easy, but what about from coffee to python? How would hyperweb-init work in other languages that might not have existing libs for server-side compilation of coffee or less? If I changed server.js to swift, what impacts does/should that have on package management?

phew When your edge-cases have so many branching paths that they start to resemble an AI problem, it’s time to step back and try something else.

Over the next couple months we slowly trimmed the fat off the welcome-project, and removed any first-party dependencies to better walk the line between simple and transparent.

So we talked about some things, had some laughs. But I’ve still got so many more Glitch rabbit holes to dive into for later posts.

In the meantime, If you’re curious, all of my design files are up at 🐙 Glitch-design on github. hyperweb.sketch is the window into my soul: it’s a little bit of a trash fire in there, but it’s pretty entertaining. I wear my inspirations on my sleeve in these files.

Thanks for taking a look at how Glitch was designed. We can’t wait to see what you make yourself! Go give it a try.

Learning About Learning About What We Want to Be Learning

As an educator, engineer, and follower of many of the same kinds of people, I am hyper-aware of how learning to code is a struggle for the whole spectrum of experience of developers in the field, myself especially! We all have our own ways of combatting or succumbing to impostor syndrome, but at the end of the day we work in a very demanding industry that requires constant learning and evolving. Where does one start?

Those of us who have been programming for years like to reminisce about when building the Web meant blog themes and static sites in hilariously unpredictable web editors. Today, it feels like we spend 90% of our time setting up developer workflow and deployment processes, leaving 10% to actually programming an app while learning what the heck we just set up. And somehow we are expected to all learn the same way!

I, personally, am a visual learner who is not very good at “reading the manual.” Other great developers I know cannot follow online videos or conference talks, but they can read all the docs! We have very different styles of learning, but online we have created this perception of the “JavaScript Rockstar™” who very few, if any, folks can fit into perfectly. I think that one way of combatting this fake idea is by having open conversations about how we learn, what we want to learn, and what is keeping us from learning.

On Glitch.com, we have a variety of apps built by and for the community to get started with different technologies — Twitter bots, Alexa skills, Mocha unit testing, Grunt task management, HTML5, and so much more — but there are* so many things *that are missing. I want to build more and have others build more, but I also want to make sure we’re providing services people actually want and need, so the week before last I went on Twitter and asked what you wanted to learn.

I was floored by the candid responses from all walks of developer life — beginners, language experts, library authors, “buy more twitter follower” bots — and I think we all learned a little more about ourselves and how we perceive how others learn. I know I did.

In no particular order, here is the list of libraries, frameworks, APIS, etc., which people said they wanted to learn but weren’t sure where to start:

D3
React
three.js
ES6
Aura
Backbone
Vue
Preact
Inferno
Glimmer
jQuery
svelte
web components
Canvas API
Redux
p5
Service Workers
WebGL
“progressive web apps” or PWA
GraphQL
amber
web assembly I was not particularly surprised with the responses given. Sure, there may be a couple in there that are joke responses (that’s the nature of my Twitter following). For the most part, though, a lot of these are things I want to learn too and am not sure where to start or why.

A couple of folks responded to my question wondering why anyone needs to learn any of those things. Of course, the general discussion at no point said “you must learn this thing” but sometimes our anxieties from the fast-paced always-learning dev scene causes folks to project onto others those anxieties in argumentative ways. This, naturally makes it hard to have an open, candid conversation — many of the above responses came to me via direct message — so it is clear that the learning problem is a culture problem.

Besides culture-incubated insecurities, the biggest reason folks gave is that they don’t really have a purpose for it — or at least that purpose hasn’t been articulated to us in a way to sell us on the technology.

New tools can be extremely daunting, especially when they are a different paradigm than we are used to. In the past, I’ve wanted to get more involved in functional programming but have been concerned about the rhetoric of some of its more vocal community members. I’m not the only one.

I see this barrier lowering a bit for JavaScript developers with languages like Elm — a functional language that compiles to JavaScript — and it seems like many of you are curious and excited about it too.

So it seems like these barriers are 1. needing to know why one would use a thing and 2. discovering if one can learn a tool without being shut down or turned off by the community behind it.

**I mean, we can all stand to be a little bit nicer, right? **It’s very clear that even the creators of the libraries we are intimidated by experience their own anxieties about learning and also teaching folks how to use their tools.

Another thing we should do is have conversations about why one should be learning different web technologies, beyond them being “cool” or popular. Let’s be completely honest here — there is nothing inherently cool about a JavaScript library, framework, interop, or whatever. At the end of the day, we should be using the languages and tools that best serve us when we need them.

As it’s impossible to know everything — I’m so sorry to break this to you — I think it’s very important for those who are authoring web development tools to give discrete examples and scenarios. In my past life as a web app consultant, I’ve found that creating user personas has helped me focus my empathy towards my users. It turns out that design processes also work great for documentation and marketing! If I can’t put myself in my users shoes, how am I supposed to make a connection that gets them to use my product?

And of course, you want real-world useful examples of your tools in action. We at Fog Creek have been super stoked to see all of the great “Hello World” apps coming from the community, which many folks have been remixing to make their own amazing creations.

If you’re the author of a JavaScript library or framework, Glitch is the perfect platform for you to show off your examples and demos in action. And the people you want to use it can just remix them and not have to worry about dev-ops or environment workflow or processes — it just works and it’s their own copy. The only thing you need to do is tell a story as to why they would want to try it!

We love to see what you all make, and we are always looking to populate our community site with all of your cool dynamic apps and static pages. If you make something cool and want us to show it off — or you yourself are wondering *why *and *how *to use Glitch — let us know by tweeting @glitch or you can email me at jenn@fogcreek.com!

The web was supposed to be a thing we make

**Retro never goes out of style on the World Wide Web. **From its earliest days, people made personal webpages about their nostalgia for pop culture. When we launched a collection of First Websites on Glitch, it’d be easy to think we were just carrying on that great tradition. We painstakingly mimicked classic layouts from sites like LiveJournal, Neopets, Movable Type and many other old-school ways of publishing a web page. If you were on the Internet back then, or are just curious about web history, you should check it out, and remix those sites to make your own new classic.

But our inspiration went a little bit deeper: It was also about remembering that *millions *of people created their own websites in the era before today’s social networks took over. Learning to tweak HTML to create a GeoCities page, or to customize CSS to make a MySpace page look perfect, was a rite of passage for the first 10 0r 15 years of the web.

At Fog Creek, we’ve thought a lot about how to help more people create their own websites, apps, and software. We were inspired to create Glitch because we know there used to be a time when people on the web were almost as likely to *make *a web page as to read one. In a time when people online spend most of their time using just three apps, it seems more important than ever to encourage a diverse community of creators to experiment with their broadest set of ideas. And what better place to do so than a friendly, helpful community like Glitch?

So while it’s fun to click around old-fashioned (and, well, sometimes not very pretty) old websites, we also hope you’ll also take a few minutes to think about how you’d leave your mark on the web. But what if you’ve never made a web page? Don’t worry: You can check out this simple video we made of talking you through building your first web page on Glitch.

If you do take a few minutes to make a page, either for the first time or just for the first time in years, let us know by sharing it on social media. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Gratitude as a Company Value

I work at a little company named Glitch. Even though we’re small, we’re one of the most venerated little companies in the tech industry, dating back to when we started making beloved products under the name Fog Creek Software — where Trello was born, and where Stack Overflow was co-created.

But though we’re relatively well-known for a small company, few people outside the company know about one of our most striking traditions. It’s a practice that is not just motivating or useful, but downright moving. How often does anybody get to have a regular part of work that touches us on an emotional level? That’s exactly what happens at Glitch. But first, I have to tell you about a flightless bird.

Years ago, our cofounder Joel Spolsky, in a fit of inspiration, decided that the mascot for the company’s then-flagship project would be a kiwi bird. The design went through some evolutions and early versions (including one illustrated by Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, back when he did that sort of thing!), and the end result looked something like this:

From there, the kiwi quickly graduated from simply being a product mascot into representing each of us on the team. We even got little kiwi statues that we give out to commemorate each employee’s anniversaries at the company. I told a little bit of that story in this talk at the Webstock conference in New Zealand a while back:

If there’s one thing New Zealanders love, it’s pandering to their tastes with cute kiwis.

But along the way of the kiwi becoming a mascot, everyone inside the company started a regular habit inside our regular all-hands “town hall” meetings. At each town hall, in front of the whole company, people on various teams and on different projects take some time to publicly acknowledge others in the company. We called these acknowledgements “kiwi bravos”.

Bravos can take the form of everything from a simple, brief nod to someone who helped answer a befuddling technical challenge to a broad acknowledgement of a team that worked tirelessly on a lengthy support question to effusive praise for a designer who went above and beyond in making a customer happy. What matters, though, is the overall effect.

At Glitch, our whole company regularly takes time to listen as team members publicly thank each other. From this comes a **culture of gratitude. **Even as we renamed the company from Fog Creek to Glitch and focused on our new product (the logo is two fishes instead of a bird!), we were able to preserve, and to grow, that culture of gratitude.

As a New Yorker, and someone who’s worked in tech for a long time, I was pretty skeptical about the idea of Bravos at first. Publicly acknowledging coworkers sounded like it could be pretty corny, or even unpleasant if it were forced like those times when people in big companies have to sign birthday cards for coworkers they’ve never met.

But in practice, this habit of showing our appreciation is incredibly sincere, genuinely heartfelt, and downright *moving. *I found myself incredibly surprised at the level of emotion I felt in seeing people simply, and honestly, recognizing each other’s efforts.

Best of all, our embrace of this form of gratitude has made things better. A better working environment for everyone on our team, a better focus on things that make our customers happy, and even better communication as people learn new ways to do things simply based on what gets praised.

We don’t expect that every company or organization is going to embrace a slightly wacky cartoon bird as part of their culture, but we do hope every team can embrace the idea that underpins our Bravos: we should regularly take the time to show our colleagues, peers and collaborators that we’re thankful for their work.

(Oh, and if that culture of gratitude sounds like the kind of place you’d like to work, maybe you should **)

Creator Spotlight: Building Twitter Bots with Stefan Bohacek

Twitter’s history with developers has been a rocky one, to say the least. But like the on-again, off-again relationships of our teenage years, it seems despite this tumultuous past we just can’t get the love for creating Twitter apps out of our system.

The French (of course!) have a term for this at times tortuous and all-consuming desire — ‘amour fou’. Insane love. And nowhere does this fiery passion for Twitter development burn stronger than on Glitch.

A quick search of the community site reveals a treasure-trove of Twitter apps. From New Yorker caption bots to ways to share midi files via tweets (!) And at the heart of it all, stoking the flames is Stefan Bohacek.

Stefan is the creator of Botwiki, an open catalog of friendly, useful and artistic online bots, tools and tutorials.

Alongside fellow admin, Veronica Belmont, Stefan and co have worked tirelessly for the past year and a half on the site that’s dedicated to teaching folks how to make friendly, whimsical, and (by his own admission) “sometimes mildly annoying”, online bots.

In fact, it’s Stefan’s Twitter bot templates that power many of the Twitter apps on Glitch. His templates provide a useful springboard to the throngs of devs who are eager to quickly create a Twitter app or bot on Glitch, and they’ve already been remixed by more than 350 other app creators.

Among Stefan’s many Glitch creations are:

Twitterbot — A simple template for making Twitter bots.
Twitterbot-autorespond — A template for making Twitter bots that respond to @ mentions and DMs.
Random-image-twitterbot — A Twitter bot that posts random images of your choice.
DM-retweet-twitterbot — A retweet-via-DM Twitter bot. Stefan says he began creating these template apps on Glitch after “I wrote several botmaking tutorials and I realized that the hardest part was always taking your code and making sure it runs after you close down your computer”. But his accessible templates and step-by-step tutorials haven’t just made creating Twitter apps quicker, they’ve opened Twitter development up to a much larger audience too.

“I struggled to make instructions on how to deploy and run your bot on a server accessible to people with less technical experience. But Glitch changed that.” Now he hopes that his Glitch templates mean that “everyone is able to make a Twitter bot clone for themselves”. Stefan says that “we are facing enormous challenges in the world, and while we absolutely can’t solve them all through writing code, for those times when we can, Glitch, and similar tools, make it much easier for everyone to contribute”. But while we appreciate the props, it’s really made possible by the great tutorials and resources that Stefan has worked hard to put together.

So armed with Stefan’s templates, what will you besotted Twitter fans build next?

Developer Relations and the Need for Better Tooling

We know that Developers are writing the script of the future, and their creations can generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue. As a consequence, large tech firms frequently acquire (and shut down) promising startups for millions of dollars just to get their developers. Not to mention the perks offered to try and recruit new developers can resemble those usually reserved for sports stars and hedge fund managers — from things like on-site massages to laundry services and even music studios. When it comes to hiring top dev talent, money is no object.

But cut to Developer Relations, and we often see a very different picture. Developer Relations teams are small, usually numbering only a few people. They’re often awkwardly augmented onto the Support, Marketing or Sales department. Senior Management seems to never quite know what to do with them, so they’re frequently passed around from one department to the next. And of course, they constantly have to justify their existence and prove their Return on Investment (ROI).

These could be the teething problems of a new field, except of course that for almost as long as there have been developers, we’ve had Developer Relations. In one form or another, and with a variety of names, it has been undertaken for decades. Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Selling the Dream’ is now more than 25 years old, Evans Data’s Developer Relations Conference in its 13th year, and yet as a profession, Developer Relations still seems in many respects to be in its infancy.

I think it’s because, for most of its existence, it has remained the pursuit of a few small disparate groups of developers found inside a handful of long-standing Tech giants. But with each new book, conference (DevRelCon, DevXCon, Dev Rel Summit), and blog, Developer Relations is becoming more accessible and its adoption is growing as best-practice emerges and gets shared.

But while Developer Relations is professionalizing, there are some things still holding us back. In particular, the ROI question remains a tricky subject for many of us because we still don’t have a great answer.

While it can be hard to measure the impact of some of our current efforts, like handing out t-shirts and speaking at conferences, for the most part it isn’t a lack of metrics. When compared to the robust sales funnels, extensive KPI reporting and dedicated tooling of our Sales and Marketing colleagues, our cobbled together spreadsheets and in-house developed tools can let us down. Brandon West, former Director of Developer Relations at SendGrid, tweeting from DevXCon just yesterday captures this:

So it’s these problems that we’re trying to tackle with Glitch for Platforms: A dedicated toolset specifically for Developer Relations.

Glitch for Platforms gets you started with a range of free tools that help you leverage the power of Glitch and provide sample apps to kickstart developers with your product. You can use these to create unlimited projects, allow people to import your GitHub repos with just one click, and embed a ‘Remix on Glitch’ button into your help docs and blog posts. You can even do things like automatically populate apps with a customer’s API keys on remix so that they get to see a real, working app running instantly with their data. This cuts your Time to Hello World (TtHW) from minutes or hours to seconds.

Then if you’re serious about doubling down on Developer Experience (DX) you can use Glitch for Platforms, including our new Help feature. This lets you know when a dev gets stuck, allowing you to hop into a project and help them right away. This takes getting help with code beyond the forum, enabling folks to get help in real-time and in a more personable manner. And it allows you to directly improve success rates of getting developers working with your API because you can help them out before they give up.

We also provide the advanced analytics you need to show the impact of your efforts. These stats will help you to understand how the refinements you make to DX improve outcomes for developers, and they allow you to optimize your funnel to make the best use of your time and resources.

Of course, we also provide a custom-branded gallery to feature your sample apps and for select partners, we can work with your team to share your platform’s message with the Glitch community.

To get started using Glitch with your own platform, learn more about what you can do. With these tools, we can help take your developer relations efforts to the next level and get you the recognition and budget you deserve. It’s no on-site massage, but it’s a whole lot less stressful (and more effective) than any ‘t-shirt giveaway and pray’ strategy.

9 Ways to Improve API Developer Experience

We recently released Glitch for Platforms, a dedicated set of tools specifically for Developer Relations. We’ve been previewing some of the features with partners for a few weeks, so let’s take a look at some of the ways Glitch for Platforms features are already being used in the wild.

One of the core features of Glitch is the ability to remix an app. This means anyone can copy and reuse the code from another project on Glitch, that they can tweak and personalize to make it their own. This is especially handy for those with an API or SDK, as it allows you to create sample apps that use your service, which folks can remix to quickly get started with to build their own apps.

This is exactly how Facebook are using Glitch in their Messenger quick-start documentation. They’ve created a simple template project on Glitch that shows off the key features of their Messenger API. They’ve linked it from their documentation so that you can “open it live on Glitch and remix your own to make it work in a minute.”

The lovely people over at Howdy have taken this even further for Botkit, their fab set of tools for creating and managing bots. They’ve created 3 customizable Starter Kits for building bots for Slack, Cisco Spark, as well as Facebook. You can remix them directly from their GitHub readme as they make use of our GitHub import links feature. Howdy Founder and CEO, Ben Brown, says “Glitch takes what could be a really complicated process and makes it a one-click operation.”

A staple of the Twilio blog is tutorial blog posts, walking people through code to create some example app. Twilio have used Glitch in their blog posts to not only explain the code in the example but provide an app that users can demo. This is useful both to understand what the finished product should look like, and to remix to try it out for themselves. Whether it be a fun SMS-powered adventure game or a core Node.js SMS sample project, Twilio have used Glitch-based example projects so that readers can skip the setup and instead focus on understanding aspects of the Twilio API.

A creative use of remixing is being employed by freeCodeCamp, a community to learn to code and build projects for nonprofits. In order to help people learn back-end development, they’ve created a number of partial projects that accompany their explanatory course material. Students can utilize what they’ve just learned in the course material and complete the partial projects to create a working app. Quincy Larson, Founder and Teacher at freeCodeCamp remarks that “Glitch does exactly what our community needs — it makes it trivial to build APIs, pipe them together with other services, then share the resulting applications”.

Code examples are a key part of any API documentation. Interactive documentation improves on this and allows you to try out real requests. However, this still has the limitation that you can’t take that working example with you, and replicating it can be time-consuming. That’s why for example, HyperApp, a JavaScript library for building frontend apps, use Glitch in their docs. By supplementing their code explanations with working examples, users are able to re-use and extend them for use in their own apps. HyperApp maintainer, Jorge Bucaran, explains that it’s this “simplicity and straightforwardness” that attracted them to use Glitch, and it’s delivering the ability to work with their code “without getting bogged down in details”.

The Glitch editor is collaborative. Multiple people can work on code together in real-time, like editing a Google doc. This means you can pair program and work together with your team at the same time, creating projects where all members have access to edit the code. But you can also allow visitors to just view your code too. When combined with audio sharing software, like Twitch or YouTube Live, you can eschew the grainy screen share and work on code while others watch you work directly in the editor. Webpack maintainer, Sean Larkin, did this while creating a live demo of Webpack’s lazy loading capabilities for example, with users watching and learning while he worked.

Glitch accelerates web development, and this is especially useful when at a Hackathon and time is limited. A lot of time can be lost deciding upon and getting started with the various technology choices. You can help Hackathon attendees to get up and running with your API by creating examples that they can work from. Take for example the recent Anvil Hack event, a creative Hackathon by Hacksmiths. Students were quickly utilizing Spotify and Twilio APIs by re-using existing apps to prototype their own using Glitch.

A recent addition to our platform is Glitch Help, which provides the ability for people to ask for help when they get stuck, in realtime. This is especially useful for developer relations teams as it means you can hop into their project and help people directly before they give up. This is something existing partners are already keen to utilize, like Wistia for example, who provide a number of sample apps embedded within their developer documentation.

We’ve built a friendly, welcoming community, and we’ve made sure that our outreach efforts regularly connect with underrepresented developers that other communities don’t serve. When you bring your platform to Glitch, you get outside the bubble of the developers you already know and a custom-branded gallery of sample apps for your API helps introduce them to your platform. Take for example the following collections that we created to coincide with the flagship conferences for Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

Lastly, I wanted to highlight A-Frame School, an interactive course for WebVR. Mozilla’s A-Frame team have put Glitch at the heart of their documentation by creating an interactive workshop based around their Glitch sample project. In their own words, they describe the advantages of using Glitch for this:

Thousands of people have already been introduced to A-Frame and WebVR by following this course.

Underpinning all of these examples are the advanced analytics provided by Glitch for Platforms. Our stats let you know how many people have tried and successfully used your sample projects. And when combined with web analytics and your own internal stats, this gives you complete insight into the entirety of your funnel — from viewing documentation, through to successfully creating an app and working with your API.

Through these activities, early adopters of Glitch for Platforms have already been able to optimize their funnel, generate more leads and improve outcomes for developers trying to use their APIs.

How I wanted to start with Stripe

This morning, a helpful blog post by Slater Stich made the rounds on Hacker News, showcasing a static website implementing Stripe Subscriptions that was backed by AWS Lambda.

The thing that caught my eye about this post was just how little code it took to get a subscription service up and running. Wow! That’s so easy, I could spin up an ad-hoc tip jar, or roll-my-own Patreon. For better or worse, though, my recent privilege of spending a whole lot of time building projects in Glitch has left me hungry for more.

I like that Slater did a great job of showing me the source for how to accomplish something useful and new to me, but with my head in the world of Glitch I’ve come to expect more: In addition to seeing the source, I should be able to play with it and see where I can stretch it, and I want to easily make it my own.

And so I moved the author’s example into Glitch. Slater was right, Stripe’s documentation is top-notch. I read the source article at 11:30, after my team stand-up ended, and by lunch time I had the example working, except for the success message. So I tagged in my coworker, Gareth, to help me polish up the project while I worked out that final kink.

I owe you a note of explanation around my being grumpy about the example using Lambda. So here’s the thing…. I am a really huge fan of AWS Lambda. I sincerely believe it (or technologies similar to it) are a huge part of the future of software development. Slater’s work of showcasing a Lambda example is also very valuable and I’m glad he did so. But the constraint of using Lambda limits its brilliance.

That’s because even just getting my KMS values into AWS would’ve taken me longer than it took me to get this project working on Glitch (and I’m lucky enough to already have an AWS account and know what it is in the first place!) By bringing this project into Glitch it takes it out of the community of developers sharing their professional code with each other, and into the community of anybody with a web browser and the interest to have their own payment page.

That’s why I was grumpy; Folks are doing great things, but my beliefs are now aligned with a future where sharing expertise goes further than just *showing *and explaining (which clearly Slater and the Stripe API Docs team did a great job of, as it inspired this whole ordeal). I want the art of sharing expertise to include *making new superpowers immediately available for your tinkering pleasure *and inviting you to make them your own with nothing more than a web browser and some human spirit.

And so, here it is:

I made my first Stripe app today. I invite you to reconsider Slater’s original article and then take it a few steps further: step into the source of stripe-checkout.glitch.me, remix it and make it your own.

(And hey, if you get stuck just raise your hand. I’ll keep an eye out for you.)

Put Pixel to Screen and Express Yourself

Creativity is fragile. Fantastic ideas and creations start out as nebulous thoughts that need time and focus to grow. But they’re easily dismissed, forgotten or downright crushed, and there are so many things that can crush them.

One such thing is technology. While it can be the driving force of creativity, at times, it’s just as likely to be the thing that stops us in our tracks too.

As web development technologies have evolved, their complexity has grown and the depth of understanding required across a whole slew of topics has followed in kind. It can be difficult for even professional developers to keep up, so those with just an occasional interest or ad-hoc requirement have a very difficult task. Just to be able to create something and share it online needs knowledge of package management, terminal commands, build tools and version control systems before you’ve even gotten to type a single if statement.

It’s no wonder then that many people fail to overcome these hurdles, and we’ll never know what could have come from their ideas.

This is why we’re excited to add our Art app collection to Glitch. It includes both examples of, and the tools to build, visual and interactive experiences without any of that complexity. They’re all available to be remixed, and doing so hurls you over many of the technical roadblocks, helping you to be immediately creative.

The collection includes building block apps for:

[P5.js](https://glitch.com/~p5js): A library for creating graphic and interactive experiences, based on Processing.
** ** [Three.js](https://glitch.com/~three-js): An easy to use, lightweight, 3D library.
[ASCII-art](https://glitch.com/~ascii-art): A library for ANSI codes, Figlet fonts, ASCII art and other ASCII graphics. As well as Paper.js, Processing.js and Node-Canvas.

There are also examples to inspire, including:

[Color-wander](https://glitch.com/~color-wander): Generative artwork based on a seeded random by Matt DesLauriers.
[By conspiracy or design](https://glitch.com/~by-conspiracy-or-design): A poem in Node.js by Daniel Holden and Chris Kerr. A valid program that produces a visual representation of itself when compiled and run.
[Make check box art](https://glitch.com/~makecheckboxart): An app to make pixel art using checkboxes.

We hope you find these helpful in putting pixel to screen, and creating wonderful digital art. Let us know what you create, and if you want to see them on our community site then take a look at the Creator’s Guide.

If you get stuck, just raise your hand.

Coding: From Art to Science, and Back Again?

It’s May 24, 2017. Twilio CEO, Jeff Lawson, stands in front of an auditorium packed with developers.

"Code is creative,” he says, “It’s more than just math. It’s art.”

A statement met with applause, but by this point shouldn’t it be a given?

After all, for as long as we’ve been coding people have been using code for creativity. From Noll’s computer generated imagery and Knowlton’s ASCII Art in the 60s, to the emergence of Demoscene, and Warhol’s digital art in the 80s, and of course today’s Dev Art.

The response to Lawson’s statement is a sign that our perception of coding as science is so firmly embedded, that the suggestion that it could be creative is noteworthy. But it hasn’t always been that way. During programming’s early day’s people felt the need to pro-actively push programming to not be seen as art but as science. In ‘59, members of ACM’S Editorial Board said:

“If computer programming is to become an important part of computer research and development, a transition of programming from an art to a disciplined science must be effected.”

Well, that transition certainly happened.

Since then software has eaten the world, but it hasn’t eaten the art world. Computer Science programs are commonplace, but computer-generated art, and art that utilizes computers has remained a niche area.

Why hasn’t programming as a method of producing art flourished?

Some suggest programming art hasn’t grown as expected because the digital art pioneers were often scientists and engineers (because they had access to the once rare devices), not trained artists, and so their many accomplishments have been overlooked by the art establishment. Others suggest the myth that computer art requires no effort beyond ‘pushing a few buttons’ has hampered it.

But could technology itself also be to blame? It can sometimes be as much of a blocker to creativity as it is a facilitator. While developers have changed the world through code, coding itself has gotten more complicated. Would-be computer artists need to work through the complexity of configuring their dev environment, running commands, setting up build tools and mastering version control systems.

That complexity holds back creativity.

People abandon their creative ideas because it can prove too difficult to get started and require too much time and effort be spent on things other than coding and creating.

But it’s here where Glitch can help.

How Glitch Helps Coding Be Creative

By removing the complexity that usually goes hand-in-hand with creating things with code online, Glitch promotes creativity by delivering the ability to just code. It does that by attacking the barriers to building things.

Have you ever wanted to try out a new library, framework or technology, but couldn’t decide what to make with it? We provide a growing collection of sample apps to inspire you.

Have you ever been excited to create something but it quickly dissipated at the sight of a blank code editor, and you began to wonder ‘where do I start’? Our sample apps are real, working projects, which you can remix to get started straight away.

And of course, nothing halts creativity like getting stuck. Well, if you do, on Glitch you can just raise your hand.

By removing the nitty-gritty technical details from creating stuff with code, Glitch frees you to be more creative. And with our new Digital Art category, we provide you with example projects to both inspire you and help get you started.

We hope that Glitch helps put the creativity back into coding, and we do our bit to readdress the balance of programming as both science and art.

How Glitch is Growing

One of our biggest goals in launching Glitch was to remind people of that initial promise of the Internet — that the web would be something that any of us could build on, that we could use code to solve little problems or to express ourselves. And our community’s response exceeded even our wildest expectations.

One great example of this is “It’s Time To Make Code More Tinker-Friendly” in the latest issue of Wired, which perfectly captures the spirit of Glitch:

It’s fantastic that the creativity of the Glitch community is reminding so many people of what drew us to the web in the first place.

While it’s nice to get great press stories talking about Glitch, the most important measure of success for us are the things that we see you creating with the platform. And that creativity spans everything from up-and-coming startups to sporting events like Formula 1 racing.

For example, take a look at the story Sam Wilcoxon is telling about building a startup that raised $1M for its new product — built entirely on Glitch:

We were excited to see Sam tell that story at the NYC Nodejs meetup.

Creating things with code isn’t just about startups getting funding, though — it’s also about turning fun moments of inspiration into something that connects people around the world.

Take Jake Archibald, who saw a fun Twitter thread about the response time of Formula 1 drivers:

From that little spark, Jake created a fantastic and fun game that, while simple, is oddly addictive. It just tests how fast you’re able to react to a simulated F1 start. (Try it when you’re ready to tap as fast as your thumb is able.)

And then Jake’s little game took on a life of its own, first being picked up by Formula 1 enthusiast site WTF1, and then graduating into a whole video of top F1 drivers being filmed in London while they try out the app for themselves. Hundreds of thousands of people have checked it out already:

That’s what we find hugely inspirational about Glitch — it’s not about the complexity of your code, it’s about whether you have ideas that connect to the cultural moments that people find to be funny or inspiring or exciting.

Glitch is also growing by leaps in bounds in its ability to help people try new technologies and learn how to use them. One of the key parts of that effort is Glitch for Platforms, the set of tools that companies can use to help developers discover and build on top of APIs or SDKs.

Developers at every skill level are using Glitch’s help feature, which lets you just raise your hand to get help right in the editor as you code. If you’ve never experienced multiplayer coding where more than one person can code in the same file at the same time, it feels like a revelation.

At a deeper level, though, Glitch for Platforms is enabling some really new experiences. Platforms like Facebook Messenger are putting the “Remix on Glitch” button right onto their documentation pages, and toolkits like Howdy’s Botkit are building “Remix on Glitch” buttons directly into their code examples.

Glitch’s support for easy remixing of ready-made bots and apps is taking off, too. So if you want to learn how to add a powerful search API to your apps, Algolia’s excellent examples provide the perfect starting point to get started in no time. Slack has gone all-in on great Glitch examples, expanding past its list of example bots, slash commands and apps to a full set of “app blueprints” that make it downright effortless to build integrations for Slack.

Want a simple app that requests approval before a message is posted into a Slack channel? Slack’s got a blueprint for exactly that, along with many other common scenarios. Those kinds of great developer experiences are part of why we’re so excited that Slack has listed Glitch alongside platforms like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud and Heroku as a Hosting Provider.

Similarly, our friends at Trello have gone all-in on making Glitch a great way to build Power-Ups for Trello — their gallery of example power-ups and apps is the perfect place to begin.

In all, we see more and more of the most interesting companies on the web embracing Glitch as the best and easiest way to get developers building on their platforms. You can join them: just read more about Glitch for Platforms to learn what’s available for your SDK or API today, and stay tuned for even more exciting new tools coming soon.

Finally, you might not have caught this one if you are logged into Glitch, but we’ve started our first steps towards making it easier to explain Glitch to new users, especially those who may not have coded before.

We’ll be taking a lot more steps to ease your way into Glitch, but in the meantime, here’s a witch and a turtle! Yay! 🎏

Apple is about to do something their programmers definitely don’t want.

I work at Fog Creek Software, where our cofounder and former CEO Joel Spolsky has been blogging for 17 years about how open-plan offices are terribly bad for programmer productivity. His insights on the topic are based on Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister’s classic book Peopleware, which has been around for literally thirty years. So this isn’t a particularly new insight. And of course, in the decades since, there have been countless academic studies confirming the same result: Workers in open plan offices are frustrated, distracted and generally unhappy.

That’s not to say there’s no place for open plan in an office — there can be great opportunities to collaborate and connect. For teams like marketing or communications or sales, sharing a space might make a lot of sense. But for tasks that require being in a state of flow? The science is settled. The answer is clear. The door is closed on the subject.

Or, well, it would be. If workers had a door to close.

Now, when it comes to jobs or roles that need to be in a state of flow, programming may be the single best example of a task that benefits from not being interrupted. And Apple has some of the best coders in the world, so it’s just common sense that they should be given a great environment.

That’s why it was particularly jarring to see this side note in the WSJ’s glowing article about Apple’s new headquarters:

Usually, companies justify putting programmers into an open office plan for budget reasons. It does cost more to make enough room for every coder to have an office with a door that closes. But given that Apple’s already invested $5 billion into this new campus, complete with iPhone-influenced custom-built toilets for the space, it’s hard to believe this decision was about penny-pinching.

The other possible argument for skipping private offices would be if a company didn’t know that’s what its workers would prefer. But we can test this theory— let’s see what it looks like when we ask people what they want in an office, without any prompts or suggestions to guide their responses.

What you’ll find in the hundreds of responses to that tweet is dozens and dozens of people talking about how much they loved having a private office with a door that closed, or how much they wish they had one.

There’s no doubt that Apple would get the same responses if they talked to their own team. So the only possibility that’s left is that there just aren’t enough people in the industry who really, truly believe the benefits of having private offices for coders. So we’ll keep banging the drum on this subject.

Almost a decade ago, I remember reading about the construction of the new Fog Creek office on Joel’s blog, and when it was finally complete, I remember seeing the New York Times breathlessly cover its innovations. At the time, I would never have imagined that I’d get to work from that office someday. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how it felt to look at that article and wonder a bit skeptically whether it was really worth all that effort.

And I have to admit, I had a moment of temptation as we started thinking about a new office for Fog Creek, wondering whether we might save a few bucks by having an office that was merely great, with the same open plan as almost every other company. It’d be so easy to make the case.

A lot has changed at Fog Creek — about 2/3 of our company works remotely, though almost all of them work from home offices that have, you guessed it, doors that close. And we’ve got teams like sales and support that benefit from being in a shared, open-plan space. We could make the argument for giving up and just falling in line with what everybody else does.

But even the teams that have shared spaces are excited about our new office having dedicated phone booths for them to make calls in a private space. And the members of our technical staff remain as hyper-productive as ever without working absurd hours, which we can attribute to them having the right environment to do their work.

Best of all, focusing on making a great workspace even has us thinking of new ideas that help people get the best of both worlds, like dedicating a large conference room as a “Quiet Car”. It’ll be a place where people can sit together but still enjoy peace and quiet, inspired by everybody’s favorite Amtrak amenity.

We would never presume to advise a company as successful as Apple about how to do products. Though we’re incredibly proud of Glitch and FogBugz, we of course have huge respect for everything Apple’s done for decades. But we didn’t want to let this one avoidable mistake go by without pointing it out, as it’s a shortcoming that Apple (and every company that has coders on its staff!) could easily fix.

We’re glad so many companies know it’s worthwhile to invest in their employees — in everything from great healthcare to having the latest-and-greatest computer hardware. But when it comes to forcing every worker to be in an open plan shared space, even when they’re trying to concentrate, it may be time for even the biggest and most successful companies to think… uh, differently?

It can’t just be a pile of parts

Whether you’ve been coding for a few days or for a few decades, almost every coder is familiar with that moment of inspiration, where you see a new library or framework, or come across a new toolkit or API, and immediately begin to imagine something great that you could build with it.

That exciting early moment gives way to staring blankly at an incomplete and frustrating mess hours later. And you didn’t even get to try the new stuff yet. Obstacles like getting a working dev environment or jumping through hoops to set up a new project sap all of the energy that makes trying new things so much fun. You end up updating dependencies instead of following your creative muse.

If you’re a less-experienced coder, these obstacles can reinforce that nagging sensation of self-doubt, becoming another barrier to bringing new talent into the world of coding. It’s bad for everybody.

The frustration of wasting all of one’s energy on configuration instead of coding is a phenomenon that we talk about a lot while building Glitch. The way we think of it, everyone’s starting point in working with Glitch, or on any coding effort, should be from a working project, which you can then modify to your heart’s content. By contrast, a lot of current practice gives you just a tiny bit of functionality and expects you to assemble the rest of a working app on your own, an approach we sometimes think of as “giving you a pile of parts instead of a working car”. It’s a lot more fun to tinker on a car that runs and to repair or upgrade some parts than it is to assemble an entire vehicle from scratch.

That’s not to say we want to compromise on composability or the philosophy of loosely-coupled pieces. It makes perfect sense from a maintainability standpoint to have code repositories which only include the discrete parts of a single component.

But what if we just want to make something?

In Glitch, we built a platform with a strong bias toward offering starting points that work. When you explore the gallery of projects on Glitch, everything you find works immediately, and you can remix them into your own version with just a click. The default is to give you code that already works, without any setup. And that default is backed up by a wide variety of example projects, organized into a range of different categories, from art to bots to games.

The net result is something that feels wildly empowering to those of us used to fighting with our development environments just to get a project started. In many cases, a large percentage of an idea we’d want to build already exists, and by remixing existing frameworks or toolkits, we can focus on just the part that’s new.

That design frees you to do your most creative work, without the burden of slogging through a bunch of drudgery first. And of course, we’re just getting started, as we’ll be building out a rich library of additional example projects to help you get your next cool app off the ground. If you haven’t yet, we hope you’ll take a look at Glitch when you’re starting your next project, and we’re confident you’ll find it a far faster environment to get to the good parts of creating with code.

Taking FogBugz Forward

is a lot of things — it’s a tool that helps teams make great software, it’s the platform that pioneered bug tracking, it’s a smart and opinionated set of project management tools that are informed by two decades of experience in how to successfully ship software. And for more than 16 years, it’s been our flagship product at Fog Creek. So this marks a good time to articulate a clear public roadmap for what’s ahead.

Having learned a lot from the recent launch (and thrilling early success!) of Glitch, we spent some time thinking about our vision for FogBugz’s future, and how we’ll be (re!)investing in the platform. These were our starting principles:

FogBugz provides a unique and valuable set of tools for managing the software development process, but some of its power just isn’t very discoverable.
The user experience and design of FogBugz haven’t evolved to keep pace with the other tools that dev teams use, which means the platform hasn’t felt as relevant to newer software developers.
People who know Fog Creek like our history of advocating for developers, and of supporting the way that teams learn to make great products, and that should be reflected in FogBugz itself.
FogBugz users are increasingly relying on a suite of different tools for tasks like chat or continuous integration. It would improve the development process if those were connected directly to FogBugz.
Software development has changed to focus on a broader set of business and social goals that goes far beyond bugs in code, and needs to respond to bigger organizational or cultural concerns. And of course, there are the fundamentals — we want to make sure FogBugz is a solid, reliable platform that every team can trust, and to keep iterating on all the core features and components that you rely on.

With these ideas as our initial hypotheses, we started asking FogBugz users how you would like to see the platform evolve. Here’s what we heard from you:

People who use FogBugz today really appreciate its abilities, and in general are the kind of teams that like to use the best tool for the job in all their processes. This means FogBugz users are hungry for better connections to the other best-of-breed tools like Slack, GitHub, Google Docs and Trello.
FogBugz does have great project management and bug-tracking tools but seeing more energy and innovation around the platform could make it even more valuable for your teams; its older design can sometimes present a barrier to wider adoption of the platform, or to discovering its deeper features.
Most people who use FogBugz have a pretty positive impression of Fog Creek Software and most of you use at least one of the other products we’ve created or co-created, whether that’s past work like Stack Overflow and Trello, or our newest offering, Glitch.
There are a lot of polite 😬 responses about the branding of FogBugz. In short, a lot of the feedback that our community has about FogBugz matches the way we see its strengths and weaknesses today. That gives us a pretty clear path for how we’re going to follow through on what we heard from you.

While we’re proud of our long, innovative legacy, it can be an obstacle to getting new users to give FogBugz a fair shake. Even though FogBugz is quite powerful, it shows its roots as a product that’s been around for a long time by Internet standards. Some parts of the user interface and design are a little long in the tooth, and honestly, even just the name FogBugz feels a little bit dated these days.

So we’ll be rethinking and updating the FogBugz user experience to make it more closely match the simplicity and accessibility of the other tools you use, without compromising on the customizability and power that make FogBugz so useful.

We’ll be making these changes iteratively, and we’ve scheduled time specifically to get your feedback as these changes roll out, so we can refine the FogBugz user experience to fit your workflows. The first fruits of this work will start to show up in the next few weeks, and will continue on into 2018.

We hope you’ll follow along as FogBugz takes this big leap forward, and if you’ve got ideas or requests, we’d love to hear them. To get the latest updates on where FogBugz is headed, just let us know you’re interested!

If you haven’t checked out FogBugz in a while, you can get started and be ready for the exciting new developments. Start your free trial right here.

The Sounds of Music Created, Connected, Visualized and Remixed

Music might just be the ultimate creative medium. Its effect on us is powerful. It can drive an emotion, fill us with energy, or chill us right out. It can be combined with video, lighting, dance and best of all — there’s no expectation about what music should be. It doesn’t have to make money, have an efficient design, be made in any particular way, or use any specific tool. Anything goes.

This free-form creativity inspired Glitch. Its design is rooted in music, and we think there’s a lot that, as coders and creators, we can learn from it.

For example, I learned to play the guitar as a teenager. A local, older kid used to come to my house each week — we’d hang out, and he’d teach me little snippets from songs I was into. I picked up a book of chords and I’d practice them between those ‘lessons’. After a few months, I felt comfortable enough to join a band and I’ve played on and off ever since. I’m no Hendrix, but I can play.

I contrast this fun, organic learning experience with learning to code. To begin coding you need to know about, not just programming syntax, but lots of other stuff just to get going. Like which libraries and packages to use, the terminal commands to install and navigate your dev environment, as well as build tools and version control. And that’s all before you get to create your first ‘Hello World’ program, let alone anything that’s cool, which motivates you to keep learning.

I wonder how far I would have gotten with learning to play the guitar if I had to learn how to build the guitar first? Starting with understanding the characteristics of different types of wood, the tools to shape it, before learning about pickups and memorizing some special incantation to unlock the guitar case…

Making music is a fun, iterative, nonlinear, and collaborative process. Which is exactly what learning to code and creating apps could be, if we enabled it.

And that’s what we’re trying to do with Glitch. We remove the technical barriers to getting started, and our community site provides working apps for you to remix. So you can focus on the fun, creative parts of building an app, without losing that creative spark.

And now we’re pleased to add a music category to Glitch too. Fusing code and music together, so that you can make apps using the music services you love, create music with code, and learn all that you can from music along the way.

The music category provides a mixture of building block apps that hook into popular services and libraries, and some musical creations from members of the Glitch community. Here are just a few:

Search for a track on Spotify and then visualise it’s audio qualities, like danceability.
Create music with JavaScript & Node.js by taking the notes you supply and generating a MIDI file that plays in the browser.
Search for a track on SoundCloud and see its waveform.
An audio reactive A-Frame scene using custom shaders
Drawing, image manipulation and The Smiths.
A re-interpretation of one of the Elektroplankton interactive music games Check out the full category of music apps, and let us know what you create!

Showing Gratitude is the Biggest Missing Feature in Coding Culture

Glitch: Praise Built-in #

At Fog Creek the importance of giving thanks is something we’ve made sure we remain mindful of by making it a company value. We’ve built praising others into the way we work, taking the time to show our colleagues, peers, and collaborators that we’re thankful for their efforts.

Praise and gratitude are things we think are sorely lacking in Tech in general, but especially in developer culture and development tools. Some dev platforms have been around for almost a decade but still lack the ability to directly thank contributors and creators.

With Glitch, we made sure giving thanks was one of the first things we built.

Some Much Needed Warm Fuzzies #

Encouraging a more positive, more appreciative community, goes to the heart of what we want to achieve with Glitch.

It’s an essential part of our Help feature. The only thing you can do to establish a reputation on Glitch is help people, represented by the thanks you’ve received. And thanks is so important to coding because it can be such an emotionally vulnerable, yet unforgiving pursuit.

Nothing is quite so relentless in demanding absolute perfection as a programming language. Whether compiled or interpreted, at some point, your code is going to get checked. And it’ll spew all kinds of funky error messages, and produce weird behaviors for end users, should you have gotten so much as a period in the wrong place, or some logic muddled.

Working code is the expectation we set for ourselves, which can make anything else feel like a failure.

And programming is personal. The code we write is important to us. It’s how we approach solving a problem, which is an expression of ourselves.

Combine these things together, and it can mean the environment for a programmer is a harsh one. One that starves us of the warm, fuzzy things we need to keep going.

A little thanks goes a long way, and this is especially true in software development because it’s rarely something we remember to do. The prevailing culture doesn’t encourage it, and our tools and processes don’t help.

Take code reviews for instance. They’re very often approached from a critical perspective — set up to find issues, not things to praise. Our tools, like compilers, and development platforms, might warn us of issues and help join us together, but they don’t proactively encourage us to create positive interactions.

We need to do better, and with our thanks feature, we’re hoping we can start to do that. When you’re remixing and creating things on Glitch, you too can give thanks to those who have created things that you’ve found helpful. So that together, we can help make coding that little bit more warm and fuzzy.

It’s time to get serious about Developer Relations

If you do developer relations or evangelism, you’re probably great at your job. You’re talking to coders, getting out in the community, building relationships. But does the rest of your organization value that work as much as they should?

A lot of smart people are thinking it’s time for Dev Rel to grow up, and we agree. All of us who give a damn about developer relations need to get a lot louder and more aggressive about the business value of what we do. And that means tackling the ROI question head-on: **Can you **

For a lot of Dev Rel people, really proving a return on investment is, well, a pain in the ass. If what you’re doing is working, explaining Dev Rel success can feel like a waste of time. Why spend precious time proving what you already know is the right thing to do? If your efforts haven’t worked yet, then metrics can be even more scary — why show your peers data on something that hasn’t clicked?

The answer is simple: Good metrics can help Dev Rel get the same respect, support and resources that Sales, Marketing and Support already take for granted. You deserve the tools you need to get the Dev Rel job done.

But so far, we haven’t had good metrics or return on investment for Dev Rel because **it’s a really tough problem. **This is obvious when we see so many of our most talented peers discussing it in their conference talks and blog posts. Fortunately, they all reach a pretty strong consensus about what’s needed.

The key is to find the metrics that matter. Ones that help you make smart decisions about your Dev Rel strategy. This is exactly what we designed Glitch for Platforms to deliver.

We built Glitch for Platforms directly into Glitch itself so that you can understand how many developers have tried your API examples, how many devs created their own apps using your API and where these developers came from. These are “conversion events” — the equivalent of when an e-commerce shopper adds something to their cart. They’re the steps to a measurable, valuable outcome and Glitch for Platforms lets you track them over time.

Now you can finally prove the value you provide, help refine developer experience, improve success rates and demand the budget you deserve.

You can get started with Glitch for Platforms by using our free plan. (It’s really FREE. And it’s going to stay free.) We provide a range of brand-new tools for your team to start helping developers today. Like:

Live, real-time pair programming with coders who try your platform, so you can help them before they get stuck and abandon your API
**A ** you can drop anywhere you want devs to try your code so that they can instantly clone one of your sample apps and be up and running with it in seconds.
And soon, we’ll have live, editable code that you can embed directly in your docs, how-to articles and blog posts.

When you’re ready to double-down and radically improve Developer Experience, you can. Our advanced Team and Business features help you grow your dev community.

There’s an actionable analytics tool, so you can show your boss real results. Teams and Business users can also have private projects, perfect for turbo-charging your workshops, hackathons and training sessions with reusable examples and starter projects. (Imagine a hackathon with no wasted time setting up dev environments or hosting!) All of this connects to the Glitch help feature, letting you answer developer questions about code as they arise — even during remote events, like virtual conferences and live webinars.

The whole thing starts with you curating sample projects created by your team or community on your very own Gallery page. You’ll drive adoption of your API by providing quickstart apps that get people building, app blueprints to simplify third-party integrations, and live demos to show off the full power of your platform.

And we’re not done yet. All of these features are evolving quickly, which means that soon, a developer only has to land on your page to get started with your API.

This is why Glitch for Platforms is already being used by some of the most innovative developer platforms in the world, like Slack, Facebook, Trello, Botkit, and Algolia.

So, it’s time. You’ve been doing the hard work of Dev Rel, now the rest of your organization—and the rest of the industry—needs to gets behind the movement, too. All we need to make it happen is to embrace some basic analytics and accountability, to help communicate the business value of Dev Rel. Today, Glitch for Platforms is here to help with exactly that.

We’ll be watching to see how the Dev Rel community keeps fighting for the respect and support it deserves, and doing everything we can to help. And all of that stands behind what you care about most: helping developers succeed with your API.

A Developer Relations Bill of Rights

Seventeen years ago, Joel Spolsky wrote the Joel Test, a broad framework advocating for empowering developers and investing in their work. Even as these ideas have evolved or specific rules became a bit dated, the underlying principles have aged pretty well, and helped the tech industry become massively more productive. The Joel Test stands as one of the most effective efforts in advocating on behalf of people who make software.

In that same spirit, we present another starting point for discussing how to support a newer, less acknowledged, but no less critical, community: developer relations. Whether it’s called “developer evangelism”, “developer experience”, Dev Rel, or any other names, this field encompasses a related set of strategically critical roles. The community includes people with actual “developer relations” titles, as well as titles like developer advocate, platform or product evangelist, or developer support.

Yet, despite Dev Rel being so important as we said in “It’s time to get serious about Developer Relations”, most companies fundamentally do not show Dev Rel the respect it deserves. We’ve seen valuable efforts from people in the community like Ashley McNamara starting to codify principles that should underpin effective developer relations. And of course, for our own part, we’ve built communities like Glitch with the specific goal of being a valuable tool for Dev Rel.

Building on that work, and in hopes of starting to change the reality that most companies don’t support Dev Rel enough, here is the first draft of a Dev Rel Bill of Rights. We’re eager to hear your suggestions for changes and improvements.

Every person who does the work of Developer Relations deserves to be supported by an environment which follows these 10 principles:

We’ll be going into depth on a vision for each of these key concepts that empower Dev Rel to succeed, but we want to hear from everyone in the community who cares about the future of developer relations. We’re sure everyone in Dev Rel can think of an area we missed, or a particular pain point that you’ve encountered in your career.

Together, we’re confident we can fight for Dev Rel to get the investment, resources, support and strategic focus that it will take to move the industry forward.

Every Dev Rel professional deserves a clear set of business goals

*Developer Relations is one of the most strategically important roles for any company that wants to build a successful technology platform. We’re working with the community to create a Dev Rel Bill of Rights. In this article we explore article 1: A clear set of business goals.

Every developer relations professional should know how their work contributes to helping their organization achieve its business goals. #

It’s one of the most frequently omitted forms of support for Dev Rel. Many times, people in Dev Rel roles are sent out in to the world with little more direction than “get developers to try our platform!” Basic requirements like a list of metrics or measurements are often overlooked in favor of undefined generalities.

Most of the time, this isn’t due to any malice or negative intent, it occurs because the function of Dev Rel is relatively new within an organization and poorly understood. That lack of familiarity leads others in the organization to leave Dev Rel practitioners to figure things out on their own. And while some degree of autonomy is useful, communication around objectives and outcomes is fundamental to making sure Dev Rel is treated as an essential strategic investment. So, do you really have a clear set of business goals? To determine this, consider the following questions.

Questions to ask: #

Do people with Dev Rel functions in your organization have a clear definition of “success”? Will they know when they've achieved it?
Can people in other roles define what the Dev Rel staff is trying to achieve? Can they articulate what Dev Rel is responsible for delivering?
Can senior management explain why the organization is investing in Dev Rel, and what return is expected on that investment? By setting expectations from the outset, and clearly communicating these goals, we set up Dev Rel professionals for success.

*Read the original Dev Rel Bill of Rights and discover the other articles in this series. And check out Glitch for Platforms, where we’re building the first set of business analytics tools for Dev Rel professionals.

Dev Rel requires a well-defined place in the organization

*Developer Relations is one of the most strategically important roles for any company that wants to build a successful technology platform. We’re working with the community to create a Dev Rel Bill of Rights. *In this article we explore article 2: A well-defined place in the organization.

Developer Relations staff deserve clear lines of reporting, with well-articulated lines of accountability. #

Because Dev Rel is a practice that touches on many different functions across both technical and non-technical roles in an organization, Dev Rel team members are often stuck with “dotted line” reporting structures. This leaves Dev Rel professionals in a situation where they may not know where to go to get the resources they require, and it may even be unclear who they are accountable to for delivering on their goals.

But for Dev Rel teams to succeed, they can’t be wasting time wondering who the decision-maker is for a particular need, or whether their budget is coming from the CTO or the CMO. Both management and workers should fight to achieve clarity in Dev Rel’s place within the organization. Then when changes or transitions happen, that clarity will help keep the Dev Rel team running smoothly.

Questions to ask: #

Does everybody on the Dev Rel team know exactly who their boss is?
If there are “dotted line” or complicated reporting structures, does each team definitely know who its leaders are, and where to go for help or resources?
When there’s a reorganization or a structural change, is its impact communicated clearly and effectively to Dev Rel? *Read the original Dev Rel Bill of Rights and discover the other articles in this series. And check out Glitch for Platforms, where we’re building the first set of business analytics tools for Dev Rel professionals.

Dev Rel needs a structured way to impact product

Developer Relations is one of the most strategically important roles for any company that wants to build a successful technology platform. We’re working with the community to create a Dev Rel Bill of Rights. In this article we explore article 3: A structured way to impact product or platform.

By spending so much time with developers, customers and the community outside of the organization, a good Dev Rel team will often gain valuable information on how to improve the product or platform that they’re evangelizing. But too often, that feedback gets lost or even worse, ignored when it’s time to evolve the product.

Doing right by and making the most of Dev Rel requires building a process where their valuable feedback finds its way back into improving the product. At an immediate level, it’s powerful for developers, users and potential users to see that their ideas and insights are being heeded by the platforms that they choose to use. But there’s a more subtle and less obvious benefit, too — following through on feedback that the community gives to Dev Rel helps to build the credibility of Dev Rel efforts. That investment in trust powers a virtuous cycle of improving results and collaboration over time.

Questions to ask: #

Does the Dev Rel team have a specific place to collect feedback from developers, users and the community?
When community-submitted ideas are shared by Dev Rel, is there a predictable, visible process to monitor how those ideas are incorporated into the product or platform?
Do you “close the loop” — letting the community know that their feedback to Dev Rel resulted in specific, tangible improvements? *Read the original Dev Rel Bill of Rights and discover the other articles in this series. And check out Glitch for Platforms, where we’re building the first set of business analytics tools for Dev Rel professionals.

Dev Rel needs open lines of communication to marketing

*Developer Relations is one of the most strategically important roles for any company that wants to build a successful technology platform. We’re working with the community to create a Dev Rel Bill of Rights. *In this article we explore article 4: Open lines of communication to marketing.

Developer relations must be able to collaborate on messaging, communications and outreach efforts to ensure that marketing and Dev Rel initiatives are coordinated and coherent. #

One of the most important relationships that Dev Rel professionals can have within their organizations is with the marketing and communications teams that define the messages being shared with the world. In some companies, Dev Rel itself reports to marketing or relies on a marketing team to provide necessary resources to do the work of reaching developers.

Some of the time, though, marketing teams can see their relationship with Dev Rel as one way — delivering messages that Dev Rel must incorporate into their work. But a collaborative, supportive relationship between Dev Rel and marketing that’s two-way can unlock the full potential of taking developers seriously as a key audience to reach with a marketing message.

What’s more, marketing can often serve as a role model for Dev Rel professionals, because as a more mature industry, marketing enjoys the benefit of marketing analytics tools and even the kind of executive support that can come from a CMO being a C-level executive. Almost no companies have a metrics-based Dev Rel practice or a C-level executive who directly oversees Dev Rel. Until that’s common, bringing these two essential functions into close collaboration is the best way to ensure that both Dev Rel and marketing reach their full potential.

Questions to ask: #

Does a Dev Rel team have regular, predictable meetings or communication channels with the marketing team? Do leaders on both teams have a method of ensuring ongoing communications?
When the marketing team defines its goals, does Dev Rel have a say in helping to shape those goals? Are Dev Rel goals aligned with the timing and intent of marketing’s initiatives?
If Dev Rel needs additional resources like personnel, budget or tools, is there a structured process for requesting these resources from marketing? *Read the original Dev Rel Bill of Rights and discover the other articles in this series. And check out Glitch for Platforms, where we’re building the first set of business analytics tools for Dev Rel professionals.

Dev Rel needs the right tools specifically designed for the job

Developer Relations is one of the most strategically important roles for any company that wants to build a successful technology platform. We’re working with the community to create a Dev Rel Bill of Rights. In this article, we explore article 5: The right tools specifically designed for the job.

Developer Relations professionals deserve the same level of support and technical infrastructure that other disciplines rely on to execute, measure, automate and improve their work. #

Today, teams that manage marketing or sales take for granted that they’ll have mature, powerful software tools and services to help manage their processes. But too often, the Dev Rel professionals who work alongside them are still cobbling together their own, or reusing technology that wasn’t built for the purpose of Dev Rel.

It’s ironic that a field so focused on technology lacks any of its own, but the real cost is in the reduced efficiency and effectiveness of Dev Rel efforts, and the increased frustration of those trying to do the work.

Forward-thinking organizations should invest in professional-grade tools to enable analytics, reporting, and improvement of Dev Rel efforts that are aligned with the clear set of business goals that Dev Rel is working toward.

Questions to ask: #

Do people working in Dev Rel have the tools they need to measure their progress?
Is the organization budgeting for Dev Rel tools in its IT or operations budget in the same way it does for marketing or sales?
Does the Dev Rel team know where to go to get approval or to procure the tools needed to do their job? *Read the original Dev Rel Bill of Rights and discover the other articles in this series. And check out Glitch for Platforms, where we’re building the first set of business analytics tools for Dev Rel professionals.

Dev Rel requires explicit ethical and social guidelines

As the practice matures, it’s important to be sure that Dev Rel is not just achieving its goals, but that it has the right goals. Doing so means acknowledging that technology and platforms are not neutral, but instead conform to the values of the people who create those platforms and advocate for them.

To that end, every Dev Rel team or community should create a set of guidelines for its ethical standards, its social practices, and its community goals. These guidelines should be specific enough to enable effective, consistent enforcement that will build trust over time. Organizations or companies that have a Dev Rel function must dedicate enough time and resources to developing both these guidelines and an enforcement process that makes them meaningful.

Dev Rel doesn’t just educate or lead developer culture — it can shape it, too. Well-defined rules of engagement are just as important a tool for Dev Rel as any technology or software.

Questions to ask: #

Can everyone on a Dev Rel team and in the community see a clear, visible list of ethical guidelines, and weigh in on changes or revisions to those guidelines?
Does the community or organization behind the Dev Rel effort have an explicit, defined process for enforcing the guidelines or holding community members accountable for transgressions against them?
Are new initiatives and efforts validated against these guidelines before they’re launched, to ensure conformance with the community’s ethical intentions? *Read the original Dev Rel Bill of Rights and discover the other articles in this series. And check out Glitch for Platforms, where we’re building the first set of business analytics tools for Dev Rel professionals.

Dev Rel deserves support for building inclusive communities

Developer Relations needs resources, support and education to carry out its critical role in making sure every type of developer gets to create technology by ensuring that coding communities are inclusive of creators from every background and of every identity. #

One of the most critical priorities for any creator of technology is making sure tech meets both its business goals and the needs of its users, and the best way to do that is by making sure the developers who create that technology comes from diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Dev Rel is all about creating and maintaining relationships with developers, but often times is shortchanged on the resources it takes to nurture those relationships with every community. For example, building an inclusive community can require everything from creating a meaningful, well-enforced code of conduct, to preventing and quickly responding to abuse or harassment, or thoughtfully and respectfully investing in outreach to underrepresented communities.

In many companies or organizations, those skills or capabilities don’t yet exist, which means leaders have to step up to provide Dev Rel with the necessary resources and support to learn these practices, to evolve them, and keep them up to date over time as the community grows and changes.

Questions to ask: #

Does everyone on the Dev Rel team have the training or support to follow best practices for creating an inclusive community? Do they know where to ask for resources if needed to achieve this goal?
Can Dev Rel professionals identify the community goals around inclusion, and how they connect to the defined business goals for Dev Rel?
Are other teams like marketing, product and senior management aware of the critical role that an inclusive community plays for effective Dev Rel efforts? *Read the original Dev Rel Bill of Rights and discover the other articles in this series. And check out Glitch for Platforms, where we’re building the first set of business analytics tools for Dev Rel professionals.

Dev Rel must be provided with a clear distinction from sales engineering

*Developer Relations is one of the most strategically important roles for any company that wants to build a successful technology platform. We’re working with the community to create a Dev Rel Bill of Rights. In *this article, we explore article 8: A clear distinction from sales engineering.

Developer Relations needs to work closely with every other team in the organization, but its relationship to sales must be explicitly defined so that Dev Rel isn’t required to act as sales engineering. #

The foundation of effective Dev Rel is a trusted relationship between Dev Rel professionals and the developers in the community they serve. Many times, one of the goals of a Dev Rel team is to increase the likelihood that those developers will either become customers of the platform, or that those who are already customers will expand their use of the platform, which is perfectly valid.

But a more complex consideration comes into play when a sales function leverages the trust that a Dev Rel team has built in a way that jeopardizes its effectiveness. One simple and common scenario to avoid is when people doing Dev Rel are shoehorned into being a resource for the sales team without either explicitly choosing to do so, or being offered the compensation structure that often comes with sales engineering. Similarly, the technical work that a Dev Rel team does should be guided by what helps them serve the explicit business goals of Dev Rel, rather than by developing a solution to help close any one particular sales lead.

In healthy organizations, sales and Dev Rel work hand in hand to inform product roadmaps, coordinate with marketing on communication and messaging, and to keep their shared community of users happy. But maintaining that balance requires vigilance in many organizations where Dev Rel doesn’t have as strong an advocate or executive buy-in for its purpose as many sales teams do.

Questions to ask: #

Does Dev Rel have a defined set of boundaries over which tasks the team will or will not do on behalf of the sales team?
Are resources and responsibilities for Dev Rel separated in their reporting structure from sales leadership? Has management ensured that the sales team can reach its targets without relying on Dev Rel to fill a sales engineering role?
Have Dev Rel and sales teams been given time to discuss the distribution of responsibilities for the customer base they’re both addressing, and to have the conversations that will build trust between both teams? *Read the original Dev Rel Bill of Rights and discover the other articles in this series. And check out Glitch for Platforms, where we’re building the first set of business analytics tools for Dev Rel professionals.

Join the Product Hunt Global Hackathon with Glitch

We’re happy to be supporting the Product Hunt Global Hackathon. Unlike a typical weekend hackathon, this is a virtual hackathon that’s running throughout the month of November. It’s open to anyone worldwide and has over $250,000 in prizes.

With hackers of all skill levels and ages taking part, it’s a chance for you to build something awesome and try out new technologies.

You’ve got until October 29th to signup, and then the whole of November to create your entry. You can create anything you like, but there are categories for things like Social Impact, Augmented Reality, Slack and Google Home, among others.

Of course, if you create your entry on Glitch, you’ll have a head start as we get you straight to hacking without the need to worry about setting up your dev environment. And you can code together with friends in real-time, like editing a Google Doc.

What’s more, you can get started by remixing one of these handy starter projects that we’ve put together.

So get to it, signup and start hacking on November 1st. We can’t wait to see what you build!

Dev Rel must be supported with ongoing investment in professional development

Developer Relations is one of the most strategically important roles for any company that wants to build a successful technology platform. We’re working with the community to create a Dev Rel Bill of Rights. In this article, we explore article 9: Ongoing resources for professional development.

As a relatively young professional field, Dev Rel is changing more rapidly, and more fundamentally, than the more mature disciplines that it often interfaces with, like marketing or product management. When the ground is shifting this rapidly, professionals can’t keep up just by scrambling on their own to keep track of what’s happening in the industry.

Instead, companies and organizations that have Dev Rel professionals on staff should allocate resources for the training, education, events, and materials necessary to stay abreast of developments in the field. And, as mentioned earlier in the Dev Rel Bill of Rights, those resources should be accompanied by the right tools designed specifically for the job. In all, these commitments help Dev Rel go from an ad hoc process of one-off fixes to a more mature and disciplined process of continuous improvement.

By planning ahead and providing the necessary support for Dev Rel, companies can both get more out of their Dev Rel staff and help move the state of the art of the entire practice forward. In all, investing in Dev Rel is a necessary step to investing in developer success as a whole.

Questions to ask: #

Does Dev Rel staff have a defined way to request resources for training or education or professional development?
In addition to Dev Rel participation in events aimed at outreach or building developer relationships, can Dev Rel staff attend events and conferences specifically designed to improve Dev Rel practice?
Are the defined business goals for Dev Rel aligned with what’s needed to enable continuous professional development for Dev Rel staff?

Software Matters in the World

It’s become a cliché you hear at nearly every tech conference (and lots of non-tech business events, too): “”. It was a provocative framing by Marc Andreessen (and pretty effective marketing for his venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz), but it missed one of the most important parts of the story.

Yes, nearly every industry is being transformed by the power of technology. But it’s not just business processes that get changed — it’s the way workers are valued, the economics that shape industries, even the basics of how we communicate with each other and learn about the world. Software didn’t eat the world: it bent the world to fit the values of people who make software. And not everybody was happy with the result.

The good news is, there are many positive values shared by most people who make software. (We’d hope so, since that’s a group that includes all of us at Fog Creek Software!) At risk of drawing overly broad generalizations, tech workers typically value creative expression and personal autonomy, they’re often skeptical of legacy institutions that have become unresponsive to their constituents, and they have a deep, earnest and abiding optimism that even the biggest problems can be solved.

But that’s not the whole story.

Amidst the current global rise of populist movements, we’re seeing the first widespread backlash against tech since the dawn of the internet era. Some of it is basic economics — tech people got rich at a time when not a whole lot of other people did, and some of the ways they got rich have started to feel like an ugly surprise. People are deeply worried about the effect tech has on their privacy and security, and on their jobs and the economy. That’s to say nothing of the cultural shifts wrought by ubiquitous connected devices and social media.

A lot of that public mistrust can be attributed to some of the more negative tendencies in tech culture. In all things, our best traits can sometimes be our worst weaknesses. Tech is no exception.

That love of personal autonomy can shortchange a sense of collective responsibility. That skepticism about institutions can yield a “disruption” where imperfect systems are replaced by no system at all, or one where only those making the tech benefit. That optimistic belief that every problem can be fixed sometimes leads people making tech to think they’re the *only *ones who can fix things. And all of these problems are severely exacerbated by tech’s persistent failings at inclusion, which means these problems affect marginalized communities even more acutely.

One of the most common tasks in making software is simple: fixing bugs. Historically, we think of “bug fixing” as relatively straightforward stuff—maybe your app doesn’t look exactly right in that one user’s web browser. In the worst case, maybe it’s doing some calculation wrong, and you’ll have to update the software.

When our company, Fog Creek Software, was started as a little indie firm way back in 2000, we mostly saw bugs that way, too. We made a bug-tracking app and tried to help people make sure they were fixing what was wrong in their software.

While that was happening, our cofounder Joel Spolsky also wrote a lot about the *culture *of making software. Back then, at the height of the dot-com boom, it was seen as a bit eccentric to put as much focus on the human factors and ethical behavior as our founders did. But it helped us win fans, and some of those people tried out the various apps we built along the years, and we’ve been lucky to keep thriving as what feels like one of the last few independent tech companies that’s still relevant.

But we missed something important, too. Those ideas and insights about how to treat people, how to listen to customers (and to communities), and how to be thoughtful and responsible in creating technology were even *more *important than anything we built into our software. They were the first steps to trying to fix what we could now think of as “Big Bugs”. Little bugs were mistakes in the software. Big Bugs are when we exacerbate (or cause!) major problems in society.

What do we mean by “Big Bugs”? Software that exacerbates racial biases in the criminal justice system is a big bug. Security policies that put sensitive data from hundreds of millions of people at risk are a big bug. Apps that secretly spy on users (including, yes, Beyoncé) have big bugs. Undermining trust in legitimate journalism and exacerbating fake news? Yep, that’s a big, big bug.

So it’s time we make sure that we prioritize these big bugs right alongside the more obvious ones. Yes, check if your site looks good on an older smartphone, but also be sure that your data policies are respectful of your users. Of course you should address that persistent memory leak, but make time to improve password storage practices as well. And to be clear, we’re not pointing fingers here — we’ve been just as guilty of many of these systemic issues as anyone, focused on the “classic” definition of bugs while shortchanging our role in fixing some of the really Big Bugs.

Maybe it seems presumptuous for a little software company to point out these flaws in a giant industry, or overly optimistic to think that our little community can make a difference in changing tech culture overall. But we saw it happen before, not that long ago, when the first wave of people blogging about and thinking about software online started to connect with each other. They pushed the state of the art forward with thoughtful conversations about design, accessibility, web standards, performance and so many more topics that we now take for granted as part of our checklist in building our apps.

We think it’s time that a new generation of coders tries to tackle this even more important set of issues around access, equality, equity and basic fairness. And the clearest way we can state it is very simple: Software matters.

Climate Leave: paid time off for extreme weather disruptions

Five years ago, we had a real wake-up call at our little company. We’re headquartered in downtown Manhattan, and though most of our team is remote now, back then almost everybody was based right in New York City.

Superstorm Sandy hit us with full force in October of 2012. You probably know the broad details about Sandy, but our particular story was pretty unusual — our data center in downtown Manhattan was cut off from fuel, and keeping our customers running required days of heroics that culminated in a multi-company bucket brigade effort to carry generator fuel up 18 stories. Our team helped keep the lights on, and even took part in a short documentary film that was inspired by the episode.

It’s a striking story, but more important was the fact that much of our team was displaced, and many people had to evacuate—often bringing family, friends or pets along with them. We were reminded of those hardships as members of our team were forced from their homes again by the recent series of hurricanes that have ravaged parts of America. While there were of course far worse victims of these storms, and we’re extremely thankful that none of our colleagues were injured, it’s still incredibly important to us that Glitch be a company that supports its employees when they need us most. Investment in our people is the fundamental founding principle of our company.

Putting it in writing #

What we found during the recent storms (and were reminded of as we warily watched the spate of wildfires that have caused so much destruction lately) was that, when our team members were forced to evacuate, we didn’t have a policy to support them. Now, of course, we did the right thing — we told our coworkers to get safe, take the time they need, and don’t worry about work while they’re putting family first. But as a CEO, I *never *want to be having to tell an employee, “trust me, it’ll be okay”, because taking care of employees means putting down our commitments to them and their families — in writing*.*

This is especially important because these situations of being displaced by weather or environmental conditions are only going to become more common. As a company, we’re already 18 years old, and we want to be around for many, many years to come, so we look carefully at official reports that explain we’ll see increasingly violent storms and increasingly destructive wildfires. The simple conclusion is that if we’re not committing to taking care of our employees during extreme weather events, we’re not fulfilling our responsibilities to our team. Our past policy of “trust us, we’ll take care of you” needs to be formalized for the same reasons that any other HR policy gets formalized: having it in writing protects workers.

Policy in practice #

Once we made the decision to enact this policy, implementing it was relatively straightforward. We followed a few simple steps:

Our proposed policy is that employees can take up to 5 days of climate leave due to extreme weather each calendar year, and that any leave of greater than 5 consecutive days requires there to be a declared state of extended emergency, as determined by local officials in the employee’s region. This policy directly mirrors our policy of unlimited sick leave, with any absence of more than 5 days becoming short term-disability and requiring a doctor’s note.
The proposed policy was drafted by me as CEO, in consultation with our COO, finance and culture leaders, and presented to the entire company for review and comment. (Any policy change that affects compensation or employment agreements goes through our feedback cycle, where anyone in the company can offer revisions or ask for clarifications.) We did an advance briefing with team leads so they would know the broad outlines and be able to handle any basic questions that arose from their team members if needed.
We looked at the payroll and compensation tracking systems we use, as well as others on the market, and found that none offered explicit climate or weather leave (if you see a system that does track these things, let everybody know!) and decided to manually track any climate leave that’s used. Given that our team is still small and individual members are still relatively unlikely to be affected in any given year, we think this will be sustainable for our purposes for quite a while.
We’re planning to watch how the policy is used (and hopefully learn from examples of how similar policies are deployed at other companies) and iterate over time.
And of course, we’re working to do our part to reduce our impact on the climate as a company, as well. For example, our policy of being remote-first while paying for mass transit for employees in our NYC headquarters means that, in a typical week, there are zero car commutes for our employees. We’ll be evaluating more of our business processes to see how we can make substantive improvements in the future.
At Glitch, our entire employee handbook is public, so employees and potential employees can review the current Climate Leave policy and know what would be covered.

If you’ve got questions about how we’re implementing our Climate Leave policy, or examples that we can learn from of how other companies are addressing similar concerns, please do share.

[This article was updated in November 2018 to reflect the renaming of our company from Fog Creek to Glitch.]

Dev Rel success requires an ongoing connection to a community of peers

*Developer Relations is one of the most strategically important roles for any company that wants to build a successful technology platform. We’re working with the community to create a Dev Rel Bill of Rights. In this article, we explore article 10: connection to a community of peers.

Developer Relations practitioners need access to peers for learning and sharing through events and online communities.

Being a human-centered field, Dev Rel can’t happen in isolation — we need to be talking to each other, observing each other’s work and communities, and learning from each other’s experiences. But too often, Dev Rel teams are forced to treat connecting with peers as an optional luxury or a “nice-to-have” afterthought.

Instead, Dev Rel should plan ahead for regular, structured, intentional communication with peers. The specific effort can take whatever form works, from formal conferences focused on Dev Rel best practices, to ongoing chat channels, ad-hoc meetups and community events. The important thing is that both a Dev Rel team and management recognize that a peer community is necessary for achieving goals like ongoing professional development or building inclusive communities.

With that support network and infrastructure in place, Dev Rel will see benefits not just for the individual people who do the work of developer relations, developer advocacy, or developer evangelism, but for the field as a whole. By building a network that is bigger than any one person, product or company, the Dev Rel community as a whole can push the practice forward.

Questions to ask: #

Does everyone on the Dev Rel team have contacts with peers in analogous roles at other organizations?
Are Dev Rel staff members allowed to schedule explicit time for conversation or exchanges with other Dev Rel practitioners?
Does the conference or event budget support Dev Rel team members attending events to build their own skills and network, not just events designed to reach developers? *Read the original Dev Rel Bill of Rights and discover the other articles in this series. And check out Glitch for Platforms, where we’re building the first set of business analytics tools for Dev Rel professionals.

Introducing Manuscript

You know, there was that team at Volkswagen that created software to cheat on emissions testing. And they probably checked off all the items on their to-do list. They probably even fixed most of the bugs that they were tracking. But if technology is actually negatively affecting the air that we breathe, then maybe we need to think bigger about the way we craft software these days.

At Fog Creek, we’re a company that was pretty much born to help squash bugs, whether it’s “this doesn’t look right in my browser!” or “we shouldn’t be secretly polluting the earth!” We launched FogBugz back in 2000 as one of the first and most influential bug-tracking systems around, and it evolved to be great at project management, issue tracking, and lots more. Since it launched, the platform has been used to fix over 50 million bugs, by tens of thousands of teams around the world. But recently, we’ve been thinking about “Big Bugs”, trying to imagine how we can address both the necessary parts of shipping software and the larger risks that too often get overlooked.

So today, we’re using that same engine to create something new: . Manuscript helps any team craft great software. You should try it now!

The first thing to know is that** Manuscript is for making software**. Manuscript is not a generic project management tool; if you want an approval desk for your legal team, you should use JIRA. Instead, Manuscript is deeply opinionated about how to help a team make great software, and we’ve built on the insights of the thousands of teams that we’ve watched use our platforms over the last 17 years.

We knew Manuscript had to do all the essentials: task management, prioritization, scheduling, sprints, story points, and all that good stuff. And honestly, Manuscript is great at those fundamentals. But then we saw a chance to do something really new, based on a few simple ideas:

We’ve got a lot more to say about Manuscript coming soon, including a sneak peek into how Manuscript doesn’t just track tasks, it helps your team learn to craft better software — whether that’s making things more accessible, more secure, or just more thoughtful.

But you don’t have to wait for us to tell you the story: and find out for yourself. (And if you’re already a FogBugz user? We’ll be upgrading you to Manuscript for free — we’ll be in touch with all the details.)

Letting Everyone Build a Better Web

It seems every creative digital tool has been reinvented as a collaborative, social platform except the ones we use to make software itself. At a time when it’s more critical than ever to support and nurture underrepresented coders and help current coders thrive, what does it look like to create a community where everyone can make the app of their dreams?

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of Jenn Schiffer’s O’Reilly Fluent talk, in which she provides an overview of Glitch. Glitch is our creative community that enables coders to collaborate in ways that past generations of programmers could only dream of. And in building Glitch, we’re trying to tackle some of the industry’s most difficult challenges around inclusion and education while making it fun for working coders to try out the latest and greatest tech. Here’s how and why we’re trying to do that:

They’re these things, fake ideas, that we tell ourselves either to project our insecurities or put a bandaid on pervasive issues in our industry.

Fake ideas include saying building for the web is easy, or I am self-taught. Everything is going great all of the time, and coding has never made me cry ever.

The problem with fake ideas is that they create barriers of entry into the web development industry, which is a huge problem because with those barriers comes a lack of diversity, inclusivity, which then leads to a lack of products that work for everyone. That’s why VR makes most women sick and voice recognition doesn’t really work for women or people with accents. It also leads to a lack of products that are created to solve actual problems that we have. Like we don’t need a ride-sharing bus, we have buses. All of these fake ideas turn our focus away from things that we should be creating to help society, and really just to better ourselves as individuals or people in power, which is not chill.

I feel like we can fix this by having a real conversation about real ideas like building for the web is actually kind of hard. It’s okay to admit that. We don’t learn alone. You can say you’re self-taught, but really you’re guiding your teaching. You don’t just learn from out of thin air how to build for the web. You need support whether it’s in the form of books, courses, or people helping you. It’s okay to ask for help. By saying that we’re self-taught and boasting that just makes other people who do need that extra support feel like they don’t belong when they do.

Our tools are far from perfect, which is why we feel like building for the web is getting harder, and it is getting harder, but also we are human. It’s okay to get frustrated when we hit a problem, whether it’s a problem from something we don’t know, or it’s something that’s constraining us because of the way technology works today. Again, building for the web is very hard. We have a lot of constraints that stop us from doing all the things that we want to do. When you hit that wall, it’s really technically challenging and it’s emotionally challenging. That’s what I love about the industry, but sometimes I have to shed a few tears along the way.

Glitch.com is a new product where we’re taking a unique approach at building something where we can enforce those real ideas, and really make building for the web something that everyone can do and can continue doing because inclusivity is of that much importance. That’s by sort of shifting our focus from what we individually need as engineers and looking to the bigger picture of what is best for all of us. That’s by focusing on both the tools, but most importantly the community.

So tools are easy, it’s just software, right? But any level of developer, whether they are thinking of maybe learning to code, or they’re experienced or experts and want to continue to learn, the first thing they want to do is actually build something. With Glitch we’ve built an editor that allows you to write code, on the web, whether it’s static or full stack web apps. It’s really cute. It kind of looks like a toy sometimes, but that’s fine because if you’re going to be in front of a computer all day you want to have a pleasant aesthetic experience with what you’re building with. We don’t learn alone, so our editor allows multiple users at once to collaborate, so you can pair.

We all want to work on a cool team, and a lot of the software that’s being built today allows us to work as teams be it the products Atlassian’s putting out, CodePen, JSBin, all these other tools that allow you to work together. I think it’s really important that we continue doing that because we want to learn with other people, be it our coworkers or just randos on the internet that want to help us.

Glitch supports Node, but you can use really any language. I really love how we’re sort of a platform for pushing APIs, but it’s built on APIs. We use libraries.io to search and add NPM packages that you can use to build really cool, powerful stuff. Now once you build something, you want to show it. I’ve helped teach courses on teaching people how to write HTML.

One of the biggest barriers after writing code is that they want to get it on the internet and show it off to their kids, or their parents and stuff like that, but Devops is really hard, and that’s a huge barrier to getting people excited about coding without literally knowing every aspect of web development. So Glitch auto deploys your application and it lets you showcase it on our community site. You can view other people’s work. You can just view the source. Remember viewing source? And you can remix it so you have a clone of that project already deployed. You don’t have to set up any instances anywhere, we do that work for you. So you can go straight to having fun with your custom URL and go ahead.

The bonus is that you own your own code. This is probably the most important thing for me as an engineer is that whenever I write code in someone else’s service, I want to be able to own that and take it wherever I want. Just like one of the reasons why I love JavaScript is that it’s portable. I feel like my JavaScript should be as well. I think it’s important that all creators of these kind of apps don’t lock their users into their philosophy of programming or what they do. With Glitch, to promote the open source ecosystem, we allow you to import/export to GitHub or download a zip file because not all people know what GitHub is or uses GitHub. We also let you login with Facebook because some students don’t know what GitHub is and it might be intimidating to teach them about versioning before they just want to go in and edit an HTML file.

Now the hardest part is community. This is something that we haven’t really solved the problems for, and I don’t see it in the near future, or even the far future, but it’s important that we all work together on it. The barrier to entry is I want to learn something, but I don’t know what to make. I can make a to-do app, but then how do I use that to influence the things I’m making at work or at school, et cetera.

One of the hardest things when learning a new framework or learning a new language as an expert developer is knowing what am I going to make to motivate me to keep going. This is an ever learning industry. We’re always teaching and learning, but we need those projects that keep us going at it before giving up. So for Glitch we like to showcase the projects that people are making on our community site. We have building blocks. We have Hello Worlds. Who here never wants to roll their own OAuth again? We have OAuth apps that you can just take and remix and build your app onto it. If you never want to build your own Slack bot from scratch again, we have examples of that.

Glitch.com itself is a glitch app. You can go and you can view the source of the code that I’m writing. It’s coffee script. We use our own tool, and I just love using it. It’s really fun. I love to use all different types of editors. I have lots of them installed on my computer just because I like to explore what is out there. I think that the really cool thing about the site is that you can remix all these existing projects and it deploys itself. You have something working within seconds.

But I think the most important thing we need to work on besides providing ideas for people to learn is providing a way for them to get help. This is a quizzical duck. Now when we were younger we always were afraid to raise our hands to answer questions because we didn’t want to seem like a nerd, and we were always afraid to raise our hands to ask a question because we didn’t want to seem like a nerd that didn’t know anything. That’s something that still occurs today on the web. We want to work on that with Glitch. Again, we work at Fog Creek. We helped create Stack Overflow. We know developers have questions, and lots of them, so we built a way into our app where you can ask the community for help when you’re stuck. You can tag what you’re working on, and say what you want to do. If you’re somebody who wants to help, we provide a way for you to see on the community site that people are asking for help. Then you can go in, that person can let you into the app if they wanted to, your secrets are all hidden, and then they can help you. Then you can remove that person from your project, or you can thank them because thanking is cool and being nice is cool. When they’re thanked they see cool little hearts.

I think that these sort of celebrations are really important and something that we take for granted. I am seeing a really awesome trend in cuteness engineering in UI that makes being in front of a computer for our work time a fun experience, and it’s just really nice to look at, which is not really something that we’re used to with our tools. The major bonus to community is the ability to get together and have fun with each other. You can build cutting edge web technology like WebVR. This is a Glitch app by the A-frame team, and you can just auto deploy virtual reality in the browser. This isn’t something that we had years ago, and it’s super fun. It looks really rad.

Any time you edit an app in Glitch, it auto deploys so you don’t have to worry about all of that. But I think the most powerful thing besides asking for help is the ability to remix other projects. You can allow people to remix them, which leads to a lot of fun.

My internet friend Dan was using the experimental Chrome features for face recognition and made an app that added emoji to his face. I saw it, I loved it. It’s like looking in a mirror. I figured I could make it creepier by remixing his project and adding my own face pieces to it. Again, look in a mirror. Then he was able to go to my site, go to my app because it auto deployed, and he was able to make his face look like that. Then other people like my friend Ben remixed it to make it even creepier. It goes on and on and on. It was a weird day.

Having fun and learning is a big part of being a human, and software is made by and for humans, so we should be building tools that focus on community to do that. Because we can make building for the web easier, but we can’t do it by ourselves, and Glitch can’t do it by ourselves either.

If you have public facing APIs and you want people to do fun stuff with it, we can help you, go to For Platforms. Then we can make all of us quizzical ducks more like a team.

Manuscript Integrations, smarter together

Software has a huge impact on the world, so making great software matters. And now, almost every company has to make software — it’s not just startups and tech companies. But regardless of your size or the industry you’re in, we think every team can craft great software, you just need the best tools and the right information.

So when we set about creating Manuscript on the engine of FogBugz, we knew intelligent connections to the collaboration tools you use were essential. Rather than some enormous suite of tools that attempts to do everything, we think what you really need is just the right tool for the job. And when we surveyed customers about what those were, Slack, Twitter and Google Docs were the clear leaders. So they’re the new integrations we launched with Manuscript.

Here’s how they can help you work more effectively in Manuscript:

With the Slack integration in Manuscript, when you link to, or mention a case in Slack, a summary of it is shown. The case number, project, area, title, status, assignee, priority, and most recent edit details are shown, so you and the people you’re chatting with on Slack have all the context they need to understand the case and its status.

What’s more, you can also use Slash commands to add new cases and update existing ones from within Slack. That means no more switching between tools just to make a quick edit!

And even if you haven’t set up your own Slack integration yet, we make sure Slack automatically unfurls any links to Manuscript cases to make them more readable for your team.

Our new Twitter integration for Manuscript enables you to monitor Twitter for tweets that mention the keywords you’re interested in, like @mentions and hashtags, creating a case for each match. This is great for Support teams, so you can manage your Twitter queue right from within Manuscript. And it’s good for Product Management teams too, which can add tweets about features and bugs as subcases, helping you gather requirements and prioritize feature work.

Try this: Set up the Manuscript Twitter integration, then tell your users they can tweet @YourProductName with #featurerequest and it’ll automatically get captured in Manuscript!

With our integration with Google Drive, you can automatically link documents in Google Docs to Manuscript cases just by adding the case ID in the title. So there’ll be no more fishing around trying to find documents, you get a handy link taking you from Manuscript straight to the document you need.

What separates integrations in Manuscript from other tools, is the extent to which you can customize them. This is because Manuscript integrations are powered by Glitch, our friendly coding community. This enables you to leverage the full power of Glitch to make your Manuscript integrations do exactly what you need them to.

Glitch provides a browser-based code editor to modify your integrations, and instantly hosts and deploys them as you make changes. So with nothing to install, you can get straight to work on your integration and even pair program with colleagues in real-time.

You don’t need to start from scratch. You can remix full, working apps shared by the Manuscript community on Glitch, and edit them however you need to. As well as get a quick start creating new ones by using our “Hello World” starter project.

We’ve even cleaned up our JSON API and added a new API command, pushContent, that lets you easily push content into Manuscript. We’ve created a Manuscript API NPM package to make working on integrations even easier, along with all new API documentation.

We’ll be publishing a blog post exploring a Manuscript integration starter project on Glitch shortly. But for now, why don’t you trial Manuscript and hook up the integrations with your other tools.

The building blocks of a creative community

As we celebrate the Glitch community having created more than half a million projects on the platform, we've been reflecting on how to make sure that contributors to the next hundred million projects on the platform have a great experience.

Today, we’re proud to share two simple but powerful tools that represent how we think about making sure every project in our community gets off to a great start.

License to 🎉 #

With Glitch, remixing or reusing an existing app happens at the click of a button. That means that knowing how you can use someone else’s code is essential. And if you've created a project that you want others to use as a seed for their own creativity, it’s important to tell them so!

Glitch now lets you add any of the most popular open source licenses right from the Add File menu in the editor. Once you've clicked on “Add a license”, you’ll get a nicely formatted Markdown text file showing the license, and a special button will appear above the file letting you change to a different option, if you desire. We default to the flexible, straightforward MIT license, but old favorites like the Apache & GPL licenses are in there too, of course, along with a nicely-formatted summary of what these licenses imply.

We’ve linked to detailed explanations of each license so you can learn more (thanks to the nice folks at GitHub for making Choosealicense.com, which is a great reference!), and you can of course replace the text of the license with your own custom license if you want.

Having more Glitch projects explicitly declare their licenses increases the odds that people will be able to easily work together and share their creations. We’ve also added explicit licenses to all our sample projects and will be featuring projects with friendly, open licenses on the site going forward.

Code Is Culture 😸 #

Just as important as knowing your legal rights to share is knowing that your work will happen in a place where you and your ideas are welcome. Since Glitch is a friendly community (it says so right on the homepage!), creators always want to make sure new contributors feel welcome when they jump in to collaborate on coding in Glitch. But without explicit rules or guidelines, sometimes it can be tough to give people guidance about how best to encourage that goal.

Enter a code of conduct. Lots has been written on why successful contributor communities like open source projects need a good, strong, well-enforced code of conduct. You can read some good overviews from Open Source Guides or the Contributor Covenant site, but what we’ve learned from countless open source projects that have adopted such codes is that having an explicit written statement is a really powerful first step to building an inclusive community.

But, as the Ada Initiative and many others have noted, a Code of Conduct is only useful if it’s effectively enforced. That’s not a responsibility we can solve just by putting some buttons in the editor, but by building a broader Glitch community where everybody knows and expects that we all want to be thoughtful and welcoming, we make it easier to support each other.

We’re thankful to all the hard-working activists and experts who've created the code of conduct that we based our example on, and appreciate that their work to make a more inclusive coding culture makes our work possible.

The Friendly Community #

Every time we talk about Glitch publicly, we start by describing it as “the friendly community where you’ll make the app of your dreams”. Features like letting you raise your hand 🙋🏽 when you need help are all about being friendly and welcoming to coders of every background and every experience level.

We have been blown away by the hundreds of thousands of creative projects that have flourished on Glitch. And we attribute the Glitch community’s generosity of spirit and wildly inspiring creativity to the fact that both our team who makes Glitch, and all of you who use it, are excited about the idea of every person being able to express themselves by building and coding together.

Today’s new features are just one more step to making Glitch a place where anybody in the world can create with code. We can’t wait to see what you make! 🎏

Jira’s not bad. So why are so many teams looking at alternatives like Manuscript?

Over the past several years, everybody who cares about tech has become acutely aware that software really — it has a huge impact, both positive and (potentially) negative. But while our perspective on tech has changed, a lot of the tools we use haven’t kept up.

We think that’s the reason why, when we launched Manuscript, we heard from so many people with, uh… opinions about Jira who told us they were hungry for another option. Don’t get us wrong — the people who make Jira are very nice folks, and very smart, but when there’s a constant stream of complaints, there’s got to be a deeper cause.

What people mean when they complain about Jira isn’t just about the tool itself—it’s about how Jira makes them feel when trying to work as a team.

A jack-of-all-trades platform is always going to leave at least some members of a team exasperated. It’s virtually impossible for the same tool to be useful for both lawyers reviewing documents and for developers crafting great software. Worse, that open-ended design makes it all too easy to focus on process over products, leaving everybody on the team sitting through endless meetings or filling out pointless forms instead of doing their actual work.

As you might guess, we think there’s a better way to do things.

We think you’ll be excited to try Manuscript for your next software project, or even just for your next team sprint. Here’s why:

Work with what you’ve got: Manuscript helps your team use the best tools for the job, by seamlessly integrating with popular platforms like Slack, GitHub and Trello, at no additional cost. We’re not trying to upsell you to a bundled chat platform like HipChat, so we can make it easy to connect to the tools your team already loves. And you don’t have to sort through 100 different third-party Slack integrations (which cost extra!) just to plug everything in together.
Be opinionated: Manuscript has a strong point of view about what makes for good software, building in best practices like assigning each case to a single person. That means you spend less time in meetings where people are pointing fingers at each other.
Real search, for a workflow that works: Nothing is more infuriating than not being able to find an issue that you just created. Manuscript’s powerful search features work every time, letting you visually build a search and save it for re-use, without having to know some special magical syntax or obscure query language.
More cost-effective: Manuscript gives you all the tools you need, for one simple per-user price. It’s cheaper to start, since there’s no additional cost for Slack support or kanban boards or our powerful AI-based inbox management, and cheaper to run over the long term, since you don’t have to pay somebody to babysit a complex customization of your workflow.

The truth is, the process of changing culture in a development team takes time. Evolving how we think of creating technology doesn’t happen overnight.

So, for your next project, get started with Manuscript for free. See what your team can do when they’re freed up to focus on their most ambitious goals.

Build a Web App with React

Part 1: Intro to React #

Software Engineers who use React every day explain what React is, when you might use it and why.

Part 2: React Starter #

We take a look at a simple app that uses React, and we introduce the tools and concepts you need to understand it, including Webpack, JSX, components, elements and props.

View Source | Remix This

Part 3: React Router #

We introduce you to routing, and explain how you can use React Router to add links to additional pages in your app.

View Source | Remix This

Part 4: React Redux #

We explain how to manage 'state' in your app, and how Actions work with Reducers.

View Source | Remix This

Part 5: What's Next? #

We suggest some useful add-ons and libraries to try out once you've mastered the basics.

See our gallery of apps that use React.

Art, Bots and Empathy

Hey there! I’m Maurice Cherry, and I’m the newest member of the Glitch team.

I first got started on the web back in the mid 90s learning to code by tinkering around with HTML on Geocities, and I love how Glitch brings back those same feelings of fun, exploration, and community when it comes to the Web.

The spark for creativity can come at any time, and Glitch makes the process of coding and building easy and approachable no matter your skill level. To show you what I mean, let’s take a look at a typical day on Glitch!

Glitch can obviously be used as a sandbox to demo cool new tech. Take Ada Rose Cannon’s Comlink example for instance. She’s created a remixable template app for exposing APIs in iframes allowing you to create APIs where the information is stored locally but accessed from other websites using the Comlink RPC library.

Contrast that to this stunning art project from the Immigration Co/Lab Interactive Showcase from the Tribeca Film Institute. It’s a 360-degree immersive experience that follows a water droplet through its epic migration journey.

It’s also great to see people using technology to help others. Like this anxiety check-in bot created by Elisa. It’s an exciting way to use bots for self-care purposes. This bot was created using Botkit, an open-source toolkit from the team at Howdy.

But so far, these have all been creations by individuals. However, Glitch can be used for collaboration too. We are even seeing it used in classroom settings. Here, Liz Krane uses Glitch to teach almost 30 developers in her intro to JavaScript workshop!

I’ve been fascinated to see how people are using the same tool to create a breadth of interesting and useful creations. Whether it’s to scratch an itch and create a tool that’s useful for you, expressing yourself by creating art, or helping others overcome anxiety or learn something new.

We created Glitch as a powerful but comfortable and fun way to experiment with code. Whether you’re new to coding or you’re a seasoned professional, Glitch is a place where you can express yourself. And if you ever get stuck, just “raise your hand” and ask for help from the Glitch community!

What will you make on Glitch today? Respond here or tweet us (@glitch) and show us what you’re creating!

Learning with Glitch in the New Year

“This year, I’m going to learn how to code.” Or maybe “this year, I’m going to learn that new programming framework”. These thoughts pop into our heads on January 1st because of a wonderful, optimistic tendency to think, “New Year, New Me!” At the same time, it can be intimidating to try new things because resolutions can run into trouble when regular life gets in the way.

At Glitch, we look at what works to help people really learn new skills and build amazing things on the web. And it turns out, it’s the same two things you need to stick to a New Year’s resolution:

To start this year off right, we’ll be bringing the entire Glitch community together to help each other start making amazing things in 2018. You’ll see example projects to remix, articles describing how to use Glitch to create your ideas, cool new tool kits or frameworks to try out, and interviews and conversations with some inspiring people whose perspectives will inspire you.

Everybody Can Learn #

The basic idea behind Glitch is simple: Everybody, at every skill level, should be able to easily create things on the internet and share them with the world. Our belief is that this kind of creation and learning is fun if we get rid of all the technical obstacles and make sure the community is welcoming and friendly. It shows up in every detail of how people create on Glitch, including the simple idea that if you get stuck, you can just raise your hand, and people in the community will help each other out.

If that sounds like a good way for you to finally stretch out and learn some new technical skills, then join us, and tell your friends to join us on Glitch, too. You can check back in each day on Glitch as we share inspiration, resources and ideas that will help you learn new coding skills or build the app or website of your dreams. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Ready to get started? #

We’ve got just the thing: An **introduction to HTM**L, which you can use to build a list of New Year’s Resolutions (or any other kind of list!) Just jump in, read the linked instructions, and start typing to remix the project and begin making it your own!

How to Get Started Making Manuscript Integrations

Every team can craft great software, you just need the best tools and the right information.

The ‘best tools’ part of this is particularly important. Freeing your team to be able to use the right tools for the job, the tools they actually want to use, is not only empowering, but in our experience leads to better results. So, while Manuscript provides all you need to make great software, including project management, issue tracking, and support functionality. Whenever you want to use another tool in your workflow, we enable you to use it seamlessly with Manuscript. That’s why we provide robust integrations with other best of breed tools like Slack, GitHub and Google Docs that are free to use, and fully customizable.

But if there isn’t an existing integration for the tool you use, you don’t need to start coding it from scratch. You can remix full, working apps shared by the Manuscript community on Glitch, and edit them however you need to. Glitch provides a browser-based code editor to modify your integrations, and instantly hosts and deploys them as you make changes. So with nothing to install, you can get straight to work on your integration and even pair program with colleagues in real-time.

What’s more, to help you get started we’ve provided a “Hello World” starter project and it’s this project that I want to walk you through in this post, so you can see just how easy it is to start working with the Manuscript API and integrate the tools you use with Manuscript.

The “Hello-Manuscript” project provides a form, which takes user input and posts it to your Manuscript account, either as a new case or as a new comment in an existing case.

It makes use of our Manuscript NPM package, which makes it easy to work with the Manuscript API in Node.js. And it’s a handy starting point for creating your own integrations between Manuscript and the tools you use.

The only required parts of a Manuscript integration relate to the ability for users of it to add and edit the integration from the integrations page within Manuscript. In our hello-manuscript example, these important parts of the code are in server.js, so we’ll start there.

The integrations page within your Manuscript instance hits this endpoint whenever a user clicks the integration tile. In this sample app, we’re simply redirecting to a pre-populated webform. You’ll probably want to do something more complex, such as storing the authentication data in a database instance.

The other required thing is a GET route for the ‘/status’ endpoint. This should consume a site name (in query params) and send back the status of the integration for that particular site. The response will look like one of these:

Manuscript will use this response to display the status of the integration on the integrations page.

With those things setup, lets take a look at the more interesting part of the code: the bit that passes the webform data into Manuscript. It does this with a POST route for /push beginning on line 35:

It uses the Manuscript API through use of our NPM package to pass the title, text and optional case ID to Manuscript. So it’s this code that you should modify to pass data from another tool into Manuscript, instead of submitted user input.

Lastly, at some point, you’ll likely want to remove the other files in the project, like index.handlebars, style.css, and client.js. They just provide something nice to look at while you hit the app’s URL, so are only useful if you too need to provide a visible front-end such as a form to capture input.

And that’s it. If you’re looking for more involved examples, take a look at the Manuscript community app gallery, where you can view the code and remix other working integrations.

To understand more about what you can do, take a look at the Manuscript API docs, or learn more about Manuscript and the tools it integrates with.

This Week On Glitch: Learning to Code

Happy New Year! If learning to code was on your list of resolutions for 2018, then you’re in the right place. We know that it can be intimidating to try something new, but Glitch’s friendly community of creators is here to inspire you and to help you achieve your goals.

We started off this week with a series of posts from our own Jenn Schiffer that show you how to build a simple app for tracking New Year’s resolutions! We began with creating the basic structure with HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language.

The next day, we moved on to formatting our app with CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is used to control the presentation and formatting of our HTML, and lets us add color and other layout elements to our app.

After this, we added interactivity with JavaScript to get the current date from the browser and display it on the page. Each example project is well-documented, and you can see how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work together to create this nifty app. Don’t forget to look at the readme files for each of these Glitch apps for more in-depth information about each language!

In the Glitch community, make sure you check out the tutorials and apps built using A-Frame, a web framework that lets you create VR experiences that work on the Oculus Rift and other headsets! You can start with basic apps you can use as a base for larger projects, or remix bigger projects like this amazing winter wonderland done by Martin Splitt!

For something really cool, spend some time with this fun drum machine app from Mary Rose Cook. Now this app might seem like it would be complicated to build, but the 114-line source code is heavily annotated so you can understand how it works.

There are NodeSchool Workshoppers that show you the basics of Node.js development, like streams, async, scope chains, and closures. We also have Workshoppers for HTML, JavaScript, and Markdown as well!

Don’t miss the , either. It’s an entire book covering Node development from the basics, through to a complete web app. Click through the readme file to read each chapter, and use the 13 live-running code examples to help you along the way.

Once you’ve mastered the basics, take a look at our React Starter Kit. It’s a free 5-part video course that helps you learn React with interactive code examples and brief interviews with developers who use React every day in their jobs.

January 5th at 3pm Eastern Time, we’re closing out the week with a live coding session lead by Jenn Schiffer. She’ll be building an app on Glitch using Node.js! Follow us on Twitter so you can be notified! As you can see, we’re building on each day’s concepts step by step so you can get comfortable with using Glitch and remixing other projects.

This week on Glitch: Rise of the Bots!

Whether it’s a handy Slack bot that helps you collaborate at work or a playful Twitter bot that offers a fun distraction during the day, there’s no end to what bots can do for you.

But if you’ve ever had an idea and thought, “That would make a great bot!” you know it’s often still too hard to make a bot yourself. So Glitch is here to help. This week, we’ll be featuring cool bots that you can use as-is, or remix to power your own creative ideas. We’ll ask brilliant bot creators to join us to help give you inspiration for new creations. And we’ll even point out the ways that bots can encourage us to do better out in the world, not just at work.

The best part? All of these creative bot examples are just the starting point — we’ve got a whole collection of Bot Building Blocks that will let you build the bot of your dreams, for nearly any platform. So if you’re inspired by the bots you see here, you can run with your idea and make a bot that anybody can try for themselves. Whether it’s for Twitter, Slack, Facebook Messenger or anywhere else, we’ll be watching to see what bots you create!

Bots for Good

We kicked off this week talking about bots — convenient programs that can automate any number of common functions. Let’s take a closer look at some of these fascinating bots, including a few from the Glitch community!

Bots can help you with a lot of different tasks to get you through your day. Take Woebot for example, a friendly bot that uses Facebook Messenger to check in with you about your mood, teach you new things and give you insight on your behaviors.

There’s also Resistbot and WeBot: two helpful bots for civic-minded citizens. Connect with Resistbot to find out your local senator or Congressional representative, and deliver a message to them in just two minutes. WeBot takes activism a step further by allowing you to discover and receive alerts for nearby protests. Both of these bots are a great way to take activism and advocacy efforts offline and into the real world.

Need more inspiration? Here are some examples of fun and useful bots from the Glitch community!

Glitch user Elisa made a wonderful and practical anxiety check-in bot for one of her classes using Botkit, a popular open-source developer tool for building chat bots, apps, and other custom integrations for messaging platforms.

Curlsbot is for anyone who needs help with caring for their naturally curly or wavy hair. This bot asks a series of questions to determine your hair porosity, analyzes the ingredients lists of products, and provides recommendations to help you get the best results for your hair.

Two great Twitter bots — @TroveListBot and @TrovePoetryBot — use publicly available data from Trove to help you find and use resources relating to Australia. So whether you need a little poetry or just want to get your fix of koala content, these bots are here. 🐨

There’s also Glitch Notifier — a Slack bot which notifies you immediately whenever someone asks a question on Glitch. This bot is a great way to share your knowledge, pay it forward, and help out the Glitch community of creators!

Have these examples motivated you to create your own bot? You’re in luck, because Glitch has a number of resources to help you build bots for anything you can imagine.

Let’s begin with our directory of handy bots; a great starting point for creating your own bot. There are example projects here that tie into Skype, Discord, Mastodon and lots of other messaging services. Remix any of these bots and make them your own!

How about making your own Slack bot? We have several example projects available that can help you make an onboarding bot or build something more powerful using Botkit.

Looking for more inspiration? Check out Botwiki: an open catalog of dozens of friendly, useful, and artistic online bots that connect to a number of different messaging services like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and more! Get started by remixing any of these Botwiki projects on Glitch and show us what you create!

Hopefully these bots spark your creativity and make you think about what you can make today using Glitch!

The Best Project Management Tool for Slack Teams

20–30% of a team’s productivity is lost through inefficiencies in their workflow and communication (according to an IDC study) and email is a big part of that. But, we’ve all seen how communications tools like Slack help you tackle that, by reducing the amount of email sent within a team.

For many, Slack quickly becomes the team’s hub, where discussions about work happen and important notifications from the tools you use flow. But what about all those emails you get from outside your team, like customer questions and bug reports? Manuscript brings that Slack-like email reduction magic to project management. But that’s just one of the reasons why we think Manuscript is the best project management tool for teams that use Slack. Wait until you hear the other reasons, you’ll love it:

Manuscript lets you capture bug reports from users through email or a web form, it can handle core help desk tasks, and it can even take care of errors or bug reports sent directly from your products so that you can easily keep track of them and assign team members to handle them.

Also, like Slack’s message history, cases in Manuscript are persistent over time. So when somebody new joins your team, or somebody leaves your team, all of the knowledge they’ve shared and the decisions they’ve made are still captured in cases for future reference, instead of being lost in email. When combined with the powerful search capability in Manuscript, this means your team gets smarter over time and you’re not stuck scrolling back through chat logs trying to figure out who did what and why.

Plus, flexible notifications about updates to your project’s cases help reduce email too. And if you wanted to, you could completely turn off email notifications and trust the system to notify you of all the most important tasks and updates.

But good communication and project success takes more than a reduction in the number of emails. You also need the best tools and the right information.

We firmly believe that people should use the right tool for the job. So, while Manuscript provides project management, issue tracking, and support functionality, whenever you want to use another tool in your workflow, we enable you to use it seamlessly with Manuscript. That’s why we provide robust integrations with Slack, as well as other best of breed tools like Trello, GitHub and Google Docs, which are free to use, and fully customizable.

The Manuscript-Slack integration enables you to keep everyone in sync. Whenever you link to or mention a case in Slack, a helpful summary of it is shown. This includes the case number, project, area, title, status, assignee, priority, and most recent edit, so you and the people you’re chatting with have all the context they need to understand the case and its status, while continuing to focus on the conversation you’re having.

You can also use Slash commands to add new cases and update existing ones from within Slack. That means no more switching between tools just to make a quick edit!

But integrations with Slack are common in project management, so what makes ours different? Well, it’s fully customizable. You can view the code and remix the Slack integration on Glitch, and edit it however you need to. Glitch provides a browser-based code editor to modify the integration, and instantly hosts and deploys it as you make changes. This makes for a fast and efficient way to get an integration that works exactly the way you need it to.

Great communication is also about context. That’s why Manuscript organizes everything into cases. Cases are powerful — they capture any bit of information you need to stay on top of things, not just tasks in a to-do list. And they’re easily searchable, so if you remember that your teammate Kate resolved a case in the last month about a display bug, but you don’t remember the details, you can just search by what you do recall and it’ll pop right up.

And that context extends to documents too, so Manuscript incorporates document collaboration tools that make sharing technical specs, plans, design docs, knowledge base articles, and more, effortless. So no team member ever feels out of the loop.

And here’s the most important thing: Each case in Manuscript is assigned to one person. It’s a simple but powerful decision that means every responsibility in your project has a clear owner. This built-in accountability means there are no “who’s on first?” problems trying to figure out who owns a particular issue. Manuscript is opinionated so that you don’t have to have a team meeting, or even a Slack conversation, about whether somebody filled out a ticket correctly.

Using Manuscript and Slack together gives you just enough process to follow your own workflow, so your team doesn’t have to jump through hoops. All while keeping work flowing, so everyone knows what needs to be done and when.

Learn more about how your team can be more productive with Manuscript. Start a trial, and add the Slack integration from the integrations page in Manuscript (go to the Avatar menu > Integrations, and click the Slack tile).

When Good Bots Go Bad

The excitement around and use of bots on the web continues to grow. Some studies suggest that more than half of all web traffic now comes from bots and automated sources. And like we covered earlier this week, there are many bots that do good in the world: from helping fight homelessness, to supporting people with mental health issues and alerting us to health problems.

Even the more prosaic, functional bots help us out by allowing us to offload repetitive tasks, like crawling websites for search, helping folks find good deals online, highlighting plagiarism and answering our customer service queries. Bots can help make the internet a better place.

But of course, that’s not all bots are used for.

There are those that create fake reviews, comments and posts on websites. As well as those that scrape peoples’ details to be resold. There are bots that create false ad impressions inflating ad costs, and those used for DDoS attacks that take down websites. Some are active on social media. It’s estimated that 400k bots were posting political messages during the 2016 US election, including 1,600 bots tweeting extremist content.

Some are used to harass, cyberstalk or impersonate people online. Which in response, has given rise to the creation of “honeybots” that post about specific topics to entice trolls and waste their time.

But even good bots can turn bad.

There was Tay, of course. Microsoft’s chatbot, which was designed to engage and entertain people in playful conversation. That went rogue, and began swearing, making racist remarks and inflammatory political statements. The flaw in Microsoft’s thinking? People. The system was designed to learn from its users, so it soon became a reflection of the comments it saw people making.

And, it isn’t the only one.

An automated copyright takedown request bot began targeting its owner’s original content, leading to his posts being removed from Wordpress while they sorted things out.

And others are well, just a little bit sinister. Like InspiroBot, which looks like it’s meant to create inspirational posters that combine relaxing imagery with an uplifting quote. But the resulting quotes are often far from that. Some are random, others meaningless, and many outright creepy.

For those who set out to do harm, or are focused on profit beyond concern for the negative impacts of their bots actions, that’s more a matter for relevant authorities, and the platforms they run on to curtail and stop them (Microsoft even has a Digital Crimes Unit!). But that doesn’t let creators off the hook. There’s lots that we can do to ensure our good bots don’t turn to the dark side.

From their beginnings, we can think-through potentially troubling actions and emergent behaviors. Such as by limiting the words or data that bots can use through use of blacklists of offensive words. Indeed, bot creators have already set about creating shared lists of potentially unsettling words that you can use in your own bot projects.

Consideration of the ethics and etiquette of bots is useful too. And folks have have written up suggestions of good bot etiquette, as well as guidelines on ethical bot making and Asimov-inspired bot rulebooks.

What’s more, the makers of the libraries being used to develop bots need to step up too, writing best practices into their developer codes of conduct. Like emphasizing the importance of disclosing that users are interacting with a bot through use of a welcome message, so people know they’re interacting with a piece of software.

Ultimately the responsibility for what a bot does lies with its creator. We need to put as much thought in to thinking through the inputs, outputs and vectors for abuse as we do it’s personality and functionality. And ensure that after we’ve pushed our creation out into the world, we monitor it’s behavior.

As bots continue to take over the web, it’s up to us creators to act like doting parents and guide our creations, making sure they stick to the straight and narrow.

This Week on Glitch: Setting Some Rules

Recently, we introduced the ability to add a license or Code of Conduct to your Glitch project with just a click. It’s a great way to show the world that you want others to use your work as inspiration for creating even more amazing stuff.

But open source is as much about process and community as it is about any words in a license. And a Code of Conduct on a software project is meaningless if it isn’t backed up with real, substantive enforcement from someone who’s fluent in the relevant issues.

Whether it’s understanding the differences between various types of open source licenses, or choosing the wording of your Code of Conduct, we’ll be offering guidelines and interviews that will get you up to speed in no time.

We’re also thrilled to announce that we’ve teamed up with CodeNewbies for #CNC2018, the coding challenge that encourages you to meet your coding goal in 2018, whether it’s to *start *coding, code more often, blog more, or get a job as a coder. We’ll be teaming up with CodeNewbies to provide resources and inspiration to help you fulfill your goals.

Whether you call it a resolution, self-improvement, or just “practice makes perfect”, 2018 is all about learning on Glitch, and we’re here to help you every step of the way.

Talking Transparency at Fog Creek

How much money do you earn?

Decades ago, discussions about salaries and compensation in the workplace were seen as taboo. But now, more and more companies are being open and transparent about these topics, particularly in the tech industry.

Here at Fog Creek Software, salary transparency has been part of our evolution as a company since the very beginning.

“In the interest of fairness, Fog Creek’s compensation policy is open, public, simple, and accountable,” says founder Joel Spolsky in a blog post from August 2000.

According to Spolsky, some companies consider revealing your salary a fireable offense. “We feel that in the long run, this can only hurt us through negative morale, high turnover, and destructive office politics.”

Anil Dash, current CEO of Fog Creek remembers when he first read Joel’s thoughts on compensation.

“Like a lot of people in tech, at that time I hadn’t studied much about workers’ rights or the history of labor, so I didn’t know what a great role predictable compensation paid in making work more fair. Joel being Joel, he couched it in the context that many coders like rational, predictable systems, which is also often true! And I think from both standpoints it was about making workers happy and reducing some of the stress and tension around compensation and salaries, which are some of the most fraught conversations anyone can have at work.”

As companies grow and change over the years, so do their policies. Fog Creek is no exception here, and implementing salary transparency over the years has been a continual process. Jessica Moy, Head of People and Culture at Fog Creek Software, cites the general discussion and changes in tech workplace culture over the past few years as a reason for keeping salary transparency top of mind.

“A huge topic in the workplace in general is why don’t we know what other people make, why it’s a bad thing, and how [salary transparency] can help, especially when we’re thinking about the general wage gap between minorities, women, and other underrepresented groups. With that in mind, Fog Creek wanted to really embrace diversity and inclusion, and realized that a really key part of that was to make salary transparency a priority. It’s definitely all related.”

“As the company grew,” notes Dash, “new roles were added that didn’t neatly fit into the technical orientation of Joel’s original salary ladder. We added Sales people who expected standard compensation based on their sales volume, and administrative or organizational roles that weren’t going to be advancing in programming skills the way that coders would. As these new roles expanded, salary transparency sort of got left behind, to the point where half the company didn’t have a ladder to look at.”

We knew that these differences between roles weren’t good enough.

“Fog Creek has always been at the forefront of pushing what workplaces can and can’t be,” adds Moy. And if that is to continue, we had to do better.

According to Dash, prioritizing this level of transparency connected to an internal ethos we have at Fog Creek about empowering our employees too.

“We talk a lot about how everybody at the company should spend the company’s money as if it were their own. To do that right, we have to give everybody enough information to know what our people cost. Finally, it put it in solid ground as we emphasized improving on inclusion in our hiring and promotions, so we could confidently tell candidates of all backgrounds that they were treated fairly.”

Fog Creek’s current culture around transparency didn’t come without some challenges.

“The tricky thing about having a 17-year-old company embrace salary transparency again is that a lot of the people that started at Fog Creek during this time didn’t intend to share their salaries when they accepted the job,” Moy mentions.

“We ended up using some industry databases to compare salaries and make sure we were being fair, but that didn’t quite give the team internal visibility or predictability into compensation,” adds Dash. “We did an internal audit and found we were competitive to companies our size and fair in terms of pay by gender or other factors, but people couldn’t tell that was the case. It was the worst of both worlds — the company was doing the right thing, but employees didn’t know, and employees wanted visibility but because it wasn’t there it seemed like the company was reluctant even though it wasn’t.”

As you can see, adding transparency to an existing company is not an easy feat. Dash mentions that our sibling company Stack Overflow was a great model of openness with their salary calculator and by sharing salary data gathered from their annual developer survey. Startups like Buffer have been at the forefront of radical transparency since their early days. Later in the week, we’ll speak with Courtney Seiter, Buffer’s Director of People, and gain more insight on how they have handled transparency throughout the years.

“Ultimately, not many companies are doing this yet. That’s why we think it’s a competitive advantage for attracting and retaining great people.”

Moy agrees, “it’s really important that we practice what we preach.”

Want to Craft Great Software? Stand Up for Transparency

Successful software development projects rely on transparency. It’s such a key part of the software development process, that it’s one of the 3 pillars of the Scrum methodology.

But whatever your team’s workflow, the efficacy of decisions made throughout the creation of software depends upon transparency in all aspects, from the goals of the project, to the resources required to deliver those goals, and progress throughout.

However, that’s all good in theory. But how do you deliver transparency in an ever changing environment, with a team of people all with differing agendas and motivations, and often times with an organization’s changing priorities and deadlines?

One way is with a Daily Standup. A brief, time-boxed event for the Development Team held at the same time each day. The Development Team discusses the work completed since the last stand up, what they aim to get done by the next one, and highlight any problems that stand in their way. This is typically done by each member providing short answers to the following questions:

What did I do yesterday?
What will I do today?
Are there any impediments blocking me? When done right they can improve communication, identify blockers to progress and encourage quick decisions to resolve them as well as improve each member’s understanding of the project.

But it’s important to do them well. They can break down when:

Folks show up late, or skip the standup altogether
Some people don’t say much or their updates are too vague
Others talk too much, providing unnecessary detail or go off on tangents
People aren’t prepared for the standup, they can’t remember what they worked on or what they planned to do
Or the meeting doesn’t happen daily So if you’re going to do them, you need to trust the process and follow it. A great way of building in that structure, in both remote and co-located teams, is with a tool like Jell. Jell is specifically designed to help development teams carry out more effective daily stand ups. And better yet, it integrates directly with Manuscript.

We stress the importance of using the right tools for the job. And when it comes to daily stands, Jell could be that tool for you. You can prompt people for updates at a specified time, by email or even within tools like Slack. People can see what it is they planned to get done, helping them stay on track. And by having them recorded in text form, it helps keep them brief and makes it easier to compare what was planned and what was achieved. Having it integrated with Manuscript is a bonus too, as links to cases give your team members all the context they need to understand the task, so everyone is on the same page.

Here’s how Jell works with Manuscript:

After signing up, head to your organization settings and select Manuscript under connected apps.
Then while making a standup update, you can add Manuscript cases. Out of the box, your team will be able to search Manuscript cases from within Jell itself. And you can even limit teams to specific Manuscript projects.
Once a standup is complete, you can review what everyone’s working on in Jell. Of course, you can’t just throw some software at it and expect to fix all problems. You still need to manage the updates by picking up on incomplete information, by paying attention to what is really being said (or not said!) and clarify differences between planned and actual results.

But, by running a Daily Standup with a tool like Jell with Manuscript you can help provide shared accountability toward achieving goals and promote self-organization among your team. Ultimately, this can help deliver transparency throughout the creation process of your software development projects.

Buffer: What it’s really like being radically transparent

No company quite embraces radical transparency like Buffer. Employee salaries, diversity workforce numbers, and overall revenue are just a few of the metrics that are available to the public. Even the code used to power Buffer is open source and available on GitHub!

We are discussing transparency this week, so we thought it would be great to talk with Buffer’s Director of People, Courtney Seiter, to learn about the long-term impact of radical transparency on the company. She also talks about the creation of Buffer’s Transparency Dashboard, and gives some great tips for companies interested in adopting transparency.

I was a Buffer customer way back in the day, maybe like six years ago, and it really served a purpose for me. I was sort of a late night RSS feed reader, and nobody wants to read all your content at midnight, so Buffer was the solution for me to be able to share things at the right time to engage with an audience.

And then, the more I learned about Buffer, I gradually started to gravitate from just the product to learning more about the culture. And when I saw the culture slide deck of Buffer’s ten values, I really was just blown away. It’s kind of the dream that you never imagine could be real — that you could work for a company that thinks and cares about these things and continuously works on them. So yeah, I was kind of a fangirl early on.

Diverse, I would say? I’ve done a lot of different things at Buffer. I started out in a marketing capacity, and then as we started to grow, I moved into a diversity and inclusion focused role, and that morphed into a people operations role. And all along the way, I was pretty amazed and delighted to see that the values that are written down are not just words on paper; they really are something that we talk about and think about and try to evolve and iterate on. They are something that is always on the minds of pretty much everybody that works at Buffer, and that makes it a pretty special place to work for me.

Oh my gosh, so many impacts. I’ll start internally.

One huge benefit is that the team has full context of everything that’s going on at any time. As long as we all share information, what’s going on in our email, what’s going on in our projects, or what’s going on in Slack, that gives everyone full context to make connections we might otherwise have missed to put together ideas that may have not happened otherwise, and to have the full trust in the team because they understand the full context of what’s going on.

Externally, there are also a lot of great benefits. For one, we learn. We learn so much faster than if we were to keep things to ourselves, so if we iterate on our salary formula and we put that out there to the world, tons of smart people in our audience are going to come to us and say, “How did you do this? Did you think about this? I see a potential future challenge here.” We’re able to gather all that information that’s sort of “wisdom of the crowd” information that otherwise would have been entirely lost to us. Entirely missing.

We also feel like we do what we can to promote the startup environment and community. It’s almost like open source code. We add to the world of knowledge around how startups do things, how we build, how we pay people, how we provide benefits, how we travel, and how we work as a remote team. All that stuff, we hope, can help another company, help another person launch their idea and get something off the ground, and have them do a little bit less research than maybe we had to do. It’s sort of a net benefit for the world, we hope.

That’s a good question. Most folks automatically think it’s going to be something like jealousy around knowing what another co-worker makes. Really, the only challenge we have found with transparency is that it takes time to do it. You really have to set aside time and keep making it a priority and keep making it something that you communicate.

It’s real easy to have a meeting and take the outcomes and the action items and execute on them. It’s one extra step to say, “Let me write up these notes and share them with the whole team so everyone’s aware of what’s going on.” Or, “Let me post a recording of this call somewhere where everyone can see it.” It’s something we have to recommit to often and it’s something that can easily slip by when you get really busy, but it’s something that we have seen enough gains and benefits from that we always take that extra time and energy to do it because it’s that important to us.

You know, we haven’t really seen that. Generally our investors, like folks who have chosen to be part of this journey with us, did so with eyes open knowing what we do and how we do it, and most of them feel pretty comfortable and aligned with our mission — this is the kind of company that we have set out to be.

Now often sometimes we will see someone look at the information on the dashboard, particularly around revenues and take to their own blog and say, “I see Buffer’s MRR dipping and this is what I would do about it,” and we love that. We read those with such interest and often we’ll reach out to those people. It’s that “wisdom of the crowd” thing again coming back; sharing that information just means more minds on the job.

We created the dashboard in partnership with Baremetrics. They are a like-minded company, wanted to do something fun and we were already keeping these records internally anyway. I think we just asked ourselves “Could it work? Could it work to do this?” We iterated on it a little bit in terms of what information we felt comfortable showing — not from our perspective, but from a customer’s perspective. We have signed up for transparency; but our customers — many have followed along with what we’re doing and feel really aligned with it , and many just want to have a service to Buffer their social media posts. We always want to be respectful of their privacy even as we do these crazy things with our own sort of transparency efforts. That was the only sticking point there: making sure that we were sharing as much as we could while protecting our individual customer’s privacy. Once we did that, we were able to launch it and I think Baremetrics has done that with a couple of other companies as well.

That’s definitely a situation that we had never encountered before and I sincerely hope we never encounter again. The tough thing about transparency is figuring out where the line is between what to share because you can and what to share because you should.

A lot of times, there’s a debate on if we should share something that will really freak out the team if there’s nothing they can do about it. Is that within our value of transparency? Or do we try and act on it as best we can and then share with them the outcome of what happened? That’s what we ended up choosing in this case — the latter option. We didn’t share the entire evolving situation because there’s not a lot we can do to get the information if our runway is very, very short and things are in sort of a panic state. It’s not going to do everyone a lot of good to hear that and not be able to act on it.

What we ended up doing was sharing, in retrospect, that the runway was short, and this is what we did about it. “It was a terrible, terrible day. A terrible moment. We don’t want it to ever happen again. Here are the things we’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” So that’s a judgement call, right? Maybe our team would have wanted to know every step of the way. Maybe they would have wanted to be involved. Maybe they would have had great ideas that we didn’t get to hear and didn’t get to act on because we chose to shield that information from them and only share it when it was a done deal. It’s an evolving conversation. It’s something we are always talking about. It’s something that we want to own up to when we don’t feel like we have done it the best that we could and we want to keep learning from those situations.

It’s kind of hard to say what the takeaways are. In terms of sharing bad news with the team, I think the team has expressed with us that they want to be all-in. Like, Buffer is known for this: its transparency. Everyone knows everything, that’s what they sign up for, they can handle it. So in future bad news situations, which I sure hope are few and far between, we will probably try and give everyone information much closer to the time that it happens rather than wait.

I think we get a lot more people interested in Buffer because of transparency. One benefit of transparency that I didn’t mention, and that we didn’t set out to achieve, was that of marketing success. We never said “if we share salaries, all these publications are going to be knocking on our door.” It was a natural side effect of it; people were just interested in them. As a result of that, more folks heard about Buffer and heard about Buffer’s culture than maybe they would have otherwise. When we made salaries transparent, for the next open job role, we had double the number of applicants for it. I think that’s a pretty strong sign that folks feel aligned with what we’re up to.

I think so. It kind of lets you know what you’re in for. If you’re a person who is very private and this idea is frightening and terrible to you, Buffer is probably going to be a mismatch. If you’re someone who’s open to that idea, and you don’t have to be entirely gung-ho, but open to learning more and learning about the philosophy behind it and why we see the benefit of it, then Buffer could be a great spot for you.

I would say small steps are fine, you know? It would be tough to go from a very traditional organization that holds things quite close to the vest and then just one day open up everything. You can take steps in between. If you want to be more open about salaries, you don’t have to share them with the world. You don’t have to post them to the Internet with people’s names and cities. You can share bands of salaries internally, and if that goes okay and people aren’t freaking out, maybe you can share actual salaries internally. If that goes really well you can think about the next step, but break it up into smaller pieces. Radical transparency is not something that happens overnight. It’s the result of many, many small decisions over many, many years.

*Many companies are adopting levels of radical transparency, including us here at Fog Creek. *

Why Add a License to your Open Source Project?

Most people don’t add a license to their code projects. In 2013 for example, only ~15% of projects on GitHub had one.

There are a few explanations for this. Some suggest developers are pushing back against what they see as a “permission culture”, others blame platforms like GitHub for initially not taking licensing seriously enough (it was 5 years before they added a license picker for example). But I think James Governor perhaps gets closest to the truth in this tweet:

Whatever the reason, it creates a real problem which actually could stop your code from being used by others. Probably, the exact opposite of what you intended!

Just sharing your code publicly on GitHub, Glitch or elsewhere doesn’t mean it can be used. Actually, any code that doesn’t specifically have a license should be considered “all rights reserved” by its author. The author could assert their copyright at any time, and demand you stop using it. So not knowing whether your shared code is meant to be used due to lack of a license could be why your projects don’t have more stars, forks or remixes. As Jeff Atwood puts it “a proper software license is a necessary evil for any code you plan to release to the public.”

**But picking a license is hard?! I hear your cry. **And you’re right, in the past licensing was tricky. There are lots of them, and they included legalese that made them difficult to understand.

But thankfully, there’s been a push in recent years to make licensing more accessible with sites like the Open Source Guide and Choose A License (both GitHub initiatives) making understanding them and choosing one a lot easier.

Which to choose typically comes down to how comfortable you are with other people:

Using your code
Copying it
Modifying it
Redistributing it
Selling it to others
Making decisions about what others can do with it But a number of de facto standards have emerged for different use-cases. Like if you want your project to be used as a dependency in other projects then it’s probably best to use the most popular license in that community. For Node projects for example, MIT is the most frequently used license for npm libraries. If you want your project to appeal to large businesses, then they’ll probably want an express patent license like Apache 2.0. If you want your project to appeal to those who don’t want their contributions to be used in closed source software then GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are good candidates. And if you’re contributing to an existing project, it’s often expected that you’ll release your modified versions under the same license as the original work.

As a result of these common scenarios, the vast majority of software now use either a permissive license, like an MIT, BSD, or Apache license, or a strong copyleft one such as GPL v2 or GPL v3. Sticking with one of these standardized licenses makes it easier for others to know what they can and can’t do with your code. But if you’re releasing an open-source project for work, then it’s always good to check in with your legal team.

If good fences make good neighbors, then a good license certainly makes for a good project. It backs up the appearance of permission you've given folks in sharing your project publicly by expressly giving it in a way you’re happy with. That way, everyone knows where they stand.

It’s such an important aspect, we've made the ability to add a license (and a Code of Conduct) to your project a one-click thing in Glitch. For us, having more Glitch projects explicitly declare their licenses increases the odds that people will be able to easily work together and share their creations. So we've added licenses to all our sample projects too.

So the next time you’re creating a project on Glitch, be a good neighbor and add a license to it.

Over React? Open source licensing, Facebook, WordPress, and patents

In the summer of 2017, a lively open source licensing debate was happening: the React framework had become one of the most popular frameworks in existence, but was React’s open source license open enough for developers to trust it? Developers were worried whether they could use it without legal repercussions from Facebook, the primary maintainers of React.

The complexity arose because, while the React project adopted the popular and well-known BSD free software license, they also adopted an additional, unusual patent grant which worried developers.

Facebook’s “BSD+Patents” license had been a part of React for some time, but high-profile projects did not begin to consider removing React until the Apache Software Foundation labeled it a Category X license, or license that may not be included within Apache products. This, followed by Automattic (the primary company behind WordPress) deciding to pull React from its open source projects, ultimately lead to Facebook dropping the patent clause and using the standard MIT license — not only for React, but a number of other open source projects they maintain, as well.

There still seems to be a lot of lingering questions around the debate, even though it’s been resolved as a decisive win for the open source community. For example, why did the patent clause exist in the first place? Facebook’s Adam Wolff explained the reasoning, but understanding that explanation requires first knowing why companies need patent clauses in the first place and what does this kind of patent protection even mean?

Facebook didn’t invent the idea of patent protection clauses, but given their access to nearly infinite lawyers and money and being stewards of an increasingly popular front-end framework, it was natural that React users without that access and money would worry about the legal risks. This risk is heightened by many people’s tendency to ignore licenses and terms of service agreements until someone points out on social media what we may have actually agreed to.

Instead of speculating, I reached out to Gary Pendergast, an engineer at Automattic.

Gary is part of the WordPress core dev community and works on some of the projects where Automattic initially decided to pull React. He offered some insight on why licensing is important for engineers, and how licenses impact his work, part of which powers over 25% of domains on the Web.

How would you explain licensing and its importance to a developer who is either just learning to code or has not been involved with the open source community?

**GP: **The open source community can be a great place to learn to code, there are countless examples, free code libraries, and wonderful, helpful people to get you going. But all of that is predicated on the idea of giving back some of what you get out.

Writing code is a creative process, in the same way that writing a story, or recording music is, so the code you write is copyrighted to you, so people need to ask for your explicit permission to use that code. Some open source licenses implement an idea called “copyleft”, which allows you to maintain the copyright, but you give everyone permission to freely use the software you wrote. The only reason you can use all of those code libraries is because they’re under an open source license — someone before you has joined the open source community, learned how to do something cool, and released it back freely, in a way that benefits everyone.

So, licensing is important, because it lets you be the person who helps those who’ll come after you. There are a range of established open source licenses that will share the things you create in whichever way you’re comfortable with.

What projects are you working on at Automattic that are affected by the licensing of React?

**GP: **I’m fortunate enough to be sponsored full-time to contribute to the open source community — while I’m employed by Automattic, my work is entirely focussed on building cool things to give away for free.

Right now, I’m working on a project called Gutenberg, which, at the core of it, is a big re-architecture of how WordPress manages content in a website. The first part of that involves rewriting WordPress’ post editor into a modern JavaScript app, which uses React to render the interface. That’s the part which was seriously affected by React’s license.

Why would React’s license matter on a project that uses React?

**GP: **One thing you will find in the open source community is that people get very passionate about software licenses. It’s not really surprising, the freedoms we enjoy in open source rely heavily on those licenses, people are naturally going to be protective of those freedoms.

In the case of React’s license, the patent grant was the thing that caused the most concern, or at least, one particular clause in the grant, which allowed Facebook to revoke the patent grant under some limited circumstances. There were some interesting arguments suggesting that this clause had very little practical enforceability, and others arguing that the patent grant was a net benefit, but the concern wasn’t really about whether this clause could be enforced. Most of the disagreement was about the “vibe” of the thing — this clause felt a bit like Facebook was trying to get the benefits of the open source community, while avoiding giving back.

For a project using React, if we were to assume a worst case interpretation of the patent grant, React could easily be seen as a trojan horse — React is a wonderful tool to use, but it potentially gave Facebook an unfair way to attack competitors. If you were a startup that held software patents, and Facebook violated those patents, then suing them for patent violation could result in the React patent grant being revoked, even if the original patent violation had nothing to do with React. While this is a fairly unlikely scenario, the fact that it was possible made people uncomfortable.

React **** up until they changed it to MIT. Why did it take this long for Automattic to take this stance?

**GP: **Automattic has been using React for years on other projects. For example, Calypso is an open source project, using React, that powers the interface you see when you manage your site on WordPress.com. Our legal team evaluated the patent grant in the React license at the time, and decided that it wasn’t a concern for the company. Partially because of the questionable enforceability of it, but primarily because Automattic doesn’t collect software patents, so is never going to be in a position to be suing Facebook for patent infringement.

In Gutenberg, however, there were different priorities, particularly as this code would be rolled out to over a quarter of the web. The WordPress Core team didn’t feel that we could make the same decision for the entire WordPress world.

What would the consequences be of pulling React out of those projects if Facebook were to hold their stance on keeping the patent clause? How significantly would this have delayed releases of those projects?

**GP: **For Gutenberg, the impact wouldn’t have been huge, though that’s mostly because it’s architected with situations like this in mind. Over the years, we’ve found that WordPress often outlives the libraries it depends on, so we usually spend time on ensuring we can swap them out at a later date if we need to. In this case, components in Gutenberg don’t use React directly, they talk to a thin wrapper around it, so the task of replacing React would’ve been relatively simple, particularly if we were to replace it with a React-compatible framework, such as Preact.

The Calypso project doesn’t have that abstraction layer, so it would have taken significantly more effort, though it’s an effort we were willing to make. From a strictly business viewpoint, Calypso has no need to maintain compatibility with WordPress, so didn’t necessarily need to have chunks of it rewritten. Part of being a good citizen of the open source community is to play nicely with others, however, even if it requires effort on your part. So, we would’ve taken the time to do that, because it’s the right thing to do.

Do you consider this the best outcome for this situation? Do you think MIT was the best choice, given how many licenses are out there?

**GP: **I’m happy with the outcome here, React moving to the MIT license means that it can easily be used in any open source project, without concern that React’s license may not be compatible with your particular open source license.

The one down side of the MIT license is that it doesn’t include a patent grant at all. The best possible outcome probably would’ve been to use a standard open source license like Apache 2.0, which includes the patent grant, but heavily restricts the circumstances under which that grant can be revoked. Similarly, a better outcome may’ve been if the React patent grant was changed to remove (or reduce) the revocation clause. There’s basically no practical difference, however. Even assuming Facebook hold any patents on React, it would be an extremely poor business decision for them to try enforcing those patents.

As more companies become stewards of widely used open source projects, these important discussions around licenses will continue, as will the need for new developers to learn about the impact of open source licensing. The biggest takeaway from this whole thing though, is the importance of considering the impact of your choice of license on downstream users. Even with the best of intentions, we saw in this example, the clear need to balance your own interests with the needs of others who you’re intending to help by making your project open source.

Those of us on the Glitch team have thought about these issues extensively. Recently, we launched an update to the editor allowing the addition of an open source license to a project with just a click. Software licenses are typically represented as text or Markdown files in a project, so they were always able to be added manually, but this update makes the process even simpler.

Besides making the process more efficient, it is our way of facilitating the education of licensing and its importance to software development—especially open source software. We hope this will help the Glitch community not only be more knowledgeable and involved in the open source community, but in the discussions around open source licensing that are sure to continue in the future.

If you’d like to learn more about software licensing, read our post ‘Why Add a License to your Open Source Project?’

Why Slack Teams Prefer Manuscript to Jira

Teams that use Slack love how it’s helped them communicate better. Slack’s emphasis on transparency and casual, creative collaboration reflects how work really gets done. But contrast this to the project management tools you’ve used before, like Jira, where you end up doing work just to keep the system happy rather than focusing on design or coding or the other tasks that actually create something for your users.

This is a frustration for a lot of teams, so we built Manuscript to be different — instead of forcing you to obey a workflow designed by somebody who’s never even seen your project, you get just enough workflow to follow your team’s existing process and keep it on track, whether that’s full Agile or something more ad-hoc. So you don’t need to buy some how-to book, and you certainly don’t need to hire an administrator just to get the software working the way you want it to. It’s designed with useful defaults, so it just works.

We’ve all seen how Slack can help reduce the amount of email sent within a team, and Manuscript brings that magic to project management. Within your team, you can completely turn off email notifications and trust the system to notify you of all the most important tasks and updates. But Manuscript reduces emails from outside your team, too, letting you capture bug reports from users through email or a web form, handle core help desk tasks by handling your inbox, or even use Manuscript’s simple, powerful API to send in errors or bug reports directly from your app into Manuscript. Unlike Jira Service Desk, these aren’t some paid-for optional extra. Our powerful helpdesk functionality and crash reporting capabilities are built right into Manuscript.

We think people should use the right tool for the job. Software your team actually wants to use, not just another part of some suite of tools which may or may not be the best choice for you. So, while Manuscript provides project management, issue tracking, and support functionality, whenever you want to use another tool in your workflow, we enable you to use it seamlessly with Manuscript. That’s why we provide robust integrations with Slack, as well as Trello, GitHub, Google Docs and others. What’s more, they’re free to use too.

The Slack integration for Manuscript enables your team in sync. Whenever you link to or mention a case in Slack, a summary of it is shown directly in the chat. This includes details like the case number, project, area, title, status, assignee, priority, and most recent edit. So you have all the context you need to understand the case and its current status, while you continue to chat.

There are Slash commands too, which enable you to add new cases and update existing ones right from within Slack.

But integrations with Slack are common in project management apps, so what makes Manuscript’s different? Well, it’s fully customizable. You can view the code and remix the Slack integration on Glitch, and edit it however you need to. Glitch provides a browser-based code editor to modify the integration, and it hosts and deploys it automatically, as you’re coding. So it’s a quick, and easy way to get an integration that works exactly the way you need it to.

Since it’s remixable you can make it do anything you want without waiting for some little-known 3rd party on a marketplace to get around to it. Plus, it’s open source, so you can see exactly what it’s doing with your private data.

Using Manuscript and Slack together gives you just enough process to follow your own workflow, so your team doesn’t have to jump through hoops. Learn more about managing projects with Manuscript. Start a trial, and add the Slack integration from the integrations page in Manuscript (go to the Avatar menu > Integrations, and click the Slack tile).

Fighting for Better Creative Communities — A Creator Interview with Sydette Harry

Jenn Schiffer: Hi, I’m Jenn Schiffer. I’m the Community Engineer at glitch.com here at Fog Creek. Glitch is the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. Today I’m here talking with Sydette Harry, Editor-at-Large at the Coral Project. We’re going to talk a lot about community and what she’s doing in that sphere.

So you are Editor-at-Large at the Coral Project.

Sydette Harry: And Editor of Mozilla.

Jenn Schiffer: And Editor of Mozilla?

Sydette Harry: Editor, Network Mozilla, yeah.

Jenn Schiffer: Awesome. What does that mean?

Sydette Harry: I’m responsible as the Editor-at-Large at Coral … I started as the Community Lead, so I was responsible for research and looking into how you put together and describe communities specifically around journalism. We were started as a partnership between the New York Times, the Washington Post, Mozilla and the Knight Foundation.

It originally started with: how do we make better comments? One of the things we came up with after we started doing our research and planning is that comments aren’t singular. Comments are a reflection of community, so if you want to have better comments you have to have better communities around journalism.

Now I’ve now moved on to Editor-at-Large, so how do we talk about and do some of our research? With Mozilla, trying to build that journalistically into a foundation. How do we make a community of people who care about internet health? Coming from Coral, how do you make a community about people who care about internet journalism and journalism in general? What are the things and the guides that you need to make this work? What are the things that work for communities, and basically being in the archives and being in the crates and going to the meetings and going, “Let’s do this thing.”

The slogan we have for Coral Project ended up being “Because Journalism Needs Everyone”. One of the things that is … I loathe to use it, but the evangelization is getting people to think about projects, specifically within tech, that need communities. Whatever you’re building needs a community, because you need more than one person.

Jenn Schiffer: When did the Coral Project get started and why and how?

Sydette Harry: It was originally thought about in 2012 or ’13. Sasha Koren, Aron Pilhofer, various people from the Washington Post and the New York Times looked at the comments and went, “This is bad.” And, “What would we need to build tools around the comments?” Because it’s a very tech thing. “Let’s build a tool.”

As it got forward, Greg Barber who is in charge of partnerships, we started looking at that this needs to be an interdisciplinary thing. You cannot build your way out of sociocultural problems; you actually have to look at their roots and examine what they are.

They hired Andrew Losowsky, who is our Project Lead. The General. Then I was added as the Community Lead, and the goal was: so we’re going to create guides, because it’s great to … What happens a lot is people ship out to tech, and “The tech will fix it!” And there is an algorithm that nobody understands. That is the fixture, but nobody knows how to use the thing, how to adopt the things.

Also, starting to think about what works in communities and how you bring people on and where are the places we can talk about that.

That led us I think into a lot of places that I don’t think people traditionally look for in tech, when they’re thinking about communities. So sports, theatre. Theatre of the Oppressed. Augusto Boal was a big one for us. Museum curation, all of that. Like, how do you really, when you want to bring people together, to be together, how do you deal with that?

Jenn Schiffer: So, I have worked with news sites before, and when the comments were bad, which happens quite quickly, one of the options was, “Let’s get rid of comments.” I know some sites have done that, but why is that problematic? To just get rid of comments entirely? Why would you put the work into keeping commenting there?

Sydette Harry: I think that’s a common misconception people have is that people always … because we started as a comments platform, people always go, “Oh you always want people to keep comments.” No. There are some places where we talk to them like, “Please close your comments. You are not about this life; you are not about to put in this work. Please close these comments.”

The issue that often came up with this is that there was a close the comments. There wasn’t a, “So how are we going to connect with our community? How are we going to help people talk to each other? How are we going to get feedback? Is that an email, is that a poll, is that a post?” When you are producing content for people, and more, let’s be blunt, when your business is based on the content people produce for you, your comments, your tweets, your posts on Instagram, Snapchat, all that, how are people able to tell you what they need? How are they able to see that you are listening? How are they able to feel heard? Those conversations didn’t happen.

It’s kind of … it’s the version of when you’re told to clean your room and you just start shoving things under the bed, and after a while if you don’t actually clean the room the bed just starts lifting. That’s what the problem was. Because for some things, you don’t need comments. There are certain issues where if you are holistically considering your community, you don’t need to constantly expose people to how terribly other people think of them. But what you do need is a way for communities and people to connect, and also more importantly correct you in how you are handling them.

Jenn Schiffer: You have the guidelines, you have Talk and you have Ask. Can you tell me about Talk and Ask?

Sydette Harry: Talk is the comment box, so how you moderate comments. Where you put things in, how do you generate those? Ask is our first product and that was the one, I think, it was very important for us to start with and people were very confused by it. This is how you collect user-generated content and submissions and make polls and get things. There was a fourth product that’s just kind of built into talk that allows you to look for things and search for things as you moderate, so that’s on the moderation end but it comes from …

One of the beliefs is that the best way to have people be interested in you is to be interested in them. One of the things that journalism I think has failed continually at and is still failing at in a lot of ways is how are you showing people that you are interested in what they do and interested and how they ask and actually actively soliciting the truth about their lives. Most people were telling us they were using Google forms or SurveyMonkey. These are all great things but they are not for a journalistic workflow. They are not for text. They are for large data aggregation, so you wanted something that kind of cut and then put it into the way journalists would work and allowed you to contact people and allowed you to preserve identities and identify personally identifying information, because these are the things that journalists do with the people.

It’s, how do you create a tool that helps people “people” better, in a workflow? You want to recognise that, and you can do something with a text field that you can’t do with a cell, so that was what Ask was for

And it’s actually been used really well. One of our most recent projects was a discussion about race in Boston, and there had been various responses to different parts of it but one of the things people were so receptive to was the ability to be able to tell their story and get feedback and not feel like telling their story was preparation for battle. That is so often, especially for the most marginalized: if you want to tell the truth, you’ve got to prepare for battle.

With something like Ask is, you get to contribute. You get to tell the truth and if you want to go forward you can, but you also get to do the work of verification and all the things that are important to journalism and protect your sources and protect your community.

Jenn Schiffer: At least in the open source community, you and I both are greatly involved in open source communities, we have dealt with things like licensing and now codes of conduct for projects sort of thing, like the Talk project has a code of conduct and the Apache licence and for Glitch we’re trying to put our best foot forward and lead in with being a friendly community, and so we’re trying to build tools to allow that. So we’ve added a feature to allow you to add a code of conduct, allow you to add a license fairly easily, but we know that that’s just the first step.

What are some things that we can learn from physical real world communities in tech communities, besides … like, code of conducts have existed. Every mall in New Jersey has a code of conduct at the door, you know what I mean? Like you’re not supposed to rob or hurt people. You go on a bus and it’s like-

Sydette Harry: Oh Lord, we just showed our age. Malls.

Jenn Schiffer: Right.

Sydette Harry: What are those? Everybody saying, “What is a mall?”

Jenn Schiffer: I’m a Jersey girl now, so … But you know, what else can we be doing, for example listening to our users: what should we be doing to build tech to give those protections to our users?

Sydette Harry: One thing that’s really important to me whenever people talk anybody the codes of conducts, and I love OpenNews Source codes of conducts, they’re amazing, but codes of conduct are almost always talked about in this way of how do we want people to not behave? Like, “Don’t do, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t.” Think of it as a “do.” What do you expect people to do when you come in?

This is where I do the terrible thing that I’m not supposed to do but I was an athlete in school and forgive me, but it’s kind of like if you play a sport, you do not expect that you will always get away uninjured. That’s just not how that game works. But you are made aware of what is and isn’t in bounds, and you are indoctrinated into a culture and that culture can be toxic or problematic but you know when you hit the field, that’s where the goal is. This is how we’ll choose a time. A lot of times when you go into comments in other places, that’s not part of it. They don’t include what do you do, how do you do it, where is the spaces. That is what I think a lot of tech needs to start doing is people think the solution is tech, when tech is the tool people will use to create the solution.

Jenn Schiffer: It’s the medium.

Sydette Harry: Yes. So how do you get people to … How do you want people to be in that medium, and think of that that way, as well as you should have a code of conduct and no longer think this is a discussion no more. Even if you don’t have it officially, unofficially you end up with a code of conduct, so have one. And be comfortable with it being malleable.

It is something that you’re responsible for and you might not get it right, but you have these steps and you have them in place and this is how you will activate them, and this is what you want from the community. Not just this is the thing we have to do, or, “Don’t be a jerk, guys.” That’s nice, but to me that’s not where the warmth is. The warmth is, “We are here to do a thing and we’re trying to do the thing of our best ability, and this is how we want to help you know what the best looks like.”

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. I think that there is … and a lot of tech codes of conduct sort of are like TL;DR don’t be a jerk, because I feel like a lot of people in the tech community need to be explicitly told that being a jerk is a bad thing, because again, we see the leaders in this industry and the people who have made apps that we use every day and they’re known for being jerks and everyone’s like, “Oh, I want to be like that guy,” you know?

Sydette Harry: And there’s also everyone’s definition of a jerk isn’t always the same, and especially for technology, where we’re trying to build for a world, we’ve got to try and think of that. So how do we make it comfortable for people to let us know whether or not we’re successful at what we’re doing?

That is what I think codes of conducts are and that’s about what communities are is, how do we come to actions that achieve what we want, in ways that centre the people we want in the room, that we all can participate in? It’s not just everybody who believes in the same way, because your version of jerk and my version of jerk may be different, but there might be … but we can have a complicit discussion of, “This is how I’d like to be addressed. Please do not do this and that and that.” We can have that, and we should have spaces in our communities, and you should have a place to be able to talk about that and have a place where you’ve decided on that.

Jenn Schiffer: I feel like when it comes to thinking about humans, which is what we’ve ultimately forgotten about in tech, that we’re building software for humans, a lot of people … You know, working as a consultant, accessibility was always an afterthought, if a thought at all for projects. It’s like, well, it seems bad for business to allow people to be jerks in your community and drive other people away. It seems bad for business to not build tech that everyone can use.

Sydette Harry: We are, and the “We,” and my first question is always, “Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold up. Who’s ‘We’, fam? Who is the ‘we’? Let’s start there. Who do you mean by ‘we’?” “Um, people.” “Which people?” “Uh, people who do … “ “Does everybody have a phone? Is this a … how far in a legacy phone is this?” Like, there’s a whole thing that goes through and very often one of the first things with Coral we would do is go, “So what is your community for? Who is your community?” A lot of people would just kind of go, “Of course it’s our readers.” You’re like, “Are you sure? Or is it your subscribers? Or is it subscribers who will comment?” It’s like, that’s not an easy question.

Jenn Schiffer: Or is it your advertisers.

Sydette Harry: Come on now. And that’s not an easy question, and people like to pretend it is because it makes things simpler, and there needs to be an admission that it’s not simple.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, and I think that I’ve recently learned that you need user personas. You need to have an idea of who your users are and you’ll learn that there are other people slipping into the woodwork that have been using your technology in a different way than you had expected, and you have to see that as an exciting challenge to meet and not a, “Well we’re not really going to cater to them because that doesn’t really help us hit our bottom line; they’re an edge case.” I feel like we have to go more into this.

Sydette Harry: No more edge case.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, exactly. Like edge case as being a fake idea.

**Sydette Harry: **Because everybody is … Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s Design for Real Life, and I love it, is this idea that there’s no such thing as an edge case. There’s stress cases. Because depending on where you are, end of day everybody’s an edge case. Like, if you are flustered and nervous you will miss information. If you are looking for something, if you don’t have access to something, if you lose your phone, if you do this, if you do that, you are going to need something, and if you design for that in the beginning, you don’t sit there and go, “Oh holy crap, what happens when people don’t have broadband?”

There’s a lot of stuff now where like, “Oh, we didn’t understand that people don’t have broadband.” I’m like, “Because you all are in San Francisco. Nobody went down to Kentucky.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, when your sort of user sample is the people who share a co-working space with you, like, is that actually really a cross-sample that’s significant at all.

Sydette Harry: And you need to present your business in that model. I mean, if you can make your money off of just kinds of people like the people who are in your co-working space, that’s a good business model. The problem is when you say it’s for everybody.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, and I think that’s the one thing that we need to catch ourselves on in tech is that you can be building the tool for a small set of people. That’s totally fine. But you can’t jump on a table and be like, “We’re saving the world,” you know? Unless you’re actually putting the work in to try to save the world, but if you’re building an app that is for a specific group of people …

Sydette Harry: And who are you saving the world from and once again, who’s “we”?

Jenn Schiffer: Exactly, yeah.

Sydette Harry: Who is “we”?

Jenn Schiffer: So what is the future of the Coral Project? What is in the works? What can we see in the future?

Sydette Harry: Here’s where I get to be very proud of my team. They are now in 23 newspapers and working other projects and integrating with other people, and constantly developing and iterating and it’s open source, so people are joining in. It is plugin adaptable, so people pull in plugins to do polls and measure civility and identify trolling and heat map comments, and it’s all open.

Jenn Schiffer: I was going to ask you what your hopes and dreams were, because on the Glitch team, we always like to talk to each other about what our hopes and dreams of our work and in general, but a lot of that sounds like really good hopes and dreams and goals, and we think of hopes and dreams not as like, something that’s a pipe dream or something like that. They actually become our sort of goals and values.

Sydette Harry: Dreaming is work.

Jenn Schiffer: Exactly, yeah.

Sydette Harry: Dreaming is work, and this is a conversation I have with people is that you have to have hopes and dreams because hopes and dreams also tell you why what you want isn’t possible right now. So I want a Ferrari. Why don’t I have a Ferrari? Because I don’t have the money. So you have to think about what is separating you from your dream. Now you might go halfway down your dream and decide you don’t want it no more, but if you want it, it has to become something that you talk about and too often you get this, “Oh, well you’re such a dreamer.” I’m like, “Yes, and?” I’m also a worker. These things aren’t mutually exclusive. In terms of hopes, I mean the apple pie in the sky is that everyone get along … not get along, but we get justice and reparations and an end to exploitative capitalism and yadda, yadda yadda. You know? I was raised by a revolutionary. The most important thing is that we give people and we build things for people to find the best uses for their potential, and give them the space to find resources that aren’t given to them, and continue to build a tech landscape that allows for that more than the other thing. I mean, there are things I want but they’re … I think for me what has been most amazing for tech is the time when I’ve gotten to be my best self, and I’ve gotten the space to be my best self. I think that to me is a better goal than a lot of the larger ones. Am I giving the space, am I giving the tools, am I giving the resources for people to be their best selves? If they don’t want to be their best selves, I got that. I’ll back myself up. I’m good on that. But with journalism and all of these things, especially through Coral and codes of comment, is: how do we provide the resources and tools for people to do that and continue to build them in a way that allows them to have good examples to build for themselves?

The biggest hope and dream’s that it stops being a couple of people in a room talking about a thing, and we’re going to see that it starts being the world looking at, “How do we want to communicate with each other? How do we want to actually deal with this space as part of our lives?”

That becoming the focus of what we talk about with tech, as a tool in the world and not as the 600 guys making way too much money in small sectors of the world. More like, who are the people who are putting pedometers on cows and helping save the dairy industry? Who are the people that are doing micro-lending so that my friend’s family business for 30 years gets to stay on its feet? What is the newspaper that started up in my personal neighborhood because the kids didn’t believe that they were being covered but they had Adobe, a Mac and an internet connection, so they have a newspaper? How do we make those moments possible, and how do we make them possible as many disciplines and things as we can?

That’s my ongoing dream. Like, it doesn’t have a close. It’s like, “Okay, we got here. Can we do better? Can we do it again? Can we do it again?” That’s the thing. I actually enjoy it. I really do. So that to me is the hope of tech, and that’s the flip side of the, “Okay, I really want to fight everyone.” But there is something amazing when you see someone go, “Look guys! I made my first news, I made my first zine, I made my first song,” and you watch people have this relationship where it goes from, this is thing that other people do, to this is part of my life. If we can get as many people as possible to that moment, super excited.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. I like the idea of the future being thinking, “Oh look how far we’ve come,” not, “Oh God, what have we done?” Right now, we’re at, “Oh God, what have we done?” And so yeah. My hopes and dreams are aligned with yours there. But I do want to say thank you for-

Sydette Harry: Thank you for having me.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. Thank you for coming here, thank you for your work on the Coral Project and at Mozilla and thank you for fighting, because that’s where we need to be at right now.

Sydette Harry: We always talk about love as this soft and beautiful, wonderful emotion and I say that is true, but the other side about love is it’s defense. If you love something, you want it to continue living and there is no greater love than insuring someone’s survival. Sometimes ensuring someone’s survival is a fight, and it’s very uncomfortable. We all get, “Eh, ooh, but I, eh, eh, eh,” and I think sometimes if you are really met with someone that does not want to ensure the survival of what you love, you have to fight. Okay, we can make up after a fight, but if we gotta have a fight, gotta have a fight.

“This board may be slow because there are lots of open cards”

That’s the message that sits at the top of the Content Calendar Trello board we use to manage our content marketing work. It’s a recent addition, and it’s interesting to me because it speaks to the expectation Trello has about how people will use their product.

They could have chosen to handle this situation in various ways. Re-work the product to be able to handle more cards, put in place limits on the number of cards that you can add to a board etc. But this choice is a good one — it signals that we’re using the product in a way it wasn’t designed to handle, it tells us what the impact of that is, and it lets us know how we could fix it.

But this post isn’t about UX, it’s about using Manuscript and Trello together. And what that warning message makes me think about is the importance of using the right tool for the job.

Using the right tool for the job goes to the heart of our philosophy, both within Fog Creek and behind our product, Manuscript. Following the sale of Trello (which we invented) to Atlassian (the makers of Jira), some companies may have switched tools away from the “competition”, but we didn’t. We don’t think of Trello as a competitor at all, but rather as a tool that can be complementary to Manuscript. We of course use Manuscript for our software development efforts, as we think it’s the best way for software teams to manage projects. But Trello works well for our use-case in marketing, and so we still use it.

We think our customers should do the same — use whichever tool you think works best for you to get a job done. And that’s why Manuscript integrates with Trello.

In my experience, Trello works really well for organizing small projects with tens of cards. But if a project is comprised of hundreds or even thousands of cards, it works less well as their own warning message highlights.

Thankfully, for those situations there’s Manuscript. Manuscript’s case page view and powerful search facility makes working with many tasks on complex projects manageable. And our Manuscript Power-up for Trello makes working with both systems easier.

With the Power-up, you can see the status of Manuscript cases right on cards in Trello. It enables you to attach Manuscript cases to Trello cards. You can search your Manuscript cases from within Trello, and once added to a card you can see the status of a Manuscript case, with all the information you need — like who it’s assigned to, and when it was created. From the board view, you can also see which Trello cards have Manuscript cases attached.

It’s a great option for those of us who work with multiple teams, but who want to be able to use the tool that’s right for them at the time. It provides an essential hook between the two products, making navigating between cards in Trello and cases in Manuscript possible with just one click.

We’d rather empower people to use the software they want to use, rather than having to use something else. We see this all the time with teams who are forced to use a suite of tools, rather than a best of breed option. This can have a negative impact on both morale and productivity. So while Manuscript provides project management, issue tracking, and support functionality, we still provide robust integrations for other tools, like Slack, GitHub and Google Docs. And they’re all free to use, and fully customizable.

Learn more about Manuscript and begin a trial today.

Exploring the Human Side of Data — A Creator Interview with Jer Thorp

Key Links #

Some of Jer’s Glitch Projects #

LOC Names (discussed in the interview)
Wordplay
Timeline of Categories
Library of Names

Transcript #

Jenn Schiffer: I’m Jenn Schiffer. I’m the Community Engineer for Glitch.com at Fog Creek. Glitch is the community where you build the app of your dreams, and today, we are going to be talking to one of our community users, Jer Thorp. Hey Jer.

Jer Thorp: Hey.

Jenn Schiffer: So you are Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress.

Jer Thorp: Yes.

Jenn Schiffer: What else do you do?

Jer Thorp: Well, I like have a lot of rotating hats. I mean … they’re not actually rotating hats though, that would be good if they were, but I teach at a programme called ITP, which people may be familiar with at NYU. It’s a new media arts masters programme.

I am a National Geographic Fellow, so that involves all kinds of things. Sometimes with vigorous animals in vigorous places and I also have an art practise that I’ve had for a long time, which involves making art; the things about the boundaries between data and culture.

Jenn Schiffer: So Innovator-in-Residence is a very interesting title, especially with an organisation like the Library of Congress. What are you doing there?

Jer Thorp: That’s a great question and I’m not actually sure yet. So I guess the residency is a research residency, so it is literally the point of the residency is kind of trying to figure out what I’m gonna be doing there, but that time is coming pretty close. My residency ends in March, so now I’m really trying to think about what the end result of the project will be.

But in general, the library asked me to come and work there and kind of think about what is the changing role of the library in the sort of face of our new digital culture. The question that I’m most interested in is what was the data that the library holds? How can that information be useful, not only to like rarefied digital humanities scholars, but also to artists and to the general public, and so can we activate that huge, huge amount of data that sits underneath the library, can we make that a public resource?

Jenn Schiffer: Well so it seems like the Library of Congress has a lot of data available-

Jer Thorp: Yep.

Jenn Schiffer: You’ve built some Glitch apps using it, what data is there?

Jer Thorp: Well there’s a lot. So the library holds about 165 million items. Not all those items are catalogue usually because they’re kind of strange things, so the largest amount of objects in the library is held by the manuscript’s department. So a manuscript … if you or I died, we could donate our kind of papers to the library and that might include things like journals, but it could also include like the contents of your pocket, and just like weird things. So the manuscript’s division is kind of filled with that.

Then we have books and maps, and so on and so on, which are relatively well catalogued. About 10% of those are digitised. So if we think about the library’s data holdings, we have all the information about the catalogue, so you or I or a member of the public could download … there’s 25 million records, and then there’s all that digital information, so there’s lot of digitised photographs, tonnes of digitised maps. There’s lot of digitised sound and video, so there’s all kinds of things that are available, to pretty much anybody, more or less than the website.

Jenn Schiffer: The large part of content that I personally consume is digital. Is the Library of Congress adapting to archiving digital content?

Jer Thorp: Sure. Yeah. I mean I’ll put a big caveat on all this, that is like I am by no means an expert at all these things. I’ve had a chance to kind of purposely spread it as widely as I can across the library, so I know a little bit about a lot of little things in the library.

The library has an extensive web archive project, which archives kind of a curated set of websites. This works very similarly to how the library might collect books, so somebody who’s the curator of Serbian studies might recommend that certain books, which are important to that particular field be accepted into the bunch of the data collected. That process is called accession. So with web archive, it’s websites, so you know similar to the library’s main function, first of all, it archives all of the Congress peoples’ websites, but then it has been archiving for quite a long time now; websites that I believe have cultural value.

A good example of that is a fairly new project, to archive web comics, so there’s … I forget the number, somewhere around 50 web comics that are now being archived by the Library of Congress, and that’s kind of a pilot project to understand how this type of material could be collected. Very famously, Twitter, the Twitter archives has been collected by the Library of Congress up to about now, when they’re going to stop collecting it as a whole. So there is this sort of thinking about how do you archive something like that? But there’s also a little bit of tension between what the library does and maybe what you know a company like Google does, when they’re trying to archive the entirety of the web.

That was never the idea of the library though. I’m pretty certain the idea was never to just archive everything. The library does not collect every book. It collects books that are supposed to be important to researchers and to culture in general.

Jenn Schiffer: I noticed that you’ve made a couple of projects using Library of Congress data on Glitch. How did you discover Glitch?

Jer Thorp: That’s certainly a good question. I don’t really know. I mean I follow Anil on Twitter, so that could’ve been where it came from that I also have a real interest in coding platforms that are more accessible to particularly to other non-coders or beginner coders. I’ve been involved in the Processing community for a really long time, and the Processing tool is a tool that I really love and it’s certainly a liberation and p5.js is something I’ve really been a supporter of. So I checked it out when it first came out and I was really intrigued by it and then when I started at the library, and I mentioned this before, I wanted to be as public as I could with the work that I was doing, so I thought that Glitch offered a really nice platform to A: share the work that I was doing, but to, B: make it remixable.

I was always going to release the thing and do again have a repository, but that’s only useful to people who know how to use GitHub, who know how to-

Jenn Schiffer: Deploy stuff?

Jer Thorp: Yeah, to know how to deploy node or whatever that he says, so this was a really nice middle ground, and so now, I do all three, so it’s like I’m sharing the thing, I have a Glitch page for the projects, and then I have a GitHub repository work, so that’s sort of anybody along the way.

The work is that I’ve published thus far is like purposely really sketchy in all kinds of ways and I’ve been trying to think less about like try not to be precious about it, and I think that’s also a nice thing that Glitch does, being able to remix things and branch them off and try something that doesn’t work or does work.

Jenn Schiffer: I think the interesting thing about not having to worry about devops stuff is being okay with like a ephemerality and like being okay with putting something out there that you might take down because you realise it doesn’t work exactly the way you want it to, but also I guess, from the standpoint of somebody working as an Innovator-in-Residence. Its like you want more people to know what is coming out of the Library of Congress.

Jer Thorp: Yeah.

Jenn Schiffer: So what about the apps that you’ve made is one that uses like, I think it’s called Library of Names, is a project. Do you want to talk about what that app does or what you’re-

Jer Thorp: Yeah sure. So names have always been something in data that I’ve been attracted to. Partly because they read as really human things, so it’s hard for us to read a name without imagining who that person is. We kind of … our brains just do it. If I read you another piece, so I’m looking at these 25 million records, which are largely about the books that the library holds, so I’m looking at a record about a book. I can read you the title of the book and it might do something for you, like you might be kind of intrigued by it. I could tell you the year it was published. I could tell you the format, like how many pages it is, things like who the publisher was. All those things are interesting, but they don’t do that cognitive spark that a name does. As soon as I say a name, you’re like, “Oh, I can sort of imagine who that person is.”

So I went through those records and extracted all the names out of them and looked a little bit about how names change over time, so the library holds things that go back you know into the 16th century, and further back than that, and then they have things that were published last year. And so you can sort of see that the first project was if I were to randomly pick a group of authors from the 1800s, what would their names be? And I wrote if I were to randomly pick an author from now, what would their names be? And what might speaking those names or reading those names teach us about what type of people were writing books back then? That’s the first thing, but also, what was the library collecting?

Because of course, the library is making political decisions about what type of material they are collecting, and those decisions are being made by curators who have very specific academic backgrounds and so you see some of that reflected in the data.

It’s a small-scale project that it was never meant to be kind of a deep analysis of name frequency, but more of an evocative thing.

Jenn Schiffer: Well so, I have your Library of Congress MARC names project that we talked about up here. I’m gonna remix it so I can edit it. So what’s going on here?

Jer Thorp: Yes, so this is the list of names that we talked about before, so there’s a little bit of text to sort of walk you through. The imaginary idea of thinking about what authors in this case from 1775 might look like and then we see 20 of them listed on the screen. So what’s happening in the background is that it’s going through all of the names and randomly picking a set of them, so this is like a random sampling.

The sketch is kind of built in, in a few parts. There’s the HTML page, which shows the actual thing. There’s a p5.js sketch, which does some of the logic about fading in the names and showing you the particular names, and then there’s the data itself. If you look in the assets, you’ll see there’s a couple of files here. There’s the names file and that’s the main one, where you can see all the first names.

Then there’s the totals file, which actually gives you a year-by-year total of all the names, so that you can normalise against it. It’s not really important for this particular example, but if you’re thinking about ways to use this data, that could be cool too.

Then they also have a last names one in here. The last names one, I actually never tried, but I’m sure it works, but if someone’s looking for a fun thing to do and switch this thing to the last names, it should be pretty easy to do.

Let’s go to the sketch.js and I’ll show you something really simple. So I told you before that there are 20 names being shown, but if you want to see many more, we can change this first number at the top, the display num from 20 to 50, and then once that updates, we should be able to go and see, yep, there’s 50 names. Switch to maybe 1990 or something around there, and so this is the same list from 1990, and we can really see the much broader diversity of names that come at 1990, but still, a lot of names repeating themselves; Peter, and Carlos, and Victor, and-

Jenn Schiffer: A fourth Mary.

Jer Thorp: A fourth Mary.

Jenn Schiffer: Oh, it’s so interesting. Then like names from people who have Asian names in there.

Jer Thorp: Yeah, and you’ll see that more and more as you go further up with that.

Jenn Schiffer: Still a lot of Davids.

Jer Thorp: Yeah, yeah, Undefined David.

Jenn Schiffer: Awesome. So you’re using p5 for this, which I see. Let’s take a look at package.json, you have a dependency of p5.

Jer Thorp: Yep.

Jenn Schiffer: You’ve worked a lot with p5.

Jer Thorp: Yeah, it’s great and you know I think p5, the thing that I like the most about it is it’s actually not even the thing itself, it’s the community they’ve built around it. They have this really amazing community, which is you know I think Lauren McCarthy, who has run a lot of the development on p5, has really described it as a community that’s kind of built on people being nice to each other first, and then code afterwards, so it’s a nice sort of change, if people have maybe tried in the past of getting into an open-source community and then turned off by it. This is a really good place to get into it.

Jenn Schiffer: So it’s sort of a small set of data that matches names, but like it can tell a huge story about history and those people choices, which is really cool.

Jer Thorp: Yeah, this is sort of, was inspired really in a big way by a project that I and two collaborators, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, did at the Museum of Modern Art, five years ago, I guess. We did a residency there and as part of that residency, we did a performance with a theatre group called The Elevator Repair Service. One part of our performance was we actually a weeding of the most popular names for artists in the collection, starting with the most popular and then going all the way down. The first 29 of them are Ben, and then you get Mary, and then … And we sort of staged that as a performance.

One of the things that I realised then, which was I was really carrying into this piece is what I’m trying to encourage the user to do, is to read those names. You know maybe not read them out loud, but at least hear the voice in your head. It does transform it into a crowd and you can see faces, and so, that’s what I wanted to get people to think about. It’s a good critical skill too. It’s like if you look at a list of authors on a paper or speakers on a panel, like to be able to sort of close your eyes and imagine what those people look like and see what gives you a chance to be critical about what they may be talking about or where their biases lie, so on and so on.

Jenn Schiffer: What API was used for that? Is there supposed to be like an end-point?

Jer Thorp: Yeah, so that’s not an API. The library, two years ago, a year and a half ago, I don’t know exactly, they’ve done a public release of what are called their MARC records. MARC is one of the acronyms that’s not really exact, it’s Machine Readable Cataloguing Records, so MARC records. MARC records are a really interesting story actually.

They were developed by one of the first computer programmers, her name was Henriette Avram. She went to the library, was tasked with solving this new problem that they knew they wanted to do, which was put the records of the library in the computer. Before then, they were in card catalogues. She would still visit the card catalogues in the library. They’re huge, like millions and millions of cards. So she developed this system, MARC, this format MARC, which allowed for a mechanism in a series of algorithms to digitise all their records. I think I’ll get the year wrong … I think it was 1959, still being used today, MARC version 21.

So the MARC records are available for public download.

Jenn Schiffer: What’s the file format?

Jer Thorp: Well, the native file format is this original MARC format and so it’s kind of, more or less, weird, free-text code, but they also publish it in XML, so the XML is what I’m parsing in the background of those Glitch experiments, I’m doing the heavy lifting, also using a series of node apps to parse those into data sets that are sort of digestible. So if you go to any of the Glitch experiments that I’ve done in the Assets folder, you’ll find those processed files.If you want to see how they were processed, you go to my GitHub repository, that’s github.com/blprnt/loc and you can find all of the code to do the heavy lifting, to process those 25 million records, you know to do forwarding some analysis on them; it could take hours, so not a great thing for like Glitch, just hang out and wait for a few hours and then we’ll come up with some data.

Jenn Schiffer: Does the Library of Congress have plans to maybe create infrastructure where maybe they do that processing, so that developers can access an API at some point?

Jer Thorp: Yeah, so, there is sort of API-like access to the library search, which is you know is relatively similar, but when you want to process that many records, an API is never going to be the answer. You know, no one is going to make 25 million API hits, unless you wanna drive where you’re hitting their API like crazy. So zip downloads are always going to be the solution for that, and I mean that’s fine. I think sometimes us programmers … I’m guilty of this, you know, “I’ll build an API,” when it’s like, “No, I’ll just publish zip files,” and somebody can download those zip files.

But there’s a lot of thinking about how the library can be more open to certain digital humanities work through things like APIs. There’s a really good API that you can use, for example, historical newspaper records. They have a massive, massive collection of historical newspaper records that’s available. The project name is slipping my mind and that has an API that you can use, or well again, like I said, there’s kind of an API-like way to access the search.

If you wanna find out all of this stuff, there’s a group that I worked with, Library of Congress Labs. If you go to labs.loc.gov, they have a really cool site called LC for Robots, and it’ll give you lots of access to this type of information.

Jenn Schiffer: LOC now is Library of Congress, not Lines of Code.

**Jer Thorp: **That’s right. LOC for LOC.

**Jenn Schiffer: **I think a lot about people learning more about artists and coders out in the world, and you’re working at the Library of Congress, and you started this podcast, it’s called Artist in the Archive.

Jer Thorp: That’s right.

**Jenn Schiffer: **What do you go over in the podcast?

Jer Thorp: So the podcast, it’s kind of about two things, and one is the people that I’m meeting in the library and the other is the work that I’m doing to try to understand what I’m gonna do, so one episode involves a long interview with somebody from the library. The first two episodes we interviewed Kate Zwaard, who is the chief of the national digital initiatives there, so she does a lot of these digital projects that we were talking about before.

Then in the second episode, I interviewed John Hessler, who is a curator in the maps department and works on Meso-American maps, but he’s also a mathematician and topologist, and there’s lots of interesting conversations.

Then I’ve been asking librarians and people who work at the library what are their favourite objects, and I do short interviews with people about those objects. So we’ve had a census from I think the late 1700s; although, I may be wrong, from Connecticut, which is an early census of a small community. It’s kind of things like how many sheep they owned and if they knew were to own a clock, and so it’s really interesting data-centric look into life in early America, but then we saw a daily journal from a guy named Izzy Young, who ran a club and bookstore in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, early 1960s, so it’s his notes about Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen, and so it’s kind of little insights.

It’s a way for me to balance the work that I’m doing, which really tends to focus on the large data dumps to these other little pieces of texture that are in the database.

Jenn Schiffer: So your residency, you said, is coming to a close soon. What’s next for you?

Jer Thorp: The plan?

Jenn Schiffer: Besides more Glitch projects, I hope.

Jer Thorp: Yeah, I know, but I’m going to try to get something magical done at the library, and that’s my main focus. And then, the big thing that I’m thinking about right now is, along with all that other stuff, is a conference I helped organise in Minneapolis called The Eyeo Festival, and Eyeo, we’re releasing tickets on February 1st, and it happens in June, and that’s a lot of fun. I’m just finishing up putting together the speaker list for that, so if you are somebody who’s interested in creative coding, it’s like the best place in the world to come.

**Jenn Schiffer: **So you’ve got a lot going on, where can people find your work online?

Jer Thorp: Oh my. I have a really dusty website that you’re not allowed to go to. Yeah, I think the best thing is probably to follow me on Twitter, blprnt, and I post most of the stuff there. I ran a studio for a number of years that we did a lot of really cool work and you can find that work at ocr.nyc, and that encompasses most of the last six years of works that I’ve done, but I promise I am working on a new website, I’ve heard the kids say you have to have one these days.

Jenn Schiffer: Yep, got to have one, a web site.

Also thank you so much. It’s been great talking to you and I’m looking forward to future work, again hopefully, a lot of them on Glitch.

Jer Thorp: Yeah, I’ve got a few things I’m working on so …

Jenn Schiffer: Awesome, thanks.

This Week on Glitch: Taking Action With Your Tech Skills

We don’t even have to read the news to know that there are a lot of huge issues facing society today — we can just wait and the bad news will get pushed to us as alerts on our devices. In a time of so much stress and contentiousness, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

Yet time and again, if we look to those who are actually doing the work of trying to take on society’s most complex problems, they say that they wish they could team up with people who have the knowledge of how to create technology.

This week on Glitch, we’re featuring the tools and technologies that coders can use to be of service to the movements that are working to take direct action in helping people in need, all across society. We’re thrilled that people have used Glitch for activism and organizing, right from the start.

To dig into the new wave of civic tech projects, we’re featuring a new series of interviews, apps and articles all aimed at showing the breadth of what’s possible — from getting the right information to the right people, to building networks of committed community members who’ll organize around the causes they care about.

And once you see what they’re creating, we’re sure you’ll be inspired to remix their work and begin solving problems in your own community, and go on to inspire others in exactly the same way.

Empowering the Next Generation of Leaders — Glenn Otis Brown visits Glitch

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Anil Dash: Hi. I’m Anil Dash with the Glitch team here a Fog Creek. We are here today with our esteemed guest Glenn Otis Brown of the Obama Foundation. Welcome, Glenn.

Glenn Otis Brown: Thank you, Anil.

Anil Dash: Thanks for being here. So you are the Chief Digital Officer of the Obama Foundation. I think most of us have heard of the guy that the foundation is named after. Can you tell me a little bit about what the Obama Foundation does?

Glenn Otis Brown: Sure. The Obama Foundation’s mission is to inspire and empower, and connect next generation of citizens, next generation of leaders. That basically takes the form of two main projects. One is, the Obama Presidential Centre …

Anil Dash: This is a big library in Chicago?

Glenn Otis Brown: It is a big project…

Anil Dash: Okay. Much bigger than a library.

Glenn Otis Brown: The library-ness of it is one component.

Anil Dash: Okay.

Glenn Otis Brown: Most former presidents have some sort of Presidential Library. This project, the Obama Presidential Center in the south side of Chicago in Jackson Park for Chicagoan’s out there, will have some element of a museum-ness and library-ness to it. But it really is a global headquarters for a leadership training programme for future citizens and leaders. That’s the other piece of the project. We’ve got our home stadium, our home base, which is going to be the Obama Presidential Center, and then there will be … And there already are, some first steps in building toward a global, national, and local network of training programmes that get people to be more active citizens. Whatever their level of experience.

Anil Dash: Within the foundation, where you talk about people becoming more active citizens. Who are the people that are doing that? Is that an ordinary teenager? Is that somebody who is a leader in business? Who do you imagine serving that way?

Glenn Otis Brown: It’s a pretty wide audience. Our digital team, we really think about our… The main organizing principle about what we’re thinking about inside the foundation as understanding the audience, and going out and figuring out where they are. Delivering all the stuff to them. Explaining the building. Explaining the training programmes. Getting their feedback. Obviously the Internet is very good at that.

Anil Dash: Right.

Glenn Otis Brown: Those audiences are numerous. First, there’s the core audience that’s in Chicago. That is of all different age ranges. Starting with the south side, but then greater Chicago, who we want to help design what the function of the building and the grounds are going to be. What features that are going to be there on site. A basketball court. Or barbecue grills, and that sort of things.

Anil Dash: That one wasn’t so much of a stretch.

Glenn Otis Brown: That one’s not a huge stretch, but we definitely have gotten feedback on a lot of aspects of what that building’s gonna be like as part of the larger community. And then also, nationally and internationally. I think for a snapshot of what the audience looks like, though we ultimately want to reach everybody in the world, you could take a look at some of the people we gathered for the first Obama Foundation summit in Chicago in the Fall of 2017. We had a mix of up and coming leaders from overseas. Up and coming leaders from Chicago. People who had stood up or started their own social entrepreneurship programmes, or NGOs from around the United States. Rural and urban.

Really, anyone who wants to grow in their ability to engage with civil problems, civil society. Some focus on, particularly on fellowship programmes and some of our training programmes on up and coming young leaders.

Anil Dash: That’s really interesting. I think about… I got a chance to go to the Foundation Summit, and the conversation we had on the panel I was on, was about some of the concerns about misinformation and social media. A lot of concerns that many people have in the digital world right now. I’m curious, within your domain, since you’re Chief Digital Officer, this is your purvey, are the things like social media presence of the Foundation, things like that, under there?

Glenn Otis Brown: They are there.

Anil Dash: And then you also think about platforms? How are you reckoning with that trust issue? It seems like a very high priority for the former President. He brought it up on the David Letterman interview that he did. It seems like it’s very present.

Glenn Otis Brown: It is. We definitely have that top of mind, all the time. The various challenges that people have identified with the current Internet landscapes, social media landscape, whatever you want to call it. And the junk that comes with the good stuff about the current state of tech. I like to think of it as pollution that accompanies the industry of social media.

Anil Dash: I like that.

Glenn Otis Brown: And what can we do to counter it, or counter balance it, or manage it, or turn it back. The first place, especially because it’s a young organization, is just the fundamentals of ourselves having a positive presence online. We’re on all the different platforms. We’re publishing stuff that we think sets an example for how we want people to talk online. A lot of it is about shining a light on other people and what they’re doing.

Anil Dash: Modelling good behavior.

Glenn Otis Brown: Yeah. We try and do that. That’s table stakes. That should be table stakes.

Anil Dash: That’s really interesting. We look at that too, with what we do with Glitch… It shouldn’t be a contentious thing to have a community where people code, but there are places online where they’ll yell at you about that. We can model, okay, we’re gonna try and be decent to each other and kind to each other, and generous. Maybe something good will come of it.

Glenn Otis Brown: Right. Exactly. And a lot of it has to do with just paying attention to also what’s happening in general, and then pointing out communities where people are discussing things civilly and are themselves a model. And then there’s, when we get up some speed and we hire up and we make more partnerships with different subject matter experts, there’s definitely a potential role for the Foundation to convene conversations with the big platforms or with the larger developer community on, “What can we do to make this better?”

Anil Dash: Does that mean you’re going to build a platform of your own?

Glenn Otis Brown: Wouldn’t rule it out. But that’s not currently a priority. So, we have, in a way, a platform of our own in that we have a website, we have obama.org. The same way the White House has whitehouse.gov. At the same time, we understand that we need a network of partners and we need to be on the platforms where people are. I would say that we would want to maintain enough flexibility to have our own platform of some sort. Once we figure out what’s the use-case that we can actually serve, that no-one else is serving.

Anil Dash: That’s interesting.

Glenn Otis Brown: We don’t want to do it just to do it.

Anil Dash: Right. I think that idea of, we want to figure out the use-case, touches on one of the things we think of with… Our audience is digital creators, coders, programmers, and there was an era where people said, “Oh, there’s a problem in society. I’m gonna sprinkle some apple on it and that’ll fix it.” Or, “Sprinkle some code on it.” Turns out that’s not the issue. The issue is do you understand the problem real well, it becomes necessary to bring technology to bear for solving the problem, but it’s a tool in the tool belt, not the reason that it exists.

Glenn Otis Brown: Right.

Anil Dash: I’m curious if you think about, as you train these new leaders, and these people are working on a new issue, it could be something very small. I want to clean up the park in my neighborhood. How do you envision helping somebody bringing technology to bear on that problem?

Glenn Otis Brown: I think one of the strong suits of the Obama Foundation is and will continue to be the ability to shine a light on things that are working out in the world. If you think about, without even us starting to code, which we do have ambitions to do. But, without us actually building anything, we could get a lot of mileage for a lot of people out of simply shining a light on things that are working well today. Say we get advice from you all, we have a technical advisory group that says, “Here are the 10 best apps or platforms to go on if you’re a young organizer or activist, or up and coming leader.” Simply, the mere act of the Foundation holding those out and saying, “Here’s a good beginners tool kit” would go a long way.

Anil Dash: That’s really interesting because there’s an optimism to that, which is almost presuming somebody out there is already trying to do the work. They might need more attention. They might need more resource. They might need more support. Somebody always cares about the issue. Somebody’s always working on it and if you can connect them with the like-minded people, there’s some potential there.

Glenn Otis Brown: I think that’s definitely true. And we spent a lot of the last year, like I said, using the Internet to listen and using events to listen. And one of the main things we heard from what gets called “civic tech land” is over and over and over again, different organizations, large and small. Civic Hall here in New York. Various projects out of universities around the world, actually, is don’t reinvent the wheel. We’re working on this. Help us connect to other people who are working on this. Help us get the word out. Please don’t come in and try and start from scratch.

Anil Dash: It’s so funny because that is part of coding culture. Open source culture. I’m going to reuse this, I’m going to remix this. I’m gonna put this to good use and I don’t need to write it from scratch.

Glenn Otis Brown: RTFM.

Anil Dash: Yeah. That’s the less kind words. It’s interesting to me because you also have a deep background in understanding remix culture and intellectual property. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that? Lessons you’ve learned there.

Glenn Otis Brown: Sure. In a former life, I was a copyright and privacy information law lawyer. I worked at Creative Commons in its first three years. Creative Commons is a nonprofit that helps people, as you know quite well, share the creative works that they make on terms that they want others to use it with. It allows you to stamp a work, a photograph, or a song, our course material with freedoms that invite people to reuse it, so that it’s not all rights reserved, please clear all the following rights before using this. It actually invited uses under a some rights reserved copyright. Wikipedia is under Creative Commons licence. There are billions of photos on Flickr under Creative Commons licences. Lots of other examples.

I worked there as Executive Director, and oversaw the first rollout of the Creative Commons licences, and one of the things that’s really interesting about it, and an interesting compare and contrast to what the Obama Foundation’s doing now, totally different fields, is what I see in common is that’s … The ambition is to give people a way to participate in a problem that seems vague and global, and hard to get a grasp on. The copyright around 2000 was very ominously … There were two camps. It was you’re an anarchist and a pirate, or no, you’re a total control freak lock-down.

Anil Dash: And it was looming on the horizon. They knew there was going to be a battle coming.

Glenn Otis Brown: You knew there was a battle coming and the vocabulary around it was unsophisticated, and there wasn’t a real obvious place to participate and what Creative Commons licences did was to say, “You two are a copyright owner. Anybody who creates anything is a copyright owner. It’s up to you to lay out what you want to be done with your creative works with this following do-it-yourself kit.” And totally, very different field, a lot of what the foundation wants to do is say, “Yeah. Okay. You’re concerned about the world. Alright. We would love to provide you a tool kit or have our friends provide you a tool kit so that you can make a difference in your own backyard.”

Anil Dash: But there’s a common thread, which is you can reuse the creative energies of others and build on it, and amplify it as opposed to starting from scratch.

Glenn Otis Brown: Right.

**Anil Dash: **Start energy is really a lot more effort than the continuing and amplifying energy. It’s interesting too, because recently on Glitch, we built tools where basically, with a click, you can add an open source licence to your project, or you can add a code of conduct around how you want the community to behave. We did those really early in the development of the community based on this idea of obviously, reuse and remix is part of the platform. But also declarations of intentionality. I want to be able to say what I want people to use this for and I want to express the fact that this is something people can share. It seems like these are all on a thread, this open source culture, the Creative Commons culture, creative culture broadly, and then what sounds like the beginnings of a future activism, which is much more about being networked and learning from each other.

Glenn Otis Brown: Yeah. I think that’s right. And another thing they all have in common, is there’s some element… There’s a balance between free wheel and sharing and collaboration. An ethos. You can’t really have the free wheel and collaboration unless you have that intentionality that says, “Here’s some basic norms and guidelines we want to follow on this.”

To your point about a new activism that is networked and shares learnings, you’ll often hear the President describe this as his advances and Mrs. Obama’s advances in activism and in policy and in governance, were always built on previous lessons.

Anil Dash: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Glenn Otis Brown: They will go out of their way to make clear that they didn’t come up with the stuff on their own, that this was inspired by and built upon decades of the ones who’d come before.

Anil Dash: Right. There’s no community organizing without community.

Glenn Otis Brown: Right. Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.

Anil Dash: I think we’re gonna shift gears a little bit. We’re gonna have Jenn Schiffer our Community Engineer on Glitch, work with you on building out a very simple way for people to build a tool for their friends to sign up and volunteer with them and collaborate on solving projects in their communities. And the hope is, one, we have a little tool to build together that’s really interesting and useful, that will be open source. And remixable. But, also, it’s a starting point for people to be able to start to think about how they can apply those kinds of tools to their own problems.

Glenn Otis Brown: Awesome. Thanks.

Jenn Schiffer: Hi, Glenn. I’m Jenn.

Glenn Otis Brown: Hello.

Jenn Schiffer: I’m a Community Engineer on glitch.com, and after your conversation with Anil, I wanted to show you how we can build an example app based on one of the examples Anil had mentioned: clean up your local park.

Glenn Otis Brown: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jenn Schiffer: I think that there are a lot of people who want to do good stuff like cleaning up their local neighborhood, joining in activism, and they feel like they don’t know the tech to be able to do that. With Glitch, we’re trying to lower that barrier.

Glenn Otis Brown: Great.

Jenn Schiffer: I think the most powerful collection of knowledge that somebody can have is a mailing list of the people that can possibly help them. I wanted to build an example app where someone has a mailing list but they need a website to get it out there so they can collect more names of people that want to help them. If you go to glitch.com, and you search mailing list, there is a project example, mailchimp-starter. MailChimp is a service for creating a mailing list, and you can look up the set up for it. I’ve documented how to do so. You can view the source of it …

Glenn Otis Brown: I would first get a mail … I’m gonna walk through it because I’m actually not … I’m fake technical. I’m not actually technical so I might be a good sample set for this. First have a MailChimp account, go sign up for that, then come here, and follow these instructions to be able to customize it.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah.

Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.

Jenn Schiffer: Or if you haven’t used MailChimp before, I do have links and documentation on how to go to MailChimp.

Glenn Otis Brown: Okay. Got it.

Jenn Schiffer: And create a list. For now, I actually have created a list on MailChimp, where you can … There’s no subscribers, which is sad, and I want to get this mailing list out there. MailChimp does allow you to generate embeddable sign up forms, but you need a place to embed that form. As per the set up directions in the app, I tell you how to go to the embedded forms section, and there’s a part where they give you a bunch of code, that you don’t have to update yourself. But, you do have to copy and paste it somewhere.

Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.

Jenn Schiffer: In this app, this is an app that I had created, but I’m not logged in right now. I’m just another user who wants to use it to create their own site for this. If I edit this document, a remix is made so I get my own actual copy.

Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.

Jenn Schiffer: In the set up directions, it says to update index.html to include your personal content, and it gives you a line where to edit your code. I’m going to look at index.html.

Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.

Jenn Schiffer: There’s a lot of HTML. There’s a lot of stuff going on here. I added comments here that say, “This is where you put your MailChimp form.” This is the code that looks like it was given to me from the MailChimp page. I’m going to highlight that and delete it.

Now, that project was my own, but now that I’ve updated it as a not logged-in user, if you had done this, you would’ve gotten your own copy. There’s a name that’s generated. You can change it to be whatever you want it to be.

**Glenn Otis Brown: **That’s a saved folder of stuff that I’ve created?

Jenn Schiffer: Yes. Exactly. And then if you click show live, you see that you have a live page here. But, you don’t have the form, so that code that MailChimp had given us, we just copy and paste it …

Glenn Otis Brown: In the place where you say, to copy and paste it?

Jenn Schiffer: Exactly.

Glenn Otis Brown: Okay. And now do we need to edit this stuff to make it personalized or anything?

Jenn Schiffer: No. No. The form, you can save it as it is, and if we show live it auto-deploys it. You don’t have to learn how to get this online. You don’t have to get hosting. We do all that for you, for free. In a matter of minutes, you have your own page with your own form, that’s connected to your mailing list. If you wanted to update this, if your mission is to not help clear up your local park, but to start a chapter of a local meet up or organization, you can update the index.html content to do that.

Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.

Jenn Schiffer: For example, if your help us clear up a local park … I don’t want to say that, you can go to this code and you can find where it says that.

Glenn Otis Brown: If I wanted to put help us clean up Jackson Park.

Jenn Schiffer: You can put it in.

Glenn Otis Brown: Not that it needs clean up, but this is a hypothetical.

Jenn Schiffer: There you go. It’s automatically updated.

Glenn Otis Brown: Cool. I like the salmon color, and it matches the Glitch logo well. Is there a way to customize this to where I can make it …

Jenn Schiffer: For sure. In the readme file, which has all the directions for how to use this app, I do say, if you don’t like the color, sizes, or other visual elements, you can update styles.css. CSS is cascading style sheets. It’s a language for setting rules for how the page should look. This is where all the colors and sizes are. In the readme file I explain that if you want to update the colors, sizes, you can go to the styles.css file, which is here on the sidebar, underneath index.html, and CSS is cascading style sheets.

It’s a way to set rules for how the page looks. When you look at the index.html and you decided that you wanted to change the color of that, or in your example, the form. You don’t want that salmon color. We can look in the styles.css file, and we see there’s a selector for form.

Glenn Otis Brown: Got it.

Jenn Schiffer: This is probably where we want to change the color. Here we have it set …

Glenn Otis Brown: Coral.

Jenn Schiffer: The background at coral. You can pick a different color. The color values in CSS can be color names, there’s a set collection of HTML names. Coral happens to be one. And then also there are hex values, and RGB, or red, green, blue values.

Glenn Otis Brown: Got it. Okay. I would look up the code for that? Or look up what the standardized names are?

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah.

Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.

Jenn Schiffer: Let’s look for our color. This is the most important part honestly, of getting your page out there. Is personalizing, making it right.

Glenn Otis Brown: How about light green, there? That looks good.

Jenn Schiffer: Light green.

Glenn Otis Brown: Yeah.

Jenn Schiffer: Let’s type in light green.

Glenn Otis Brown: That’s close to the green we use at the Obama Foundation, among many others.

Jenn Schiffer: Light green. There you go.

Glenn Otis Brown: Nice. Cool.

Jenn Schiffer: Much better.

**Glenn Otis Brown: **That’s very quick.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. In a matter of minutes you have this embeddable form, people will be able to add to your mailing list. The great thing about using a mailing list, as opposed to collecting info on a whole bunch of different platforms, is that it’s one location, and also services like MailChimp allow you to export your contacts. You don’t have to worry about the service going away. Email has been around for a really long time, and much to the chagrin of many, it will probably be around for a lot more. Mailing lists are great way to get started in local activism.

Glenn Otis Brown: Got it.

Principle-led Product Development

Many products start as an itch that we need to scratch - a frustration or problem we’d like to see removed from our lives. You see this reflected in the overwhelming number of To-do list apps that clutter App Directories across the web and mobile. Their creator’s current solution had some limitation and so they set out to solve it.

But there are many ways to develop a To-do list app, or any type of product for that matter. We suggest a key way you can help ensure the success of that product development effort is by starting not just with the problem to be solved, but a short list of product principles that guide and inform the effort along the way.

When development of Trello began, the team discussed not just what they wanted to build, but what it meant and what the product needed to be. They came up with a few things:

It was going to be free. The idea was to get 100M people using it, and monetize by selling some aspect of it to 1% of the user base.
It was going to run anywhere — on mobile, desktops, tablets, TVs, wherever.
It had to update in real-time. Whenever anything changed that change would be visible everywhere without reloading.
It would never ask for confirmation. So, no ‘are you sure?’ pop-ups. And these simple product principles informed all future decisions. By knowing it would be free, they knew how they had to approach building it — it couldn’t be a niche thing, used by just developers, or project managers. It had to be intelligible to a mainstream market.

It informed the features they built — if a user suggested adding velocity points to cards. Ding. No. Most folks wouldn’t know what the hell those were.

It also told them how they should tackle marketing it — reaching a few thousand people wasn’t going to cut it, it had to get in front of millions.

And they referred back to these principles as they continued to develop it, even years later.

We did similar when starting out with Glitch during a Creek Week, coming up with these principles:

It had to be the fastest, easiest way to get your own web app up and running on the web. We’d do this by abstracting away the boring, hard-to-learn parts of development and provide a way for people to write an app and deploy it to a URL instantly.
It needed to provide immediate, direct feedback when editing an app.
The editor had to be a fun place to be. You should always feel safe to edit your code and try things out.
It shouldn’t look slick and super-polished. We didn’t want it to look ‘designed’, rather we’d do our own thing because we hoped that meant you would too. Knowing this upfront helped us to research and critically refine our ideas. Since we were abstracting away complexity, this meant we weren’t reinventing the wheel and so creating our own code libraries or languages was ruled out. We weren’t looking to make programming itself easier, so this wasn’t going to be some drag-and-drop no-code solution.

It also provided the line in the sand we needed to evaluate early mock-ups and prototype features. So when it came to deciding on how to create the project creation screen, that need for ease and speed meant we weren’t going to require users to make choices up-front about which specific technologies to use, common in cloud development tools. And it also lead us to auto-deploying because it meant we didn’t have to burden users with knowing how to commit code, nor task them with needing to push their code manually as we needed to show that instant feedback.

Leading with principles is a great technique, but it isn’t without its challenges. We might regard ourselves as something of a Jobsian product visionary, but when we’re just starting out we don’t have all the information we need to build the perfect product. If the product is in a new area for you, you’ll be feeling out the problem and understanding the market as you go. Even if you’ve worked in the field your product is in for years, this can just blind you to simple solutions as you can become too close to the problem to see a fresh perspective.

So how do you balance your on-going learning with your product principles? Well, getting customer feedback and iterating on the product is still a key part of the process.

This tripped up Trello early on, for example. Having decided this wasn’t a product just for developers, they took this too far and “threw the baby out with the bathwater”, ignoring almost all feedback from developers. But sometimes that feedback would prove to be right, and they realised they’d missed out on learning from the perspectives of some of their early-adopters just because they happened to be developers.

So instead of ignoring feedback from some, what they later understood they needed to do was segment the feedback they got, and make a purposeful effort to get input from a wide range of people because they were targeting a broad segment of people.

On the flip side, when we began working on Manuscript, our project management tool for software teams that was built on the engine of FogBugz, we had the feedback of thousands of existing customers to learn from that informed our product principles. But that feedback didn’t solve all our problems. Those insights were invaluable in crafting a product which fitted their needs. But despite what some people might ask for, they still really want the car, not just a faster horse — you still need that product vision. So when asked for integrations, we didn’t just create a few. We built our integrations with Glitch powering them, so we could enable customers to leverage its rapid development functionality and make the integrations we created not just free, but easily customizable too.

So there’s a balance to be found in combining your product principles with what you learn along the way. And you’ll have to make difficult calls on whether those principles were right after all. Nevertheless, the focus and clarity they give you, particularly in those crucial first weeks and months as you begin to develop your product, have proven to us to be a key step in creating successful, opinionated products that people love to use.

We The People: Using Glitch for Activism

The Internet is a powerful tool for uniting people around an important cause. But sometimes finding the quickest or easiest way to get a website online or even gather emails for a mailing list can be a daunting task. Let Glitch take your civic organizing efforts to the next level! Here’s a look at a few helpful and useful apps that you can remix and modify to fit your needs.

Email has its pros and cons, but it is still an effective and easy way to reach an audience. We like MailChimp as an email service provider for its ease of use, and we’ve made a starter app that will allow you to collect emails, and automatically subscribe people to a MailChimp list! Sign up for a free MailChimp account, follow the steps listed in this project’s README.md, and you’ll be ready to send emails to your supporters in a matter of minutes. Remix this app and customize it for your mission or cause!

Do you need to collect emails using an online form, but don’t have an email service provider yet? Or do you use a different email service provider besides MailChimp? Don’t fret — here’s where remixing apps on Glitch comes in handy. Software developer Lauren Dorman remixed our MailChimp Starter app and created a Google Sheets Starter, which stores emails and names in a handy spreadsheet. From here, you can download the data as a .csv file and upload it to any email service provider out there. All you need is a Google account, and you’re ready to roll!

The team at Campaign Zero is dedicated to helping people take direct action to end police violence. We’ve brought their homepage widget to Glitch for easy embedding onto any website. Just enter your address, and you’ll find your elected officials at the local, state and federal levels, as well as their positions on key criminal justice reform policies. Email and telephone numbers for these elected officials are also shown, which is useful if you want to take your advocacy efforts further. Remix the app and customize it to your liking!

Even if you need to create a simple landing page, you can make it happen on Glitch. Take a look at Tech Forward, a Glitch-powered website with dozens of links to tech-focused advocacy organizations and nonprofits working for social change. You can remix this to show a list of endorsements, or display companies that support your cause.

We’ve included links to these apps and more on our Peoples Response page. Get started today and make something great to help make a difference. It’s time to take action!

Beyond Open Offices: The New Fog Creek Headquarters

The new Fog Creek Software office is meant for our staff to do their best work and feel comfortable and creative while doing it. With high ceilings, an open floor plan, and a killer view of the Financial District and Bowling Green Park, the new space is not only inspiring and beautiful, but as a nod to our history, it’s also experimental. To understand this better, let’s take a trip down memory lane.

We moved into our first real office, dubbed the “Bionic Office”, at 535 8th Avenue in New York City back in 2003. Our co-founder Joel Spolsky worked with architect Roy Leone to design a space where Fog Creek workers could thrive and work alongside their co-workers while still maintaining privacy.

One of the primary features of this space was ensuring that our developers had private offices with closing doors. According to Joel, these offices were key to improving programmer productivity, were absolutely required, and not up for negotiation.

Having an office space that worked for employees was so important to Joel that he took a hands-on role in the office’s overall creation, having a say in office elements like power, wiring, and the common areas to create the ultimate software development environment.

Fog Creek continued growing over the years after that, eventually taking over the entire floor of the original office. But after five years, it was time to find a bigger space. After a grueling search, we found our next office home nearly all the way downtown at 55 Broadway. The new space was such a hit that we were even covered in

A lot of changes happened during the years at 55 Broadway, but we also kept a few ideas from our original space. Joel still had a hands-on role in both layout and construction, we retained private offices for our developers, and we provided a space large enough for our daily team lunches. To get the best sense of how much detail went into this space, watch the video below and see how it all came together.

One of the biggest changes at Fog Creek was that the number of our remote workers increased to make up two-thirds of our workforce. Also, two of the most successful projects we’ve worked on — Trello and Stack Overflow — grew large enough to become independent companies.

“As they grew and we grew, it got a little cozy,” says Anil Dash, CEO of Fog Creek.

“It was just time for us to stand on our own again. As we refocused on our products, we really thought about what a great headquarters would look like now for a company that is so focused on being great for remote people too.”

We moved office spaces in 2017, but we didn’t go far — our new headquarters at 75 Broad Street is just a half mile away and has picturesque views of Bowling Green Park and The New York Stock Exchange from our lovely 19th floor private terrace.

So what’s different about this new space?

“The old space was built when the entire company was based in headquarters,” Anil mentions. “That was sort of a different era. And similarly, back then our founders would talk a lot about programmers and coders and what they needed, which is an office with a door that closes. That’s still part of our ethos, but half the company are not coders.”

With our developers, sales team, and C-level executives working from the same space, taking different work styles into consideration is important. Some of these tasks require intense concentration, while others are more conversational and collaborative with your co-workers. To that end, there are some ideas we kept from previous office spaces.

“I think there was a very strong expectation among the members of our technical staff that coders would have an office with a door that closes. That was always a very big part of our public face of what Fog Creek is to the world. And the research is pretty clear that it is a massive booster of productivity for people in those kinds of technical roles. So we didn’t want to compromise on that at all.”

But the new office also includes a variety of work spaces that accommodate different work modes. Anil mentioned personal offices for standalone work, but they also work well for collaborative work like pair programming. There are workstations for independent or individual co-working, and phone booths for external communication such as sales calls or podcast appearances. There’s also our conference room — known as the “quiet car” — which can be used across a number of different work modes. And true to the nature of our office being flexible and experimental, we are already re-configuring some of these spaces based on how we use them.

“I think we have made [the office] a much more malleable space. We have a lot more plans to sort of shift things around, even so far as being able to entertain here. We’d never really designed our old place to be able to have guests and have people hold events and all that sort of stuff. And all of that is on the road map for us now.”

“I think just at a high level, work space really matters. It’s a fundamental part of how you take care of your people, and we have always been leaders on that. When the bar is set that high, you really have to get it right. And so we have always taken this really, really seriously. And at the same time, we have a lot of fun with it.”

And speaking of fun, we can’t forget about our lovely terrace. Once it’s up and running later in the year, we expect it to be a wonderful place for collaborative work. It will also be the centerpiece of our office as we host events, visitors, and other guests.

“There are a lot of companies in New York that have a lot of great ideas, and we are hoping to be able to invite them over, get to know each other, and figure out what we can learn from each other …and also just be good neighbors,” says Anil.

As the company has grown and changed over the years, so has our office space. Joel’s grand visions for what a work environment should do for employees have been part of Fog Creek from the very beginning, and we have tried to honor that legacy. We also have plenty of plans for the future, and look forward to continuing our tradition of incubating new teams and ideas from within our company and beyond.

“I think the fact that there’s so much personality and history in everything we do is really motivating. It’s become a very great space.”

How to Make a Website

Part 1: Intro to HTML #

We talk about HTML, what it is, what its limitations are and we cover some actual HTML code that makes up the intro to HTML example website.

View Source | Remix This

Part 2: Intro to CSS #

We learn about CSS, classes and how we can use CSS to make our website look nicer.

View Source | Remix This

Part 3: Intro to JavaScript #

This video provides an introduction to JavaScript, what it is and how we could use it to add behaviors and functions to our site.

View Source | Remix This

Part 4: Intro to Node.js #

We explain what Node.js is, how web servers work and the types of things you can use Node.js for in your own apps.

View Source | Remix This

Each One, Teach One: Using Glitch for Learning

Whether you’ve been programming for decades or are just starting, everyone who codes is constantly in the process of learning new things. It can be frustrating to know just where to begin, but we’re here to help. Actually, the whole community is here to help you. We built Glitch to be a fun and friendly way to build the app of your dreams, and we are seeing a number of crafty developers and global tech companies use Glitch to teach you everything from building a simple website to creating an immersive VR experience.

Earlier this year, we rolled out our free React Starter Kit, and this week, we launched our Website Starter Kit. These are two great ways to learn coding using Glitch, so let’s take a look at how you can use Glitch to teach others!

WebVR is a JavaScript API that lets you bring virtual reality experiences to the Web. These WebVR experiences also work on VR headsets like Oculus Rift or Google Daydream! If you’re interested in learning more about it, take a look at A-Frame School. This interactive course is presented as an in-browser slideshow (that also works on mobile devices!), and guides you step-by-step through setting up Glitch as your development environment, introducing you to the basic elements and features, and provides you with several lessons and examples. Each of these lessons can be remixed on Glitch, so you can really get hands-on experience with the code.

Already have a little experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? Take the next step and make your own interactive web app using choo! This great onboarding example in the Choo Handbook gives you great instructions and code examples on getting started using choo on Glitch by building a fun animals app. By the time you’re finished, you’ll learn the basics on creating templates, modularizing your code, and other helpful concepts which will help you build any app you can imagine.

When there’s already a ton of documentation around a particular language or framework, sometimes a simple blog entry is best. It’s also a great way to highlight new projects or features, which is what Algolia has done with their Glitch app We Rate Tweets.

Instead of walking users through building the app themselves, Algolia wrote a blog post which shows off their new app, tells people how to use it, and gives you instructions to remix it to have your own copy to use. All you need is a Twitter account and an Algolia account to get started!

Glitch is super approachable for beginners, but it’s also powerful enough to be used by some of the biggest companies on the Web. We talked about how A-Frame uses Glitch for their interactive slideshow, and Mozilla also uses Glitch to teach developers as well! Mozilla’s post on creating multi-user experiences with A-Frame shows you how to create shared, persistent and interconnected 3D virtual spaces using WebRTC. If you want to make your own slash commands for Slack, Airtable provides you with detailed instructions on using Glitch and the Airtable API to make that happen. Samsung explores how to use web components to build visualizations and configure a midi controller — perfect for anyone looking to become a VJ and show off some cool effects. Lastly, Google will teach you how to get started using Workbox for NPM, a way to improve load performance for your website and make it work offline.

We’ve shown you a lot of examples of what companies are doing with Glitch, but lots of developers out there are using Glitch in amazing ways. The team at Trove has several starter kits to show you how to create your own Twitter bots. Remix any of their bots, add your own personality, and give it a try! Live out your horror fantasies and make a dark and stormy night come alive using this fun tutorial from software developer and educator Kelly Lougheed. It uses regular HTML and CSS animations for everything! And this article from Red Hat’s developer evangelist Nicolas Grenié really embodies the spirit of what we want to accomplish with Glitch — getting better at programming by helping others. Teaching really does help you gain a better understanding!

These are just a few examples of how Glitch is used to teach developers across the Internet. The sky’s the limit when it comes to what you can learn, and we’re here to help you succeed. Don’t worry, you’ve got this!

Doing a Better Job of Job Listings

Some might say Fog Creek wrote the book on technical recruiting because, well, our founder Joel Spolsky, *wrote the book on technical recruiting. *About 10 years ago, “Smart and Gets Things Done” went out into the world. Today, it’s still one of the most trusted guides for organizations looking to attract and hire great technical staff. But, a lot has changed in those 10 years about the tech industry and how we need to recruit people today.

Here at Fog Creek Software, we’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the most common hiring practices. What we realized is that while many of these methods were once considered effective, they actually perpetuated the biggest representation problems in the industry. For instance, we were huge proponents of hiring interns — but we only recruited students from the most prestigious universities (with the most well-known Computer Science programs). When interns proved to be highly skilled, we offered them full-time jobs before they could hit the open market. We were hiring great developers, but they were also primarily white men.

We tried a few things to change this, including our partnership with the Flatiron School. We recognized that there are many paths to a career as a developer, and we hoped that this initiative would communicate that to non-traditional candidates. But one initiative was never going to be enough, we were committed to the hard work of implementing recruiting practices that correct the representation problem that runs rampant in the industry today.

So we did even more homework. And we all agreed that the next step was to rewrite our job listings so that they more accurately reflect the supportive culture and values we have at Fog Creek.

We were especially interested in improving the “candidate experience” section of each of our job listings. We tried to be as clear as possible about what the actual requirements were, and which skills were more in the “nice to have” category. Doing this enabled us to avoid using terms like “Junior” in our job titles, which are the types of words or phrases that typically suggest a company is only looking for a young, recent grad.

We also decided that living up to our commitment of transparency meant we needed to disclose salary ranges for every open position. Fog Creek was already in the midst of re-implementing an open salary policy internally, so this change was fairly simple to make to our job listings as well.

But transparency also meant that we needed to be as honest as possible about the downsides of working at Fog Creek. Yes, the downsides.

We were particularly inspired by this job listing for the Recurse Center. Not only does it include an informative description in an easy-to-read format, they even listed the pros and cons of the position! Calling out the downsides of a position is gutsy, but it’s required if you really want to be transparent and it has worked well for us.

Take the DevOps position we were looking to fill, for example. We knew that our legacy infrastructure would present a unique challenge, and we wanted to be open with candidates about it. In a not-so-surprising turn of events, the pros and cons brainstorming exercise actually led us to realize that what we really needed on the team was a DBA! It’s in this spirit of thoughtful evaluation that we continue to write honest job listings about every open position at Fog Creek.

As difficult as recruiting can be for employers, the experience can be even tougher on candidates. Far too many companies expect candidates to make time for day-long interviews, without giving them the information they need in advance.

For someone who’s juggling coursework, managing care-taking responsibilities, or you know, wants to have a well-rounded life, this can be particularly frustrating.

That’s why we also expanded the “What to expect when you apply” section, which details the potential time commitment and process for prospective candidates. Additionally, we added FAQs about our amazing benefits and how they actually play out on a day-to-day basis. In addition to the responsibilities themselves, we think these are significant factors when candidates are deciding whether or not they should apply for a role.

After all this work on the job listings, the next step was to post it in places the right candidates would see and, then hopefully, apply. Some boards we love are Tech Ladies, a supportive community over 20,000 strong, and Blacks In Technology, a professional platform for PoC in tech. We’ve also put more effort into reaching non-traditional candidates through our connections at established coding schools and, of course, Twitter.

This is just a start to improving our processes and there’s still a lot of work to do. It’s also too early to tell the exact impact these changes have made, but anecdotally at least, so far they’ve been well received.

Making Web Apps with Node

A free, 24-page zine that will help you to learn some of the key concepts needed to create web apps using Node.js, including:

How web servers work
The anatomy of a web app
What is npm?
Understanding asynchronous programming
Find out how Cassidy Williams, Steve Klabnik and Saron Yitbarek got into coding.
Expert advice for new developers from experienced programmers.

The Time Has Come to Push the Button

Time Tracking is an essential part of Agile software development. To make resource planning effective, you need to track the time you spend on tasks so that developers, technical management and product managers gain insight into project progress and how much work remains outstanding.

Time tracking is built right into Manuscript, and enables you to not only record time spent on each case, but from that logged time you can keep timesheets useful for keeping clients and customers informed, as well as generate reports and visualizations that show how individuals and teams spend their time. Like ‘Hours spent per person, per project’, or burndown charts, showing hours remaining to complete a project displayed over time.

It also provides the raw data, along with estimates, that powers our unique Smart Scheduling feature, which uses AI to calculate ship date probabilities and predict software schedules.

We provide the facility to log time automatically. To make it easy to track your time, Manuscript uses your working schedule (which can be set at Time Tracking > My Working Schedule) to stop the clock automatically whenever you go home and start it again automatically when you come back in the morning. It also stops the clock during lunch breaks and when you’re on vacation, etc. That way you only need to change the “working on” case when you switch from one case to another. You can specify a site-wide working schedule, along with individual team members’ working schedules when they differ.

And now any case that has an estimate will show a start/stop work button directly in the case itself. This makes it even easier to record what it is that you’re working on, and provide accurate time information. This benefits everything you use time tracking for, from better probabilities of project completion, to more accurate reports that keep management informed and eases project planning.

Learn more about managing projects with Manuscript.

Teaching Coding with Glitch

Last week, we shared how companies use Glitch to help developers learn the latest technologies. These were all great self-directed examples, but what if you needed to provide more hands-on instruction? Let’s take a look at how other companies and organizations are using Glitch in a number of different learning environments.

Glitch makes a perfect environment for teaching workshops! Streaming music giant Spotify has created an app on Glitch that teaches developers about utilizing the Spotify API. Along with a slide deck detailing the basics of Spotify’s API, Students will work their way through the challenges, and by the end, they’ll have their own Node app! Once they have gotten familiar with how Spotify’s API works, they can check out other Spotify apps on Glitch and get creative with remixing something for their very own!

Samsung’s Internet Developer Relations Team uses Glitch to run workshops at tech conferences and meetups such as JS Monthly and Mozilla Festival. Students start with a simple template and end up with a working project by the end of the workshop. We love how they utilize Glitch’s ability to remix apps to enable students to work with code much safer and faster. The team even documented their setup for workshops on Medium so anyone can use the framework to create workshops of their own!

Glitch is the perfect tool for coding tutorials! Instead of creating a complicated local dev environment, Glitch provides everything you need right in your web browser. Envato Tuts+, one of the most well-known tutorial sites for self-directed learning, has a great tutorial on building a multiplayer pirate shooter game.

The tutorial begins with a starter kit — a simple Glitch app — and shows you how to add a library, accept connections on the server, handle sync orders between a client and server, and more. The tutorial also includes code blocks explaining each step, and it’s a great way to illustrate how to build a complete app on Glitch. View the complete example below!

If the Internet of Things interests your students, you can get really crafty and teach them to create a custom Alexa skill using this tutorial from the team at Hackaday. Remix an Alexa skill app on Glitch, register it with Amazon, and use the skill right away. You can even go a step further and publish the skill for anyone to use!

(BTW, see how we embedded two projects in this section? You can embed Glitch projects into any documentation you publish on the Web. Here’s how Wistia uses it to demonstrate their JavaScript Player API.)

FreeCodeCamp’s mission is about helping teach people the ins and outs of programming with the backing of a supportive community of millions of coders. They use Glitch for all their back-end coding challenges, with topics like responsive web design, data visualization, and APIs and microservices. By starting with a partially complete app template, students remix the examples to complete the challenges. FreeCodeCamp then uses a batch of their own Glitch projects to check if the submitted solutions are correct.

As you can see, Glitch is a really powerful and versatile tool for teaching, and students can use it on their own or in a number of different ways depending on their learning style. And if they get stuck on something, they can just raise their hand and the community will be there to help!

How Vox Media’s Product team creates inclusive job listings

Vox Media has grown in the last dozen years from a small network of blogs to become a massive digital media company with hundreds of employees across eight different content verticals. Whether it’s technology, shopping, or sports, Vox Media’s content spans a wide range of topics, and the best way to cover them all is by hiring top talent to make it happen.

We talked recently about how we approach job listing at Fog Creek, so we reached out to Ashley Twaddell, Director of Team Operations & Experience for Vox Media’s Product team, to talk about inclusive language, recruiting efforts, and tools to help companies establish their own processes around creating effective job listings.

Why is having a conversation about job listings important? #

That’s a great question. There are a few reasons. One is simply that it’s in a business’s best interest to actually consider that a job description is an extension of the employer brand, and that’s a powerful tool to market yourself for the talent that you want. It’s important to strike the right tone about what an employer is looking for in candidates, and it’s also about what company values an employer is looking for. A job description is the first thing that a candidate probably sees about the company aside from any other content or product usage that it has, so even if a person doesn’t actually apply for the position, a well-written description can influence that candidate’s opinion of the company, and you get the voice of the company to shine through versus an individual hiring manager’s.

More importantly though, we say here at Vox Media that language actually matters. You don’t want a job listing to make the candidates that you’re trying to attract back away. If you’re focused on attracting a large and diverse pool of candidates, you don’t want that job description to sound exclusionary in any way. If you’re an employer or company that doesn’t understand the benefits of hiring a diverse workforce, both from a moral and a business standpoint, there’s plenty of free resources and reading that you can do to get started.

You joined the Vox Product team back in 2015 as a product team coordinator. What was the state of job listings like? #

We probably had around 500 or 600 full-time employees at the company, and the most notable change we had made in terms of hiring was switching to Greenhouse as our internal candidate tracking application system.

At that point, in terms of the job descriptions themselves, we had one or two template phrases that we would encourage folks to use. Those were generally about what Vox Media is as a whole, what the company does, and then also some blurbs about what working for Vox Media meant, specifically Vox product. There was also a description about our team, and that pointed you to a page where you could see our team blog and our code of conduct. But everything else was all over the place, and at that point, not really tested for inclusion.

We relied heavily on our leadership team to do a lot of the hiring for Vox Product, and honestly, we were really fortunate to have really thoughtful and educated leaders like our former VP of engineering, Michael Lovitt. He really supported and encouraged best practices around this. When you’re growing quickly and you don’t have a system in place with dedicated resourcing to check in on these things, ultimately you won’t be as successful as you hoped.

When I joined the company as a product team coordinator, I routinely checked on our job descriptions and ran them through online editing tools to check for gendered language and the overall tone and shape of our job descriptions. I would do that in coordination with our People and Culture team.

Was there anything in particular that prompted that move to review the language? #

Definitely. In my job description, it was actually listed as one of the first things that I would be responsible for, in addition to a slew of other hiring responsibilities! But honestly, I think that in terms of what actually prompted the move…it was our staff, which is something that I’m really proud to say. So much of our inclusive culture is due to the incredibly thoughtful people we have been able to hire from the beginning, in addition to leadership that’s open and willing to take action on any of the recommendations that our staff would provide.

We have a company diversity leadership group in addition to our own Vox Product diversity group. At that point, the group was comprised of leaders across all the different divisions of Vox Media, and a lot of the initial resourcing came from the contributions of the members of that group, some of which were Vox Product staff and leadership. We recognized as a product team and as a company that building a system for inclusive hiring, starting with the job description, is more than important — it’s the right thing to do. We just had to figure out how to put the practices in place to make sure it was happening at scale.

The general conversation around job listings and inclusive language feels fairly new…like it’s something that’s just started to become more important within the past five to ten years. What sort of steps did you take when it came to the language that Vox Product used with job listings? #

As a team, and as a company, we recognized this was a larger conversation, and that we needed to make improvements to show that it was work that needed to be done and was necessary to change things. A lot of our leadership worked on this versus falling onto our staff itself to create the changes, which I think is important to acknowledge. It demonstrates that as a company, we made it a real priority.

Beyond that, we did our research to see what best practices already existed in terms of what language to add and what language to avoid. We also focused on some of the internal process changes that would need to happen in terms of who is seeing job descriptions, who’s writing them, who’s posting them, and figuring out what resources we might need to ensure that hiring managers would implement these changes as they wrote and posted job listings.

Were there any specific phrases or words that were changed? You mentioned before that you ran the language through certain online tools to check for inclusive language. #

I think generally we were looking to make our listings as a whole just more inviting and exciting. We worked to remove a lot of gendered language and emotional language. We avoided using any gender specific pronouns or terms that sound too aggressive or too feminine. We also asked our teams to avoid listing years of experience or any unnecessary educational requirements. We largely want our hiring managers, when they’re writing the descriptions, to focus on the skills and qualities a person could bring to our team. We take a step back and look at what we call our “scorecard attributes” to build out a list of skills that are truly necessary for the job versus a huge laundry list of nice-to-haves or irrelevant skills for the job.

So if there are nice-to-haves, we ask our hiring managers to state them as such. Are they skills that someone would have to learn through an educational experience, or are they on-the-job skills that you can learn? They aren’t formal requirements, and we ask our hiring managers to list them separately.

What’s been the outcome of these job listing changes as it relates to recruiting? #

The biggest impact that I have seen over the last few years is that it has helped with our company’s reputation for being an inclusive employer; one that actually values having a diverse workforce. We are, after all, a company that prides itself on voices, and as a product team in particular, we’re looking to extend that into how we build thoughtful and inclusive products. So we certainly see an increase in the number of applications that we’re getting. We’re also able to use EEOC data to track within our job listings the identities candidates report them themselves, and we’re able to analyze and make changes to move one way or another. But overall, we’re seeing a general change in the reputation of the company and how people perceive us.

Based on the knowledge that you have now, is there anything that you would have done differently with respect to changing Vox Product’s job listings? #

That’s a good question. I certainly wish we could have gotten to where we are now a lot faster! But it just shows we’re two years later down the road, and there’s still even more work to be done. We wish that we could make those strides a lot faster, obviously.

I think training would have been the most effective thing. For a while, I was coaching managers individually because I had to support them with not only job descriptions, but the whole hiring process: how to use Greenhouse, how to build out an interview kit, how to think about scorecards…that whole ordeal. I was supporting them one-on-one, and that obviously wasn’t scalable. It’s one thing to have documentation that guides you through how to write the steps of an inclusive job description, but ultimately, it’s better if the hiring managers actually understand why, and that they can identify the traps they might get into before they even sit down to write a job description. Taking the time to put together training would have made much more of an impact in the long run.

That’s a great question. From an editing standpoint, there are really great, free tools like Textio, Gender Decoder for Job Ads, and Joblint. Those tools help with making quick language checks before a job listing is posted. I really encourage employers to make sure they have taken the time to read and understand the larger conversation that’s at play here and make sure their hiring managers are well versed in the facts, too.

There’s so much great reading and resources out there. Hire More Women in Tech is a great resource to start. There are great voices also, especially in the tech space. Erin Kissane and Brittany Laughlin are two women that share wonderful insights and tools around this type of work.

Ultimately, I think just taking action to ensure that there’s a process that serves both as an educational tool and as a writing tool is a huge first step. Beyond that, make it a company priority to be accountable for the results of an effective job listing. It’s not only better. It’s actually necessary.

_Creating inclusive job listings to attract future employees is a crucial part of any company’s growth and success. Move your career forward and come work with us at Fog Creek_!

Create Without Limits: Art Apps on Glitch

Aphorist Mason Cooley once said that art begins in imitation and ends in innovation. Interestingly enough, that quote sort of applies to getting started with Glitch! If you see a project that you like, you can remix it, put a twist on it, and make it your own! Here are a few unique ways that artists are using Glitch as a digital canvas to design their own works of art.

One of the most common ways people see art is by going to a museum. Designer Mark Uraine expanded that simple concept and built a virtual gallery space with an exhibit dedicated to pioneering digital designer Muriel Cooper. Mark used a blog post he wrote on Muriel to create text and image panels within a VR environment.

As Mark mentions in his post, “Today we are rewarded by her efforts in every app we swipe, every typographical layout we scan on the web, and in every interaction that immerses us in the digital world.” I think Muriel would be very proud of this!

A big challenge for designers and artists is not only finding a way to show off their work, but to keep it updated as well. Luckily, Glitch makes it extremely easy to create a portfolio website with multiple pages and images. No more dealing with clunky site builders with finicky controls — just update your site right in our code editor and all your changes are automatically live! Take a look at how conceptual artist Karolina Dworska uses Glitch to make a simple portfolio with information on her work. Well done Karolina!

Jo Baer’s “Primary Light Group, Red, Green, Blue” is a prime example of minimalist art. The three canvases each contain a black outer border and a different colored inner border, and this Glitch project reinterprets the exhibit directly within a web browser. Check out the README for this project for a detailed explanation of not only how this was made with HTML and CSS, but the thought process from the artist behind its genesis.

We talked about using Glitch as a digital canvas for your own creations, and we’ve found a few great examples of how others have made art using our platform.

Graphics editor Rich Harris designed a lovely rendering of Maura Dooley’s poem “Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide.” As you scroll down the page to read the piece, gentle ocean waves rise and the horizon disappears. The visual rendering really adds another dimension to the poem! What poems or other pieces of art would you make using Glitch?

These are just a few ways Glitch can be used to put pixel to screen and express yourself. If any of these projects have inspired you, take a look at our Art newsletter! It contains more examples of artsy projects on Glitch, as well as a spotlight on creator Hector Urtubia.

What will you make today?

Announcing Manuscript On-Premises

With the rush to the Cloud, many tools have let their on-premises options fall by the wayside. This can be really frustrating for software development teams who need to have the applications they use run on their own servers.

Maybe you’re subject to regulations determining how you use and store sensitive data. Or you’ve become frustrated by the ever-changing rules around data privacy, like with Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield. Perhaps your team has concerns about the political or legal factors that might affect your risk over time. Or you simply want to know where your data is and control your working environment. No matter what drives your need, best-in-class on-premises tools are essential.

This is why we built Manuscript with the **exact same powerful features **and world-class support whether it runs in the Cloud or on-premises.

Recently, we launched Manuscript, built on the FogBugz engine that has pioneered project management over the last 17 years, and based on the insights gained from the thousands of software development teams that have used the platform.

The result is a project management tool purpose-built for making software. It’s deeply opinionated about how to help a team make great software and includes all the essentials you’d expect, like task management, prioritization, scheduling, sprints, story points, and all that good stuff. But then we saw a chance to do something really new, based on a few simple ideas:

We’ve been inspired by how Slack has done a great job of reducing email sent within teams (including ours!) and wanted to bring that same seamless experience to capturing bug reports or even answering customer questions. So Manuscript triages emails that come in from customers or even through your web contact form and files them right alongside automated bug reports and your team’s own tasks. This makes them easy to track in one place, so you don’t lose important decisions because they’re buried in email.

Manuscript has cases, not issues. Cases work better than the issues or tickets you might be used to in other systems — you aren’t forced to fill out a bunch of mandatory fields, and every case is assigned to just one person. That means you always know who’s accountable and no decision or task ever falls through the cracks because everybody thought it was somebody else’s problem. Even better: in Manuscript, search really works. Cases are easily searchable by anything you can remember about them, even if it’s just “I know I saw this thing last week and it was assigned to Bob”, Manuscript can help you find what you’re looking for.

Let’s face it, a lot of project management tools are trying to up-sell you on their chat platform or their productivity suite. Manuscript works with the tools your team already likes, and these integrations are free, customizable and open source, instead of being complicated, expensive and out of date. Since Manuscript has a great API, as well as example integrations that are easily remixable on Glitch, it’s simple to connect it to any proprietary tools you’re using, too.

And we don’t nickel and dime you on the stuff that you need — so features like a support helpdesk, document collaboration, crash reporting as well as so-called ‘Enterprise’ functionality like Single Sign-on with SAML 2.0 are all in the box.

Strike a Chord with Music Apps on Glitch

Talk with any designer or programmer, and they will tell you that music is an integral part of their creation process. Music can not only serve as a source of inspiration, but it’s also a great way to get in the zone for any project. Music is even a big part in how we designed Glitch! 🎏

Let’s look at a few ways that members of the Glitch community are creating fun and amazing apps centered around music!

Spotify is one of the largest and most well-known streaming music services today, and you can use their APIs and SDKs to build apps that interface with their vast musical catalog. Arielle Vaniderstine, developer advocate engineer at Spotify, created two particular apps that help you broaden your musical tastes by discovering new music recommendations!

Nelson let’s you choose from dozens of genres and different audio features — danceability, energy, and liveness, just to name a few — to make a unique, custom playlist. You can play the tracks directly in your browser or in the Spotify app. The Big Spotify Button pulls a song based off your listening habits, which is a great way to find new music that you’re sure to enjoy. (You’ll need a Spotify Premium account to use this app, but there are a number of other great apps to try out over on Spotify’s gallery page!)

Get into the groove and make your own tunes on Glitch— no musical experience required! We’ve talked about Mary Rose Cook and her drum machine app before, but the beauty is in its simplicity. Just click the grey boxes and let the app do the rest.

Electroplankton might have been a sleeper hit on the Nintendo DS, but it’s getting a new life on Glitch! Check out Remixtoplankton, a charming re-interpretation of one of Electroplankton’s music games, Luminaria, using p5.js and Gibber.lib.

We hope these apps open you up to a whole new world of musical possibilities you can create on Glitch. Looking for more examples? Then our Music category is just what you need. Creating music with code — it’s possible with Glitch! 🎼

Women Always Rule at Glitch!

Over the last week, I asked the ladies of our community to show me what they have been making on Glitch, and the response has been — as I anticipated — outstanding. From first-time bots with a political message to a progression of learning how to make art with code, women are expressing themselves with code in awesome ways, and it’s an honor to have them doing it on Glitch.

Take a look for yourself!

Gemma Lynn has taken spouse-trolling to the next level by building this Hacker News search app for her linguistics professor husband. Remix the app and update with your own subject of choice to see how the orange website has declared itself an authority on your favorite discipline!

One of the hardest problems in computer science is being bored and not knowing what to do. Fortunately, Jackie Luo built What To Do Bot on Glitch to fix that. “[It] pulls from an Airtable [database] I have to give people ideas for what to do in San Francisco!” If you’re like me and not in San Francisco, you can remix the app and connect it to your own Airtable database of ideas!

I think that one of the best kinds of bots is one that tries to make the workplace inclusive and comfortable for everyone, and Taylor Barnett’s Guys Bot does just that by reminding those in a GitHub organization to work on the bad habit of using male terms as generics. Keeping in line with its mission of “making language on GitHub more inclusive one bot at a time,” you can remix and customize it for your organization’s needs!

Omayeli Arenyeka’s first bot ever, @mypresidentis, is powered by Glitch and tweets who her president is based on a crowd-sourced spreadsheet of peoples, places and things. Follow the bot and also remix your own.

Another project of Omayeli’s that I love is her html-to-canvas app which renders HTML elements onto a canvas element so you can create screenshots of anything on a web page. I’d bookmark her Glitch profile if I were you, because she’s continually making some really cool and various apps.

Clara Beyer’s color analyser app is one of the earlier “a-ha” moments I’ve had about what was possible with Glitch when I started working here. It also panders to my love of pixel art and colors — upload your own art to see an analysis of its color palette!

If you need your own color analyser defaults, you can remix Clara’s and have something running in seconds!

I’m a huge fan of how Vanessa Yuen built a cute guessing game out of Noun Project icons. It’s a hard game — iconography is a huge form of expression on the Web these days and so there are so many icons to decipher!

Noah Leigh has been making some awesome generators on Glitch, a bunch of them leading to this incredible animated pixel gradient app. Apps that generate things like gifs are a great starting point for creative expression, and Noah’s using Glitch for that journey has been an honor to witness.

Kelly Lougheed made this rad Magic 8-ball which, as you can see above, has never been incorrect. Amazing. And since it’s on Glitch, you can view the source and remix it to add your own Magic 8-ball responses.

I want to thank all the women here who reached out to show me their awesome work and grant permission to showcase them here. Even when it’s not International Women’s Day, women are creating incredible stuff on Glitch for you and I to use and remix, and that rules! 🙋‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏼‍♀️🙋🏽‍♀️🙋🏾‍♀️🙋🏿‍♀️

Why Work at Fog Creek?

Fog Creek is a small software company that has made a big impact with our products. The company was founded with the idea that if you hire amazingly talented people and give them interesting problems to solve, they’ll create great things and do amazing work.

From there, products were born and careers made, but it wasn’t until last year that we made it a priority to define our values. Does that mean Fog Creek was value-less for 17 years? Of course not! The interesting thing with company values is that they exist whether or not you define them. They’re in your everyday practices, language, habits and norms. Regardless of the fact that we had not — in recent memory — discussed our values, they were already clear to Creekers who had been around for a few years. But relying on oral tradition that changed from person to person put prospective employees and new hires at a disadvantage.

So about a year ago, we set out looking to capture and define the values that already existed, and the natural first step was to survey all Creekers about their own experiences. Results from this survey (comprised of open-ended questions) revealed two key phrases that are at the core of everything we do at Fog Creek.

This one seems like a no-brainer given that the company was created to be a great place to work. For us, this goes beyond the people-friendly policies we espouse. What good is free health care for your family if we were to create a work environment that made it impossible to take the time for yourself or your family when someone is ill?

Work-life balance at Fog Creek means that you won’t be seen as less committed to your work when you take time to deal with the stuff that comes up outside your job. You won’t owe Fog Creek the hours you spend taking care of your life.

We’ve learned a lot over the past 17 years, but one thing that hasn’t changed is that freedom and autonomy with support from all levels of an organization creates an innovative and safe space for our people.

But people doesn’t refer only to *Fog Creek people. *Outside our employees, this mindset extends to our customers, users and community. In fact, our Support team has their own set of values that include “advocate for the customer” and “consider the long-term impact of your work.”

The two words repeated most in the survey responses were *respect and gratitude — *not surprising to anyone who currently works at Fog Creek. Regular company practices and rituals like Kiwi Bravos, along with meaningful social rules, have built these values into our culture before we ever attempted to define it.

Respect is vital in any workplace, but it is particularly necessary when working on distributed teams using Slack and other tools to communicate. Without face-to-face interaction with over half of our team every day, we have to be intentional about creating a safe space for everyone to connect. We strive to be an environment where people are comfortable sharing their ideas, asking questions and speaking their minds. We create that environment by treating each other with respect and giving our coworkers the benefit of the doubt.

That extends to our physical environment too! Recently Fog Creek moved into a brand new office, which enabled us to evaluate how we could create a space that would cater to the various work styles of office employees, and a space that would be inclusive of guests and remote employees when they visit.

Do you want to help us build a culture that puts people first and enthusiastically welcomes everyone? Are you interested in contributing to the success of products that make work better and the Internet more fun? Check out the current openings on our team. If we don’t have an open role that fits your skills right now, stay up to date with us!

Making Agile Work For You

Manuscript is built for the realities of software development. We’ve been creating software products that help people make software for over 17 years. From inventing tools like Glitch and Trello, to helping co-found Stack Overflow, and pioneering bug tracking with FogBugz. What that means is our direct experience of creating software and working with thousands of developers and development teams, has fed directly into the product choices we’ve made in Manuscript.

Lets take development workflows, for example. We talk to a lot of software development teams. When we ask them what their development process is, more often than not the response is something like, “Agile, well, not strictly Agile. We’re more of a hybrid. It’s unique.”

That’s because, no matter how devoted you are to a particular methodology, the realities of creating software often force you to make compromises.

And in Manuscript, that’s ok.

Manuscript’s Agile tools give you the flexibility to modify your process. This pragmatic approach is compelling in comparison to some other project management tools whose workflows are so strict that they don’t allow for such inevitable tweaks.

A defining product principle of Manuscript is “just enough process”, which means it helps you plan your work without getting in your way. It’s important because setting up and configuring project management tools shouldn’t be harder than your actual job. And not everyone can, or wants to bring in a consultancy or hire a full-time administrator to set up your workflows, which some other tools require.

Instead, Manuscript was built to stay out of your way and our product defaults help you get started immediately, so that you can focus on the work at hand.

Lets take a look at how we’ve built flexibility into Manuscript, so that you can configure it to work for your specific workflow.

In Manuscript, you can plan at the project, sprint, epic, user story, and task levels, but it all starts with the Iteration Planner.

You can add a column to the Iteration Planner for your backlog. Your backlog milestone is the home for every case in projects that you aren’t ready to work on yet. Then you can add sprints, which are defined by Milestones. Milestones are designed to work for specific product versions (like Alpha, Release Candidate, etc.), checkpoints in the code development process (“Search feature code complete” or “Performance work and optimizations”) as well as time-boxed batches of work, like sprints.

As you organize your sprints you drag cases from the Backlog, which you can filter so that you can easily identify new cases that should be placed in the backlog or directly in a milestone. The Fog Creek Support team for example has a “Triage” filter, which they look at during standup meetings so they can easily pull urgent fixes straight into a sprint.

And you can group cases in a number of ways too, depending on what it is that you want to see. For example, you can group by ‘Assigned To’ so that you can get a feel for how you’ve distributed the workload in each sprint. Or group by ‘Status’ to see the distribution of your work across your statuses such as how many cases still need to be completed. Within sprints you can also switch between Hours or Story Points, depending on your preference.

While the Iteration Planner gives you a broad overview of priorities and direction for your project, the Kanban Board lets you get into the nitty gritty of planning a sprint. Many teams choose to have columns for “To Do”, “Doing”, and “Done”. As a team picks up cases in the sprint and starts working on them, they can move the cases between these columns so that their teammates and manager can track their progress. But you may find that it’s helpful to add columns for things like “Blocked”, “Awaiting Code Review”, “Awaiting Deploy”, or “Shipped” — whatever works for you.

You can customize categories within Manuscript too, so that the terminology used in the product matches what you use internally. So you if you want to create “Epics”, “User Stories”, and “Tasks” you can.

But however you organize your cases, keeping track of them on the Kanban board makes it possible for anyone in your organization to get an at-a-glance update on the status of your sprint. What’s more, after a couple sprints, our unique Smart Scheduling feature will be accurately predicting how well a sprint is going based on your time tracking and estimates. So not only can you track progress with burndown charts and see the total number of cases and remaining hours, but you can also see a confidence rating of how likely it is you’ll complete your tasks by the end of the sprint.

These are just some of the ways we’ve created Manuscript to be a flexible project management tool for software development teams. So that no matter what kind of process your development workflow requires, Manuscript can help you keep on track without getting in your way.

Learn more about Manuscript and begin a trial today.

Talking Music and Tech with Web Developer Travis Morrison — Part 1 of 2

Key Links #

Transcript #

**Jenn Schiffer: **Hi, I’m Jenn Schiffer. I’m the community engineer of Glitch.com, the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. And today, I am talking to a friend of mine, Travis Morrison, who is a web developer and a musician. Thanks for coming here.

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **So what are you doing these days?

**Travis Morrison: **Well, I make applications for managing lead distribution for a marketing company in the Midwest called Element Three, I chase around a toddler, and I’m writing an album.

**Jenn Schiffer: **When did you get into tech?

**Travis Morrison: **Do you really wanna hear the story?

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, I do.

**Travis Morrison: **Okay. So in 1983, I was 10 years old. Now I’m actually starting to doubt the numbers…sometime in the mid ‘80s. I was a tweener; let’s put it that way. And I was reading magazine. I don’t know why — I was 11 years old and Washingtonian magazine is one of those corny lifestyle magazines like Bostonian. There’s always one.

**Jenn Schiffer: **That show up on the hotel benches and stuff?

**Travis Morrison: **Inside Dallas, yeah. And there was an article about bulletin board systems which talked about these strange worlds. I don’t know why this was in this magazine about Washington — I guess it was accounting for the Washington ecosystem bulletin boards where people could dial up with their computer, connect it to a phone and look at a system on a screen and write messages to other people and get files, and some of the files were games. And I was like, “that sounds incredible!”

So I went in hard on my parents to buy a computer. There was the Atari 400, the Atari 800, the Commodore 64, and then a couple of others I was just like…no. I didn’t wanna do Texas Instruments because it was membrane keyboards, and they always still hurt my fingers. Membrane. I hate membrane. Awful, awful. So I wanted the Commodore 64. It’s either the 64 or the Atari, because I like full — [Travis taps on the table mimicking typing on a keyboard] — Atari 800 or Commodore 64.

I got the Commodore 64 and a 300 baud modem and I immediately called the one bulletin board that that article identified as the most degenerate — like a glue sniffing teenagers board — which was called Spectrum. Within 15 minutes, I was like — [Travis mimics the connection sound of a modem connecting via telephone]— and I signed in as “The Aquatic”, because I was on swim teams. I was the world’s worst swimmer, but I was really into being on swim teams. And immediately, a life was started. I started talking to people like me; I saw my first flaming immediately. Like, why are they so angry and so off-topic? What is this?

**Jenn Schiffer: **So we’ve been doing that since the ’80s. That’s not a new thing.

**Travis Morrison: **Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m sure that pre-dates the ’80s. And recently, actually, there are now websites where people log old bulletin board systems by phone number, area code, and username. I don’t know if reunions are happening or stuff like that, but I have dug around on a few of those things to look for some of my favorite hangouts. I haven’t seen Spectrum. I don’t know what happened to those folks. But of course, a lot of them are only on at night, or you would call and you’d be like, “Hello?” You know? And it’d be like, “Mom?” Like, “Hi he’s not…he’s grounded. He’s not on anymore. Can you hear me? Are you there?” But that was my start. I would say that was my start with tech.

**Jenn Schiffer: **You wrote one of the greatest indie rock albums of the ’90s. I think I’m not the only person that would say that.

**Travis Morrison: **Oh, okay, if you’re gonna say the ’90s, alright. Top 50 of the ’90s, I thought we were gonna go — [Travis waves his hand in a slow, upward arc]

**Jenn Schiffer: **But since you were into technology really early, did technology have any effect on your music and writing around that time? Because we think now a lot about technology in music today, where GarageBand — and I mentioned Fruity Loops in another interview, and I guess that was years ago, not really now — but what kind of technology was being used back then for music?

**Travis Morrison: **Well, I think one of the more forward aspects of The Dismemberment Plan was…we had a sampler, and we got a lot of mileage out of the sampler. That came from loving hip-hop, which was both the most lyrically pertinent and sonically fresh music of that time. But there were also a couple of bands on the periphery of indie rock that were messing around with using hip-hop technology and hip-hop ideas in a punk context. There was a band, pretty obscure, called Moonshake, who were guitar, bass, drums, and sampler. They were a huge influence on us. The band Soul Coughing was like live hip-hop; it was much less of a band that wanted to create a punk rock din with samples. We didn’t just think it up; there were bands we saw who did it. We were like, “Hmm, yes, yes.” Moonshake was a loud as hell hard punk band that had samples and crazy hip-hop record noises floating through the soundscape. And I would say they were crucial for us in that regard.

But sampling…it wasn’t quite yet home recording. We were experimenting with it at the end, and it was kinda awful. It didn’t really work yet. by Beck was a famous “all in digital at home — wow!” And it probably was the most gruesome process; it probably crashed constantly. Great album though. Great album. And an interesting soundscape. It has a thumbprint that’s very interesting. It doesn’t really seem like sampling. Sampling kinda got shot in the head by the music industry. The golden moment of Public Enemy, * — *where you created soundscapes out of samples, and De La Soul got kinda crushed by the legalities of songwriting.

**Jenn Schiffer: **I guess it’s just the litigiousness of it, makes not only the artists be afraid to do it, but then if they do do it, it makes the people who are paying for them to make their record sort of hold back from doing that stuff.

**Travis Morrison: **I mean, to be fair…you’re Hall or Oates and you’re like, “Hi, De La Soul? Listen, I love your track, but that’s my song. And a Steely Dan song.” I mean, I’m not a tool…I get it. I see both sides. But I don’t know if I feel like the heavy samples art form thing got shunted to some very strange extralegal zones like what Girl Talk does. It prevented it from becoming lasting major pop music. People started to do things like what Dre did, where they were like “Oh, you won’t let me use it? I’ll just write something really similar or hire a really good musician to write something that gets me the same — ”

**Jenn Schiffer: **Or like…Weird Al it.

**Travis Morrison: **He’s really good.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, he’s so good. I think a lot about someone who also does satire and parodies and also open source. With open source software — and a lot of the stuff on Glitch is open source — we encourage people to remix already existing apps, and we have a functionality where you can add a license to your code that gives permission to people to copy stuff over. I know that there are projects that musicians have created — I think Moby has started one — where you can upload your own music and license it so that anybody can use it for free, attributed or not, like in movies and stuff like that. I’m wondering if as more musicians are becoming or remaining independent…like Chance [the Rapper] for example having more control over what is done with [his] music. I would like to see more of a open source mentality. Like, you can sample this with attribution or asking for permission, and you can bypass a lot of —

**Travis Morrison: **Right. Or less control, right?

**Jenn Schiffer: **Less control, yeah. When you’re not independent, you have some other person…a rando…well, a manager’s not really a rando, but like Dead or Alive had become a rando, and they own your stuff. I think a lot about that in terms of software ownership. When I make something at work here at Fog Creek, if down the line someone makes something out of it, can Fog Creek go after it? There’s a lot of talk with lawyers about stuff like that in all software companies.

I know I had a friend who worked at one of the really big, major companies of the top three who had made something open source but forgot to list it when they joined that company, and then they remembered it, and because they didn’t list it when they joined, if they release it to the world the company actually owns it. So they’re not able to release it. So we have our own weird, intricate ownership things.

**Travis Morrison: **But aren’t stars in this day and age afraid of the power of street justice? Like, “No one will ever wanna work for you again because I will make you sound like Satan.”

**Jenn Schiffer: **I don’t think that people of power in tech have to answer to accountability quite yet. We’re only just starting to see that.

**Travis Morrison: **They have no fear, and no laws.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Right, right. We’re only just starting to see that with companies like Uber.

**Travis Morrison: **Like last week.

**Jenn Schiffer: **And all the examples are companies like Uber. Just company Uber. Because what other companies have to deal with that?

**Travis Morrison: **That’s true. Okay, yeah, you’re right. The idea that all of a sudden all the baddies are just getting whacked left and right…it’s not true.

**Jenn Schiffer: **How did you end up at Element Three?

**Travis Morrison: **I was doing freelance work, and I met them over the wire on a Laravel-focused job market or bulletin board.

**Jenn Schiffer: **So you write PHP?

**Travis Morrison: **I do. I’m mostly in PHP.

**Jenn Schiffer: **I also used to write a lot of PHP.

**Travis Morrison: **I, too!

**Jenn Schiffer: **“I, too. Been there.”

**Travis Morrison: “**I, too, used to do that.”

**Jenn Schiffer: **Well actually, Glitch; we focus mostly on Node and JavaScript, but we do have some fun troll examples. It’s a Docker container, so essentially you can run anything on it — so I’ve written PHP on Glitch.

**Travis Morrison: **Well, ain’t you something.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, to troll Anil I can try to get Movable Type on there.

**Travis Morrison: **Let’s troll him. Just get a name, just troll the hell out of him.

**Jenn Schiffer: **So you found out about them over the Laravel board.

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, yeah. I was doing some contract work for them, and after a while I was like, why don’t we make it official?

**Jenn Schiffer: **Facebook official?

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, we made it Facebook official. Worked there for about eight months…and they’re great. It’s cool to work with a company that is…you’re inside New York, I’m inside New York, and I’ve actually found it very gratifying to work with a company that’s working in a space that isn’t mostly manufacturing and Midwest marketing that is outside of the New York zone. A professional culture that’s very unlike New York professional cultures, which has its own qualities. Yeah, it’s really been great. I go out to Indianapolis a couple times a year, which is a really cool city. I think that — you didn’t say this was “predictions with Travis” time — but we’re moving to that part of the show.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Welcome to Predictions with Travis.

**Travis Morrison: **I think we’re going to start seeing the great dispersal of tech from a couple of major American hubs to a whole bunch of regional communities.

**Jenn Schiffer: **And those communities are waiting for it. I know Nashville is thirsty for tech people.

**Travis Morrison: **Nashville’s a little too expensive for me now, but I love that town. If I could have lived in Nashville? I’m like wow. Why are you doing this? That’d be incredible.

**Jenn Schiffer: **It’s interesting. A lot of cities are hoping for more tech people to move there, and they’re all literally offering to change their name so Amazon builds their second headquarters there, and giving away taxpayer money and whatever, so they’re extremely thirsty for large tech companies and just the community in general.

**Travis Morrison: **And this gets back to my original point. How much of the tech world is gonna be like, “I wanna have a mid-sized town with a mellow commute and walks to my children’s school, and I don’t need 17 good coffee places. I need one good coffee place, and I want some tech jobs.”

**Jenn Schiffer: **And “I want a tech job, and I want to be in tech, but I don’t want to be in a neighborhood of just tech jobs, so it has to be affordable housing so people of different industries can all live together,” because that’s what a community generally is.

**Travis Morrison: **But how many of our people want to live in the town version of the show ? What if it’s more than we think?

**Jenn Schiffer: **The issue with accountability in tech is that a lot of people are complacent with where tech is going.

**Travis Morrison: **Like an infantilization?

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, and I think as students they start to think maybe the housing crisis in San Francisco is bad. Elon Musk puts a car with a dummy inside of it with a bunch of Douglas Adams references towards the moon, and everyone’s like, “Oh, actually, tech is good.”

*Keep reading for part 2 of our interview with Travis Morrison where we talk about diversity in tech, and where Jenn shows off a fun Web Audio API you can remix on Glitch*.

Talking Music and Tech with Web Developer Travis Morrison — Part 2 of 2

Key Links #

Transcript #

Jenn Schiffer: How has technology effected music in bad ways?

**Travis Morrison: **Jesus…you want me to count the ways?

**Jenn Schiffer: **People who are building software to democratize using technology in music, like having a place where you can like sell your stuff. Or say we were going on tour or whatever. You had started a startup, right? For music. Shoutabl.

**Travis Morrison: Yeah it didn’t really work. **I learned a lot of lessons about tech; a lot of things in tech and music and business don’t work.

**Jenn Schiffer: **What’d you learn?

**Travis Morrison: **That it’s very hard to come up with a profit structure. I mean, you do have to keep the lights on. How will you get money from people who make music? That’s where the predatory comes in.

**Jenn Schiffer: **There are a lot of places that were like, “oh, if you want to have your stuff streaming on these sites and you want to do it all at once, you have to like pay $300 to this one company and they’ll like do it for you” and it’s like…you could actually go around that. It’s a little more inconvenient, but like it takes more work.

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **People aren’t really that upfront with it.

**Travis Morrison: **That’s right.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Music and tech definitely sort of like have its parallel —

**Travis Morrison: **I don’t trust tech to solve these problems at all.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Oh no…no…because again, art’s gonna get good, music’s gonna get good but like technology is not…

**Travis Morrison: **Right?

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah. And I think when people say art is gonna get good and music’s gonna get good, people are gonna pay more attention to what has been out there.

**Travis Morrison: **Right.

**Jenn Schiffer: **And the more people pay attention, the more empowered those creators are to keep making it. And that’s what’s important.

**Travis Morrison: **With these times and the tech stuff, I get stressed out when I see so many of these problems and people attempting to solve them on platforms like Twitter which, you know, I don’t know if Black Lives Matter or anything could happen without Twitter but at the same time, you always have to be mindful of the fact that you’re playing on a field in a stadium, but it’s a commercial product built by an industry with motivations that were not inclusive when they built it. Those conversations are happening inside a shell — a container that was like put together by those very energies that have some very questionable motivations.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Right.

**Travis Morrison: **The actual conversation itself might be part of what’s driving a lot of people crazy when they have these conversations in these contexts. You can’t even account for it. But you go to Twitter, and that’s a thing that was built by those motivations — those capitalists, white male motivations. And that’s something everyone should think about every time they start typing.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, ’cause like you said, like tech won’t be able to solve those problems. I think that it can just to people who are in tech today, as a whole, aren’t listening well enough. And it takes listening to solve problems.

**Travis Morrison: **It’s a historical problem.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Right. Exactly. I feel like we just do that a lot; we just sort of smile and shake our head “no” all the time.

**Travis Morrison: **Right?

**Jenn Schiffer: **I feel like one of the solutions to allowing tech to be open to actually solve problems instead of causing more is lowering the barriers to get into tech for underrepresented people.

**Travis Morrison: **Oh yes.

**Jenn Schiffer: **And with Glitch, we are trying to do that by creating a free tool to build off of your dreams; the ability to learn how to code and remix other apps that people have made. And it’s in the browser and it’s their web applications. I think one of the coolest things with regards to music and the web is the web audio API, which is fairly new.

**Travis Morrison: **It’s super cool.

**Jenn Schiffer: **The MIDI API’s also.

**Travis Morrison: **I’ve been playing with it the last couple years.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, yeah.

**Travis Morrison: **The little synthesizer.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, exactly, it’s cool. I grew up with a huge respect for music and musicians.

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Like my father used to drag me inside whenever “Billie Jean” was playing on VH1.

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **And so he really like instilled in me the artistry behind it. I always had access to music through like television, fortunately, and by then all the money that I had — which was very little — went towards CDs and cassettes and stuff.

**Travis Morrison: **Right, right, yeah, yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **And I was really super into my friends who were all in bands, so a lot of music I was listening to all through college were just like local friends and their friends and fortunately they were good, you know?

**Travis Morrison: **Right. Your friends’ music is very important. That’s like…it’s such a primal way, sometimes, especially with young people, a much more accurate way to know how someone’s feeling than them talking.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah.

**Travis Morrison: **I could barely speak until I was like 33 years old. Like, I could talk a blue streak, but never made any sense.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah.

**Travis Morrison: **Your friends giving you music is like… “I’m trying to tell you something.”

**Jenn Schiffer: **Right, yeah, they’re like, you know little love notes and stuff.

**Travis Morrison: **Little love notes, yeah. Many emotions.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah. And I think as we’re working on a product that is trying to facilitate open source, I’m always constantly thinking about licenses and trying to promote the open web.

**Travis Morrison: **Right.

**Jenn Schiffer: **So I think a lot about how piracy is affected by that. If you democratize building software, you’ll have different options. And I think now the struggle is convincing companies that are consuming open source to give back in some sort of way. And a lot are. Like Linkedin — they have a lot of Ember core developers that work for them, and they allow those developers to give a lot back to the open source community, which is really cool. And so, I want to see that trend kind of move along.

**Travis Morrison: **Right.

**Jenn Schiffer: **But I also like the fact that browser vendors and people building APIs for browsers are thinking more creatively on what can be done in the browser. It’s not just like putting text in video, but like the ability to create music.

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **And I know a lot of people who were working on it, and they were all musicians and they were all like creating music and…it’s very empowering to build your own tools to make your own art.

**Travis Morrison: **That is true.

**Jenn Schiffer: **And to open it for everyone else to do.

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, that is true.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah.

**Travis Morrison: **Because I think diversity in the creators of this industry is the only hope. Well…and the money. There needs to be more diversity in terms of who gets —

**Jenn Schiffer: **Who gets that money.

**Travis Morrison: **Who gets bucks to try a thing. And the amount of white men giving other white men things to like try. I don’t know if I should use a visible new business — no, I’m not — but you see things sometimes and you’re like “a white man gave a white man some cash for that really dumb idea; that was really, really dumb.” Do you think there’s anything else that needs to be done besides current initiatives for continuing to push open diversity on tech teams?

Jenn Schiffer: I get asked that a lot, as a “woman in tech,” who therefore represents all women in tech.

**Travis Morrison: **You’re a WITty.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, what we should do about diversity, inclusivity…and my answer’s always dependent on who asks. Always call out people who are actively hostile towards women because that’s a thing that’s happening or, you know, get these guys to give me a ton of money. I’ll help them distribute it. If you can’t do it yourself, let me help you.

**Travis Morrison: **Right, right, right. You certainly get to that point where you’re like, “I know I gotta do something about this but I only know white men.”

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah.

**Travis Morrison: **And I think they only know white men. And yes, that’s where you’re like, “would you like to pay me?”

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah.

**Travis Morrison: **I know women and people of color; I can help you with that.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah.

**Travis Morrison: **I think that is a thing actually. You know what I was thinking would be cool? Whenever I think something’s gonna be cool, that’s the cue for someone to show me that nine people have done it and I’m like totally out of touch and corny. In light of my comment about how people are forgetting that the very nature of Twitter conversations are framed in the ideas of the old tech’s power and idea structure and money structure? I would love like a blue sky thing to see women and people of color to put out proposals for the next great social network. I don’t really buy the idea that Snapchat’s a social network. I think it’s a way for two people to send things to each other.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Snapchat is the most popular social media app for people age 13 to 25.

**Travis Morrison: **But is it social?

**Jenn Schiffer: **It is social.

**Travis Morrison: **Is it more social than, is it as SMS social?

Jenn Schiffer: SMS is social.

**Travis Morrison: **Okay, if you consider SMS social.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah.

**Travis Morrison: **But no…wait, is email social?

Jenn Schiffer: Email’s social.

**Travis Morrison:**Okay.

**Jenn Schiffer: **I think our idea of what social is, is what young people are using.

**Travis Morrison:**Right.

Jenn Schiffer: I don’t think that’s the case, but I think that’s what people think.

**Travis Morrison:**Have any of these been the vision of a woman or person of color? I don’t know if a Puerto Rican kid from Chicago who sketches out their idea of the next social network to fix the problems of the past ones or to take advantage of new demand that really had been not noticed. What would that look like?

Jenn Schiffer: Besides solving the diversity and inclusivity crisis in tech —

**Travis Morrison: **We did it!

Jenn Schiffer: What’s next for you? What are you gonna be working on?

**Travis Morrison: **Well, I’m moving to Durham. The thing I said before about the great tech dispersal? I’m doing it! I’m moving back to a purple state. I grew up in Virginia, and so getting into that community is probably gonna be a lot of my 2018. Continue working…hopefully finish another album.

**Jenn Schiffer: **One final, very, very important question: will the baby learn how to code or learn how to play guitar first?

**Travis Morrison: **Oh, he’s playing guitar already.

**Jenn Schiffer: **He’s playing guitar already?

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Well thank you so much for coming in and chatting.

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, thank you.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Always fun.

**Travis Morrison: **It’s always fun.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, Travis Morrison.

[The camera shifts to focus on Jenn’s laptop as she demonstrates a Glitch app using the Web Audio API. Travis stands next to her. The opening guitar riff to “When Doves Cry” by Prince plays over the laptop’s speakers.]

**Jenn Schiffer: **So this is a frequency visualization — you’ve probably seen this many times — and this is all in the browser using the web audio API. So my JavaScript: I start off where I have [audio] in my assets, [and] they’re converted to mp3 MIDI files, and I just have an array of objects called songs that have the title and the artist, which is what shows up here. And then when the app gets started, I want to create a sort of audio buffer so that when I press J, [it] loads a random song. The song loads and then plays when it’s ready and as the song is playing, it draws onto an HTML5 canvas the text that says the artist and song title and also all the bars for that frequency chart.

**Travis Morrison: **Right. Yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Because the web audio API gives you back a data array of, like, all the buffer lengths.

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah.

Jenn Schiffer: So that builds this. Let me unmute it again. You can see what else comes up. Another classic.

[“Every Day Is A Winding Road” by Sheryl Crow plays next.]

**Travis Morrison: **Right. Man, Sheryl. How did she do it?

**Jenn Schiffer: **The cool thing about Glitch is that you can have it auto-refresh or it auto-deploys whenever you —

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, show that to me.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah, sure.

**Travis Morrison: **Prove it.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah…so I’m gonna refresh app on changes so I don’t have to click refresh. I want to change the color of those bars, so I’m gonna make it…I guess I’ll make it a little less green and see what happens.

**Travis Morrison: **Is that a hue value?

**Jenn Schiffer: **These are RGB values.

**Travis Morrison: **Oh.

**Jenn Schiffer: **The fill text, that’s for this. Oh actually, this is position I’m changing…ignore that. Down here, the RGB value…

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **It’s starting out as like a turquoise-ish…

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **But if I wanna make it more red…

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **I’ll do 150. RGB values — the red, green, and blue — can be zero to 255.

Travis Morrison: Yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **I’m gonna say barHeight.

**Travis Morrison: **Oh yeah, sorry.

**Jenn Schiffer: **I’m gonna lower the G and then keep that there. Let’s see what happens. Oh, purple-ish.

[“Girlfriend In A Coma” by The Smiths plays next.]

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah, but you changed it. I saw it, I saw you do that.

**Jenn Schiffer: **So another cool thing about the app is maybe…I mean, this is the ultimate playlist. But let’s say you wanted to —

Travis Morrison: Because you don’t need any other music.

**Jenn Schiffer: **You don’t need any other music, but let’s say in a less perfect world, you do need more songs. Because I have this as an unprivate project, you can remix this and have your own copy made and deployed with it’s own, different URL. My original project is guiltless-answer.

**Travis Morrison: **Yeah.

**Jenn Schiffer: **And Glitch here has created . And you can show that.

**Travis Morrison: **Wait, what’s going on up there? What are these?

[Travis points to Jenn’s laptop screen.]

**Jenn Schiffer: **These are just automatically generated names; you can change them if you like. So within seconds, there’s this new copy here that works the same way. So you can remix my app later. You should.

**Travis Morrison: **Oh yeah, I’m gonna.

**Jenn Schiffer: **You can update the songs, or not, and change the colors.

**Travis Morrison: **What’s the word?

**Jenn Schiffer: **Remix.

**Travis Morrison: **Remix. When I remix it, it’s a totally new thing moving forward. It’s like hitting “copy” in a Google doc.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Right.

**Travis Morrison: **That’s right, right, right.

**Jenn Schiffer: **So the difference between just branches is that you’ve cloned it and it’s deployed. We do all the DevOps stuff for you so you don’t have to worry about how to get it online. It already is.

**Travis Morrison: **What’s the public face? Is it…dot glitch dot me?

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah.

**Travis Morrison: **Could I point a full domain at it?

**Jenn Schiffer: **We will have that sometime in the future. Right now, it’s just subdomains.

**Travis Morrison: **I’m actually gonna start using this tomorrow. Does this have any stateful services, or is it strictly like a web app; you load it and then you can work with it?

**Jenn Schiffer: **If you add a package, that JSON file becomes a note app; you can import packages through there.

**Travis Morrison: **Oh okay.

**Jenn Schiffer: **We have examples on glitch.com, which is our community site. I’m logged in here. We have different projects like…how about building blocks that get you started with other things like including persistence with MongoDB or REST APIs…Auth0 for, you know, if you don’t wanna do auth, you wanna do third party auth. We have all sorts of things that you can then take and remix and build upon it yourself.

Travis Morrison: Oh okay, cool, well there you go.

**Jenn Schiffer: **Yeah.

**Travis Morrison: **This is super cool. I’ll take two.

Stay One Step Ahead with Glitch for Platforms

Getting started with a new technology can be intimidating. When we built Glitch, our primary goal was to lower the barriers to entry for developers everywhere, and last year we took that to the next step with the launch of Glitch for Platforms. Since then, companies have used Glitch for Platforms to help improve their API onboarding efforts and drive developer success. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Botkit wants to help make building bots fun and easy, and their gallery page includes different examples of the types of bots that you can create using their API. Providing remixable starter apps is a great way to increase the number of users who succeed with your API, because a working example is so much better than starting from a pile of parts.

Even better, Botkit uses Glitch directly within their Botkit Studio offering — so when you signup they guide you through making a bot which is already up and running on Glitch. By using our support for parameters in Remix URLs they remove the need for the awkward copying and pasting of API credentials, dramatically improving the number of developers who get their bot up and running.

Algolia’s powerful API allows you to add search functionality to your website or app, and their gallery page on Glitch provides a few fun searches to stoke your imagination.

What’s really great about these examples is how their presentation aids in making learning easier. Each sample app is laid out as a step-by-step tutorial, and quirky font choices and playful use of emoji helps make the subject matter approachable. This guided approach to learning takes away the anxiety and doubts developers have when trying something new; here, Algolia directs them to the exact documentation that highlights what they need to know!

With over two billion users worldwide, no one builds at scale quite like Facebook does. Hundreds of thousands of people build apps using Facebook’s API, so understanding how it works and the many ways you can utilize it is pretty crucial.

Take a look at Facebook’s documentation for their Messenger platform. In this Quick Start guide, their starter project is built on Glitch, and users can easily remix the project to create their own. There’s no need for a user to set up a server or mess with SSL certificates — Glitch handles it all for them! 👌

The Wistia video player is simple to use, yet can be customized in lots of different ways using Wistia’s API. You can change the color of the player, add captions, and even include custom timings like annotation links and calls-to-action to drive engagement and turn viewers into customers.

Wistia’s thorough documentation includes examples of how to make these customizations, and they use Glitch to embed live code examples so developers can learn Wistia’s API in real-time. Take a look at their gallery page for even more examples!

These are just some of the ways organizations are using Glitch for Platforms to transform their API onboarding, teach developers, showcase new technology, and help customers through better documentation. Get started using Glitch for Platforms today and show off the full power of your APIs!

What is Glitch?

A year ago, we launched Glitch to the world. Since then, over a million people have become part of the community, creating amazing apps, bots, websites, art projects, virtual reality experiences, interactive infographics and much more.

But we wanted to take a moment to clearly explain what Glitch is about, and why we think it’s a place that everybody on the web will find valuable. This is Glitch:

A community where you can find cool apps and websites you can’t find anywhere else. Think of it as being like YouTube or SoundCloud, but for apps or bots or VR experiences instead of videos or songs.
**The most innovative, powerful collaborative platform for creating, remixing and hosting apps. **We’re evolving “developer tools” into a set of creative and expressive tools that people of any skill level can use to create the web.
**An effort to make the web into a creative medium where **We’re an independent company that cares deeply about making tech more accessible, more inclusive, and more empowering, and Glitch is how we’re doing that. Now, those ideas can mean a lot of different things, whether you’re a person looking for cool VR experiences to check out, an artist who wants to use the web as another outlet to express an idea, an educator who wants to teach a room full of students how to create an app, an experienced coder who wants to launch a new startup without dealing with the drudgery, or an activist who needs to share essential information that others can quickly reuse.

All of those people, and more, are who we’re making Glitch for—and we’re just getting started.

Just as important as the technology that enables Glitch are the principles that make Glitch special. We hope you’ll take a look and offer your feedback on how we can put them to work as we build Glitch with you.

Much of what we’ve captured in the Glitch principles are things we’ve learned from some of the core ideas that have made the Internet so powerful, principles like Postel’s Law (“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”), the Principle of Least Surprise (“In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.”), and key insights from the Unix philosophy.

But just as much as we reference any technical precedents, we look at everything from urban design to artistic movements to efforts to advance justice or equity, and we see those as influences on how Glitch will grow and evolve.

Most of all, we find our inspiration in our community, from the new and surprising things you create, and the ways you push us to bring Glitch to even more creative people. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Changing the Way We Build the Web, Together

Powering Creative Coding #

A year ago, Glitch launched with the aim of building a community where anyone can build the app of their dreams. We wanted to remind people that the web could be a fantastic place, filled with fun and creativity, that any of us can build. To do that, we built the easiest way for coders to create and collaborate, whether you’re an experienced professional developer or you’re just getting started.

Right from the start, Glitch has had some truly unique features for creating and coding:

Real-time collaborative editing, which makes coding together as easy as working in Google Docs.
**Instant deployment **— so you don’t have to worry about DevOps stuff.
Automatic hosting on a secure URL — so there’s no messing with tunnels and SSL certificates.
Magical CDN — any assets you upload are automatically ready for super-fast delivery.
Secure sharing of code — projects can be public or private, with support for environment variables so you have a safe place to put credentials and API tokens.
The ability to remix an existing project, or import a repo from GitHub — so you never have to start from a blank page.
And of course, ! We don’t use any proprietary protocols or libraries. So if you want to move your code elsewhere, you can. Just download it as a zip, or export to GitHub and it’ll just work.

Building With the Community #

It gets even better. In the year since we launched, we’ve been hard at work in collaboration with our community, building the things you told us you wanted most.

We’ve added new features, like the ability to help each other with code problems in real-time, so you never have to feel like you’re on your own.

We’ve made it easier to add licenses and a code of conduct to your apps, essential building blocks for a healthy environment where people can express their ideas.

We made it possible for creators to thank each other, encouraging a more positive, more appreciative community.

We introduced a console, giving you access to the container behind your project so that experienced users can tweak things as they need to.

And we added custom profiles and team pages, so you can show off what you’ve been creating, either on your own or as part of a team.

Glitch is for Everyone #

The best thing that has emerged over the last year though is clear: the friendliest dev community in the world. Over a million of the most creative coders, designers, developers, artists, activists, educators — people just like you are using Glitch.

Features are great, but all too often tech is seen as the solution. Glitch is different: People and community are the heart of what we all create, even when we make amazing new technology together.

And whether you’re an old pro or a newbie just discovering code, learning new tools is a fundamental part of being a coder. So we’ve created lots of resources for learning, like starter kits to help you get started with HTML and React, as well as a fun zine which explains some of the key concepts in creating web apps.

Because Glitch is for everyone, we’ve done our best to highlight the creations of those who are under-represented in tech, from showing off the work of community members who are women, to promoting the work of black creators, to featuring makers of all ages right on the homepage of Glitch.

Perhaps most exciting of all are the fantastic apps that our growing community of creators have built. Covering everything from music, art and bots, to apps for activism, learning new skills, and teaching others.

Some of the projects made on Glitch have helped startups raise $1M in funding, while others have created apps that have spread across the web, even ending up being used by real-life F1 drivers. Some of the sweetest apps on Glitch show off a poem or were made by someone who wanted to make their significant-other smile. And others, well, they’ve ruined whatever plans we had for the day because we just can’t stop using them.

Coming Soon: Glitch for Teams #

Soon, we’ll give the same powerful Glitch tools to teams at work, so developers, designers and anyone with an idea can create real, full-power apps incredibly easily. Sign up to learn more, help shape its development and to be the first to hear about Glitch for Teams.

Get Ready #

We’re proud of how far we’ve come in just a year, but we really are just getting started.

In fact, we’re making it official:** This Friday we’re tearing off the ‘beta’ label! **But as we get ready for Glitch v1.0, we’ll have a new major announcement each day. The new features you’re going to see are going to enable a huge wave of creativity, and inspire you with things that no developer tool has done before.

Come back to Glitch each day this week to see what’s new — this is going to be a week that’ll change the way we all build the web together.

Making Learning to Code More Accessible

Glitch is already the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. But during this week of announcements, we’ll show you how Glitch is also the most innovative development platform on the web today.

Part of helping us all build a better web together requires easy to use tools that can be used by anyone, anywhere. So we’re enabling you to use Glitch everywhere, with the ability to embed your live, running code anywhere on the web — from landing pages, to blog posts and documentation, to news stories and articles.

Glitch, Everywhere #

Today, it’s really easy to embed a video, a song or social media on your website or blog. But embedding a whole app has become nearly impossible.

Now, Glitch makes it as easy to share an app on your site as it is to embed a YouTube video. Whether you have an interactive visualization you want to share, a cool art project, or a useful little tool, you can embed Glitch apps anywhere. It’s a killer way to demonstrate a new tech platform or API, on your blog or in your documentation.

Whenever you see a cool Glitch app, just copy and paste the code to embed that app on your site. It works with most blogging tools like Medium and WordPress, and you can completely customize the look and feel of your embed — choose to show your app, the code that powers it, or both at the same time.

And since nothing explains an idea better than real, running code, embedding Glitch on your page lets your audience remix and edit the app directly within the embed.

Welcoming Education Organizations to Glitch #

But building a better web also needs everyone to have the opportunity to learn coding skills. So today we’re excited to welcome some of the most respected tech education organizations to the Glitch community, helping to make learning to code more accessible. These include:

We’ve teamed up with Slack, providing Glitch as the preferred coding platform for Slack Platform Sessions. Sessions are Slack’s wildly popular online live-coding events, where they teach hundreds of developers at the same time everything from the basics, to the advanced tips and tricks involved in making apps for Slack.

We’re partnering with Mouse, a national youth development nonprofit that empowers all young people to create with technology and make meaningful change. Glitch will be part of the Mouse Create learning platform, expanding how Mouse brings web literacy, coding, and creative computing to young people, especially those from underserved communities across the country.

freeCodeCamp is a community that helps you learn to code and get experience by contributing to open source projects used by nonprofits. As part of their redeveloped curriculum, they’ll be using Glitch for teaching back-end development, testing, and security.

We’re partnering with Major League Hacking on MLH Localhost. Major League Hacking is the community for student hackers, supporting hundreds of hacker clubs, events, and hackathons around the world each year. MLH Localhost is MLH’s student engagement and education program, providing educational content on cutting-edge technologies, and they’re now hosting some of this content on Glitch, helping serve its community of over 65,000 hackers.

Glitch on Any Device #

Glitch also makes it possible to build real, working web apps on any device — including creating them entirely on a mobile phone or tablet, with best-in-class support for remixing and creating on devices like Chromebooks, iPads, and even hand-me-down laptops. With nothing to install, Glitch is a great option for use on locked-down PCs like those in schools and libraries too.

You just need a screen, keyboard and an internet connection and you can build the app of your dreams on Glitch. And now those apps and your code can live on any site on the web.

But this is just the first of the announcements we’re making this week. Check back tomorrow to learn more about how we’re improving the platform to make Glitch faster, and better than ever before.

Tackling the Biggest Pain Points in Web Development

With Glitch, we’re tackling some of the biggest pain points in Web Development, ones that have been there so long we now take them for granted. Rather than accept the status quo though, we’re creating the development experience we’ve always hoped would exist, not the one we’ve ended up with.

Full-Stack View Source #

In the early days of the web, the way people learned how others had built things was simple: They used View Source.

View Source in your browser let you see the HTML, scripts, and styles that made up any page you visited. Later, great tools like Firebug, the Web Inspector, and Chrome’s Developer Tools took that to the next level, with features like source maps that let you really understand what your browser was handling. But even in today’s best progressive web apps, a lot of key functionality still happens on the server, meaning what’s happening behind a running app has been impossible to look at.

But now with full-stack view source on Glitch, that all changes.

Using the standard Developer Tools built into your Chrome browser, Glitch lets you see all of the code that runs your Glitch app, including the server-side code. You can set breakpoints, step through your code, and see the live code on both the client and the server, all right from your browser. This makes it easier than ever to troubleshoot small problems in your app and get them fixed quickly, without having to set up a complicated dev environment, worry about deployment, configure a debugger, or mess around with logging things to the console.

When you’re trying to get a new idea out in the world, speed of development is one of the biggest factors that decides whether you can get it built before that initial spark gets lost. The gold standard for a lot of creators is a local development setup — most cloud development environments just can’t match it. But running in the cloud provides us with some unique advantages that we can leverage to bring that same pace and responsiveness to development on Glitch.

Instant Installs for Node Modules #

Today, we’ve taken another step towards that with instant installs for node modules. Any common module is now automatically there when your project needs it. Especially when working with large or compiled modules it’s now multiple times faster than it was before, even as fast as developing on your local machine.

To show you what we mean, we set up a few projects using the same code and popular modules like Socket.io, Puppeteer, and TicTacToe.js on a recent MacBook and on Glitch. Thanks to instant installs, we found that each was at least three times quicker to get to a working app on Glitch than it used to be. When things are that fast, you can try out more ideas, and get problems solved faster.

Even better, node modules no longer count against the storage limits on your Glitch projects. Previously the project size limit included node_modules, meaning you could sometimes exceed the space quota, forcing you to restrict the number and size of dependencies you could use. But not anymore! Now dependencies don’t count against the storage limit on your Glitch app — only your code does.

There are huge improvements to working with files within Glitch, too: You can now copy and paste large files right into your Glitch project. Gone are the copy/paste size limits, as well as the size restrictions on files that can appear in the editor, and the cap on the number of project files shown.

We’ve also improved our support for slow or flaky internet connections. Now, if you lose connection while developing on Glitch you can just keep typing — all your changes will be merged in once your connection comes back.

With Glitch, you’re part of the friendly community that will help you build the app of your dreams. And we’re lifting the limits on your projects while making development on Glitch even faster than was possible before.

And we’re not done yet! We have major new product announcements every day this week. Yesterday we introduced the ability to embed your Glitch project anywhere on the web, along with partnerships with Major League Hacking, Mouse, freeCodeCamp and teaming up with Slack. Check back tomorrow for our biggest announcement yet.

Reinventing Version Control with Glitch Rewind

Doing Things the Hard Way #

When you’re in the middle of coding, nothing’s more frustrating than the risk of losing the work you’ve been doing. And nothing’s more liberating than knowing you can undo any of your mistakes at any time if you need to.

Right now, the answer to those problems is overly-complicated version control solutions. Coders are forced to learn a frustrating system where they spend way too much time trying to remember obscure commands and worrying that they might accidentally break their project. And those who aren’t coders just figure this is another one of those barriers that keep people out.

It all adds up to a situation where people don’t create, experiment and innovate like they want to, because making a mistake has too high a cost.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

There’s a fundamentally better way to undo errors in your code and review any point in the past history of your project: Glitch Rewind.

Simplifying Version Control #

Glitch Rewind is the easiest, most powerful version control for coders, ever. As you work, Glitch automatically checks in your code, even handling multiple authors seamlessly. (Because Glitch lets you and your collaborators code together in real-time!) Then, with Rewind, you can see every change, every commit, and walk backwards in time through all those edits, just by scrolling back on the timeline. It’s as easy as rewinding a video on YouTube.

But Glitch’s rewind feature does even more.

You can see who edited a file, with their avatar right next to their changes. You can see how big a change was to a file by the size of the bar. You can tell what kind of file was changed because everything’s color-coded, just like in the Glitch editor’s file list. And if you import a project from GitHub, your history comes with it.

But best of all, you already know how to use it.

By seeing the history of your project laid out in front of you, knowing who changed what and when — your confidence grows. You never have to worry about losing a single line of code, and you know you’re safe to try out ideas because undoing mistakes is a piece of cake.

Behind the scenes, it’s still just regular Git — you can use Glitch’s console to run Git commands to work with your code if you want to do things the hard way. You can use your git tools with your Glitch project just like it’s a regular git repo, because it is. We just think that once you’ve used the interface, you won’t want to go back to being nervous about making a commit or trying to wrap your head around git HEAD issues.

We’re enabling Glitch Rewind for beautiful and brilliant version control on every Glitch project, for free today.

So far this week, we’ve announced embeds, an improved development experience, and now Rewind. But we’re not done yet, check back tomorrow for our final announcement of the week as Glitch comes out of beta and gets ready to greet the world.

Glitch Opens Up: Welcome!

Glitch launched in beta a year ago. And this week, we recapped how Glitch has delivered an easier way for coders to create on the web right from the start, with things like real-time collaborative editing, instant deployment and automatic secure hosting.

Since then, Glitch has evolved based on community feedback—your feedback. We’ve added real-time help, a console, and the ability to thank creators as well as easily add licenses and a code of conduct.

But to get Glitch ready for the world to come in and build, there were still a few things that we wanted to add. So each day this week we’ve made a major announcement. Look at all this cool stuff!

We released the very first details about our upcoming offering, so developers, designers and anyone with an idea can create real, full-power production apps incredibly easily on Glitch. You can sign up to learn more, help shape its development and to be the first to hear about Glitch for Teams.
We unveiled , which allows you to embed Glitch apps anywhere on the web. And we shared how we’re working with Slack, Major League Hacking, freeCodeCamp and Mouse to make it even easier for coders to learn new skills.
We announced unprecedented new developer tools like full-stack view source, which lets you can see the complete code behind apps running live on the web — server-side as well as client-side, for the first time ever. You can even debug your apps right from in your browser! Plus, Glitch apps now have much more room, along with an improved developer experience that can even be faster and less frustrating than working on your own computer.
Then, just yesterday, we launched . This reinvents version control with a groundbreaking new user interface that gives you the easiest, most fun user interface for undoing changes and rolling your project back in time that any developer tool has ever had. And with that, we’re happy to rip off the beta label. Glitch is now out of beta!

Today, we’re making a big leap forward: The Glitch.com community is now open-source.

You see, there’s a little app that runs glitch.com, that helps you explore apps, discover new projects, and show off a profile for you or your team. You’ve always been able to view the source code of that app, as naturally, it runs on Glitch. But since the community is at the heart of Glitch, it only felt right that community members like you should be able to shape the development of glitch.com itself.

So now you can remix the site to suggest ideas for the community, and make a home for yourself on Glitch. Learn more about how to contribute. Soon, we plan to open-source even more parts of Glitch, with your help.

Anil and Jenn hosted hosted a livestream discussing this exciting change. Catch the recording.

Thanks so much to everyone in the Glitch community for taking part in this week of announcements and here’s to building a better web, together. We have one final request: tell your friends. For all the work we’ve done in making Glitch a welcoming community, we’re still a tiny little team trying to support a huge community that’s going to change the web. We’re doing it entirely independently. So we’re going to need your help to get the word out about Glitch.

If Glitch seems like something special, something promising to you, tell the creative people in your life that they belong here in the community with us. We can’t wait to see what you create together!

Bug Tracking and Helpdesk Software: Better Together

I’ve experienced this kind of separate setup, see if any of this sounds familiar:

Customers email in reporting bugs and they get routed into the Support team’s Helpdesk software. Meanwhile, the development team track their development tasks, like bug fixes, in their own separate bug tracking software. So for the developers to hear about the bugs you have a weekly meeting with the Development team lead. In this meeting Support flag up the priority customer issues, tickets get created in the bug tracking software and added to the backlog for the upcoming sprint.

But without an integration between the two systems, you have to add links, manually.

The Development team adds links to the emails in Support’s Helpdesk system from the issues they’ve opened in the bug tracker, in order to provide context for the developers tasked to fix them. Meanwhile, the Support team add links to the development tasks in the Development team’s bug tracker so they can track progress on fixes for customers’ problems.

And this works, sort of. Problems get reported and things do get fixed — it’s just not very efficient.

There’s the time spent finding the issues in the respective systems, as well as the duplication of effort in creating the links back and forth. Of course, folks sometimes forget to add links to the bug tracking tasks or help desk tickets, so some things slip through the cracks. With no notifications of updates, you have to rely on noticing the work has been completed to update a customer. If a customer comes back with more information about an issue then the developer probably won’t see it either.

And that’s just bugs.

Feature requests are a whole different problem, with spreadsheets or tasks being added along with, you guessed it,* yet more links*.

It’s fair to say that working this way, things get messy, quickly.

So Manuscript does things differently. We fuse bug tracking and a helpdesk together, so you have a single place where issues get reported and fixed. This means you collaborate on issues — with members of both the support and development teams working together.

In Manuscript, since emails are cases the developers have all the context they need. If a customer provides additional info, they see it. And if a customer reports a critical issue, you can assign the case to a developer for immediate action. Of course, because the systems are seamlessly integrated there are no links to remember update, so you don’t miss anything either.

But it’s not just about being more responsive, it means you can become pro-active too.

Having bug tracking and a helpdesk together makes it easier for you to incorporate customer feedback directly into the development process. With our Crash Reporting functionality, you can have your software report errors, exceptions, and in-app customer feedback itself. So you know which bugs to prioritize with the recording of the number of customers impacted.

Of course, you get all the stuff you’d expect in a helpdesk — like the ability to prioritize, assign, track, and of course, reply to customer emails. But then we take it a step further by triaging those emails for you. Using AI, customer emails go straight to the relevant team or member’s inbox. And since inquiries demand a different kind of response whether, for example, they’re reporting a bug or suggesting a feature, we enable you to set different workflows by type of email.

Long-time customer, Rogue Amoeba, began using Manuscript for exactly this reason. They started with just a help desk product, but found that it wasn’t enough — “having support and bug tracking in one place is something we wanted to do,” says CEO, Paul Kafasis. With Manuscript, they found that “having the customer communication together with feature requests and bugs, was really useful so we could communicate with a customer and say ‘oh yea that’s fixed in so and so version’”. It also meant that staff could seamlessly transition between roles, for example, “one of our support techs transitioned to development, so he’s seen both sides of it.”

By more efficiently handling customer inquiries, you’ll have more time to spend actually solving their problems. While having development and support staff working closer together means your whole team are better informed about customer problems, feature requests and the work required to implement them. The result of this is you can build better products.

Learn more about Manuscript and begin a trial today.

Learn How to Make Your Own Site With the Website Starter Kit

Glitch is the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. We want to introduce you to different ways to build those apps. In this video series, we talk about HTML, JS, CSS and Node.js. Through 4 short videos we cover what they are, why you might use them and when. And we look at 4 remixable example apps that use them.

We talk about HTML, what it is, what its limitations are and we cover some actual HTML code that makes up the intro to HTML example website.

We learn about CSS, classes and how we can use CSS to make our website look nicer.

This video provides an introduction to JavaScript, what it is and how we could use it to add behaviors and functions to our site.

We explain what Node.js is, how web servers work and the types of things you can use Node.js for in your own apps.

You’ll find other resources which will help you to learn to code on Glitch. And if you get stuck, just raise your hand.

The Essential Elements of a Fab Featured App

‘Start from something that works’ is one of the guiding principles behind Glitch. It’s important because the odds that someone will be successful when creating something are much higher then than if you start with a blank page and a pile of parts.

We don’t want you to get frustrated just getting things to work, so we’ve made a ton of apps you can use as jumping off points. But this isn’t some closed shop — anyone can submit an app they’ve created to glitch.com for others to see, use and remix!

In fact, in addition to the recent major new additions to Glitch, we’ve also made design changes to glitch.com to make community-submitted apps even more prominent. Your apps can be featured right on the homepage, so people can see the fantastic things you’ve created, get inspired and use them to create their own things too.

But in order to get your apps in shipshape to be featured, we’ve put together a few tips on how to best present your apps to the world.

The contents of your project’s readme.md file is what gets shown on glitch.com. Think of it as being like an App Store description, rather than a typical readme on GitHub or elsewhere. This is your spot to get people interested in your project, so it should really sell it.

Cover what the project does, why it’s useful and what users will need to do to get their own version of the project working (adding in API keys etc.). But keep it short — around 100 words total.

The readme is also the place to show folks what your project looks like and how it functions. Include a screenshot, or even better, a gif.

If the setup instructions are more than a few lines, then add a setup.md file to your project and use that to go into the detail. Be prescriptive and try not to make too many assumptions. We want projects to be accessible to a wide audience with differing skill levels. So avoid jargon and acronyms whenever possible.

Set your project avatar — it’s a 200x200 file, but they’re often shown at 33x33 and 18x18 on the site and in the app, so they should display well when small.

Also set your project description and a relevant project title, which also functions as your project’s URL.

By adding a license to your project people know where they stand — what they can and can’t do with it. We’ve put together some advice if you get stuck, but it doesn’t need to be an arduous thing. In fact, we’ve made the ability to add a license (and a Code of Conduct) to your project a one-click thing in Glitch.

In-line code explanations are super helpful, so if you have time, then please add them. Also, be sure to remove any extraneous dependencies and unused code.

We’ve made a Glitch button to make it super easy for folks to see who contributed to the project, and move between your app and its code. So, if it’s appropriate to the design of your app feel free to include that too.

Putting a “Remix on Glitch” button on your project’s page makes it super simple for others to get started using Glitch! Click the “Share” button and then click the “Share Buttons” button at the bottom of this menu. You’ll find code there which you add anywhere your project is featured, including a GitHub repo!

We’ve made it easy for you to embed your new project anywhere, including on your own website, a blog post, or in any documentation. Click the “Share” button and then click the “Embed Project” button to find our Embed Project wizard. In this pop-up, you can choose to display your code or your project, and swap the orientation of the panes. Toggle the checkbox to display attribution, and then copy the code to embed your project!

Once you’re ready, let us know about your project! Share it on Twitter, and if you’d like to see it featured then submit it for consideration.

But you don’t have to have made an app to suggest one — anyone can submit an app they liked on Glitch to be featured.

We’re excited to see what you submit!

Celebrating the Creative Process — Warts and All

I was relaxing by the pool when I noticed a tall, tanned, handsome man on the other side. I would have described him as cool except he was contorting his body quite strangely. He was looking this way and had his arm outstretched.

He was taking a selfie 🤳🏼.

This funny little dance was just the end part of how this perfect pool snap came to be, though. For weeks leading up to the vacation, he’d probably been going to the gym and watching what he was eating — getting into ‘beach-shape’. And it’s likely he knocked-out a couple of dozen press-ups in his room before heading to the pool for good measure too.

I’m sure the final shot looked great — but its creative process belies the effortless, chilled-out pool scene it captured.

Which got me thinking — when it comes to publishing our apps and side-projects online, we kind of do the same thing. The slick, polished look of the app and it’s refactored, tidied-up codebase doesn’t tell the real story about how it was created. It skips the hours spent digging into that elusive bug, the time stuck while crafting a particularly tricky piece of logic, and the endless UI tweaks to get it looking just right.

The difference though is that we know the slick images we see on Instagram and in magazines are air-brushed, filtered, or at the very least cherry-picked from a photo library filled with half-blinking eyes and unflattering angles. But when it comes to programming, seeing others’ amazing creations can make us doubt our own abilities and lead us to wonder why we can’t create such considered code. But we really shouldn’t, because this polished perfection is a distorted reality.

In part, this is why Glitch looks the way that it does. The aesthetic of Glitch is a rejection of the idea that everything on the internet has to look ‘designed’ or ‘professional’. It’s also why when creating Rewind, we chose to leave a project’s change history in remixed projects.

When starting from a remix you might have expected it’d just be a blank slate. But we include the original project’s change history so you can see how the app was built. By seeing the development of a project laid out in front of you, knowing who changed what and when, you get a better understanding of how an app has evolved over time.

You can see the mistakes, yes, but also the flashes of genius: the tweak that made the app faster, and the revision which tightened up the UI. We think this more accurately reflects how we create code. Because no matter whether you’re new to coding or have years of experience, we all make mistakes. And that’s ok.

The hope is that this small design choice helps people form a better understanding of how things really get created. With Glitch, we want to celebrate the creative process, warts and all, as much as the fantastic results that come from your coding blood, sweat and tears.

One Way to Get Pro-Active with Your Customer Support

Reacting quickly and properly to customer needs is table stakes. It’s no longer enough to simply give your customers a satisfactory experience if you want to maintain customer loyalty. This is because almost half of customers say they’d look to take their business elsewhere immediately if they experienced poor customer service. And only around 4% of dissatisfied customers reach out to a company when they have a problem. This means for every customer who tells you they’re unhappy, you need to keep in mind there’s likely another 24 just like them.

So you need to be able to stop them from needing to reach out to support in the first place, and Manuscript’s Crash Reporting functionality can help you do just that.

Manuscript provides a simple API known as BugzScout, which allows you to send new bugs directly to Manuscript. It’s a great way to automatically report bugs from any of your websites or applications.

For example, for each version of your application that you release you can gather and consolidate data about crashes or even let users send feature requests straight into Manuscript. Reports can include the Project and Area the new case should be created in, so it goes directly to the teams that need to know. And you can include any other information that’d be useful in fixing the issue, like a stack trace, operating environment information, HTTP headers, or other details about what might have caused the error.

BugzScout submissions are consolidated into one case based on the description you set. So after a bug has been created for a particular type of issue, subsequent cases are appended to it. The number of occurrences and last occurrence date and time are shown in the case. This enables you to prioritize the bugs impacting the most users first, and you have an easy way to follow-up with those users by updating a single case.

By having your applications report problems you’re able to spot issues earlier, sometimes before they’ve even impacted a customer. This results in fewer total support requests, so your support team has more time to handle their more involved cases. This is a great benefit as such pro-active customer support doesn’t just lead to improved customer loyalty, but happier employees too.

No-one working in customer support likes to let a customer down. Support staff are happier when they’re able to spend time on meaningful interactions with customers. By staying ahead of customer issues with crash reporting in Manuscript, you can do just that.

Learn more about Manuscript and begin a trial today.

Making Glitch Sustainable

**The short version: **go to Glitch for Teams, and tell us what collaboration features on Glitch your team would find valuable enough to pay for.

In launching Glitch to the world, one of our core values that underlies the community is that sustainability matters. We mean “sustainability” in every way possible, but today we want to focus on sustaining Glitch as a business.

Our perspective on this is a little bit different. Fog Creek Software (the company behind Glitch) is nearly twenty years old, and we’ve never taken outside funding and have always built our business based on selling our products and services directly to our customers. At a time when lots of people don’t trust their relationship with big tech companies, we feel good about staying on this path as an independent tech company.

But building groundbreaking technology like Glitch takes lots of resources, especially as we want to see the community flourish for years (and even decades!) to come. Now we need your feedback.

Here’s what we know:

Glitch makes developing apps with other people far more pleasant and productive by providing collaborative tools for coding together, and massively improved implementations of features like version control.
Being able to tap into Glitch’s creative community makes it easier to create the apps and bots and sites you need. Just start by remixing; you don’t have to manage any devops, hosting or deployment complexity.
Most companies and organizations see their developers’ and designers’ time as precious, so any improvement in their workflow or process is extremely valuable.
Basic team management features like being able to control who can edit and access a set of Glitch apps would be useful for developers, designers, marketers, educators, and others who do development in a collaborative environment. We’re building Glitch for Teams as a paid subscription product to deliver those benefits. We know so many of you love Glitch and would love to use it at work, so we’ll build our roadmap around the tools that help you adopt Glitch within your organization. Get in touch with us and share your ideas! We can’t wait to see what you and your team create using Glitch!

From Project to Funded Startup: How Lorem Moved Fast with Glitch

“Startups need to move fast,” says Sam Wilcoxon, CEO of Lorem Technologies.

“We learned this the hard way after spending nine months writing production-grade, well-tested, highly-performant code and then throwing it all away when we pivoted the product.”

Wilcoxon was determined to not make the same mistake twice, so he and his team decided to build out an MVP using Glitch.

“Glitch enabled us to quickly get code live, rapidly iterate, and focus on driving customer demand, without having to think about DevOps or Infrastructure”.

They used this prototype when seeking to raise a seed investment round, which they did — raising $1.1M in a round led by Flybridge.

Now, they’re launching their product to all.

Many business owners don’t have the in-house technical knowledge to build, customize and fix their own websites, and finding someone with the know-how can be a time-consuming challenge too, especially for small tasks rather than wholesale redesigns. That’s where Lorem steps in.

Lorem provides an “instant help” solution that matches business owners with a website task to a freelance developer or designer suited for the job within minutes. Their focus is on small, one-off jobs, like fixing broken parts of a website, customizing site CSS, or building third-party integrations. Lorem makes it easy to get website tasks taken care of quickly and easily.

Congratulations to Sam and the Lorem Technologies team on their successful launch! They will be on ProductHunt answering your questions about Lorem, so give them your feedback!

Join Mozilla’s Global Sprint with Glitch

Mozilla’s Global Sprint is a fun, two-day collaborative hackathon that runs from today, May 10th until the 11th. The event brings together a diverse network of educators, engineers, artists, scientists, and many others to build projects for a healthy Internet.

The Global Sprint is open to everyone, no matter your skill level or background. It’s an opportunity to leverage your design or writing skills, expertise in coding, teaching, QA testing, game design, or whatever else, to help make the Internet better, safer, and healthier. You’re able to collaborate with partners in person, or work online with folks from the other side of the world.

This year, the Global Sprint is focusing on five key Internet Health Issues:

WEB LITERACY: Projects that teach individuals skills to shape — and not simply consume — the web.
OPENNESS: Projects that keep the web transparent and understandable, allow anyone to invent online without asking permission, and encourage thoughtful sharing and reuse of data, code, and ideas.
PRIVACY & SECURITY: Projects that illuminate what happens to our personal data online, and how to make the Internet safer for all.
DIGITAL INCLUSION: Projects that ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to access the Internet, and can use it to improve their lives and societies.
DECENTRALIZATION: Projects that protect and secure an Internet controlled by many, so that no one actor can own it or control it or switch it off.

Here at Glitch, we love these themes behind the Global Sprint, and we want to help you make them happen! So we’ve put together a collection of starter projects that you can use to kickstart your sprint project.

By building on Glitch, you can get straight to hacking without the need to worry about setting up your dev environment. And you can code together with partners in real-time, like editing a Google Doc.

To find a hackathon near you, or to join in virtually, register here for the Global Sprint. And here’s Mozilla’s guide for participating in the sprint.

We can’t wait to see what you build!

Emojineering with Monica Dinculescu

Monica is an Emojineer at Google, where she works on Polymer, web components, and Chrome.

She’s passionate about emoji, web fonts, and cheese, which you’ll see are recurring themes throughout her projects on Glitch that both explain and inspire. Her creations run the gamut from super-serious tutorials that go into nitty-gritty technical issues, to what she describes as “a lot of pretty silly side projects, mostly related to emoji.” ✨

Although, you know you’re doing something right when your “silly side projects” get a nod from superstar digital designers like Susan Kare 🙌🏾

An explainer about loading web fonts created for her fab SmashingConf talk, *Fontastic Web Performanc*e. It covers the potential problems that result from inefficient handling of web fonts and how to avoid them, along with a demo showing you the outcomes of the different techniques she describes.

If you’ve ever tried to position page elements using CSS floats, you’ll know how finicky they can be. Thankfully, Monica’s float-layout project describes how the algorithm that browsers use to position floats actually works. It’s a fantastic resource and the interactive demo drives home some difficult to grasp ideas.

Compared to the early days of the web, where millions of people around the world were creating weird and wonderful websites that expressed themselves, some parts of the modern web can feel soulless. Many websites do seem to all look the same, and for some, the internet has literally just become Facebook. This has led folks, like Dan Nosowitz, to conclude that the internet is now “a utility world”. One that’s “efficient and all-encompassing”, but also “not very much fun.”

At Glitch, we don’t buy this. We know the good, fun internet is still out there and creators like Monica are proving it. Case in point is Emoji-Garden. It’s a random emoji garden generator that makes cute little gardens.

But that’s not the only thing it has generated. It’s kicked off a mini remix revolution, unleashing creativity in those seeking to make their own perfect emoji gardens.

Like New York-based software engineer and writer, Margaret Ikeda, who wanted her emoji world to reflect her day-to-day one. So she remixed emoji-garden and created emoji-city - complete with pretzels and traffic jams.

Meanwhile, Audrey Moon’s remix, emoji-voidscapes, takes a decidedly darker turn (that’s still super cute!)

For Stirling Allred, her perfect emoji garden needed hedgehogs. Lots of them. So she remixed Monica’s project to create her own hedgehog-ified version.

While Lisa Ciccarello wanted something a little more arid.

These emoji-filled creations are the perfect antidote to the bland, functional internet Dan describes. Creators like Monica show us that the web is still a thing we make, not just something we consume. Just take a look at the heart-warming responses her projects inspire 😍

You can follow Monica on Twitter, learn about web fonts and more on her blog, and see what she creates next on Glitch.

Turn Clicks into Actions on Slack

Slack recently held their first ever developer conference, Spec. Among the exciting announcements, one of the highlights that they unveiled at the event was their new Actions API.

With Actions, Slack has added the ability to build integrations with Slack that turn clicks on messages into actions in your own apps! So you can build tools that give folks an easy way to complete a follow-up action based on a conversation in Slack, such as creating a new task in a project management app or creating a pull request in code management software. This saves people from having to open a browser window, login, or look something up elsewhere just to perform a quick action.

It replaces what you might have previously built a full bot or slash command app to do, and it provides a little UI around it, making it more user-friendly.

But it’s not just for third-party tools — you can create actions in apps just for your workspace too. So you can build custom actions for your company, connecting Slack to your own internal tools.

Tomomi Imura gave a great talk at Spec, walking you through creating Actions on Glitch using her remixable template project, ‘slack-action-and-dialog-blueprint’.

The project is for a fictional Slack app, “ClipIt”, that allows users to “clip” a message posted on Slack that then uses Actions to export the message to JSON to be used elsewhere.

The readme is thorough, providing the specific steps you need to follow in order to get the app up and running. Plus, there’s a handy diagram in how_it_works.md that visualizes the flow of data between your Glitch app and Slack, so you can really understand how it’s all working.

To get started, you can remix the app and build your own Slack apps using Actions. To learn more about Actions in Slack, check out their API docs and look out for their upcoming ‘Building with Actions’ webinar on June 12 at 10:00 AM Pacific.

And while you’re at it, be sure to check out Slack’s other blueprint projects on Glitch that help you kickstart building integrations, as well as our collection of Slack starter projects if you want to create bots and slash commands.

From Coding Help to a VR Picnic: This Week on Glitch

We’ve made it easier than ever for you to get started with creating the app of your dreams. Here’s just a taste of what the community’s been cooking up! 👩🏽‍🍳🍲

We’ve probably all doodled in the margins of a notebook, but what if you could do the same thing on the Web? That’s where p5.js comes in — a flexible JavaScript library that lets you interact with HTML objects, including audio, video, webcam, and text.

You can get started with p5.js with this simple p5-base-project app from engineer and game developer Jack Preston. You’ll start out with a single line and a circle, but try remixing it and adding different shapes!

Eve Ahearn found a great way to use Glitch — listing upcoming events in her city! Her website DART shows any upcoming events which are at the intersection of data, technology, and art.

You can easily remix the project to add an event to the list, or change it up and make your own directory of events!

Glitch works great when you have quick problems to solve. Patrick Perini used it recently to make a simple color picker app for a Zapier zap:

Make sure to view the readme.md file to see how the app works! Add in the correct parameters in the URL in your address bar, and the app will return a color or a list of colors sorted in order of frequency. Not bad for 20 minutes of work!

Nebulous CMS calls itself the smallest, most adaptable CMS in the world. It runs off Node.js, JSON and Markdown, which means that it’s perfect for Glitch! The first theme for Nebulous CMS is live, and creator Andrew Chilton ported it to Glitch for easy remixing and editing.

This is a fantastic way to make a quick single page website, and all changes go live immediately. Change out the images and links and customize it to your heart’s content!

We love when creators get inspired to make projects based off Glitch features, which is where the idea for Newbie Talk came from. Here’s how creator David Francisco describes the app:

You will need to supply your email address to use the service; from there, Newbie Talk will send you an email allowing you to sign into the service, create an avatar, and begin to offer help.

Plant biologist and Web VR developer Colin Keenan wants to make VR experiences that capture the feel of Raleigh and North Carolina. His app, A VR Picnic, shows off his favorite neighborhood spot Dorothea Dix Park.

What locations would you like others to experience using VR? Remix this project and show the world!

Stack Overflow is the world’s largest developer community, and millions of developers share their knowledge across a number of different topics. And what’s a better way to answer questions on Stack Overflow than using Glitch?

For example, abraham recently helped solve another user’s problem with progressive web apps with a quick demo. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to show a solution than to describe it!

The members of the Glitch community are always coming up with creative new projects worth celebrating. Have you made something in Glitch worth telling the world about? Find out how to get your app in shape, share it with us, and we may feature it in the future!

GitHub, Glitch and the Future of Social Coding

**Here’s the short version: **We’re excited about GitHub becoming part of Microsoft, and think it’ll be good news for developers. But based on the huge adoption we’re seeing for Glitch and our own decade of experience in building version control tools, it’s clear many developers also think it’s time to explore new approaches, so we want to build on this milestone for the coding community by articulating a new vision for social coding.

Let’s put it short and sweet: Microsoft buying GitHub is likely to be good news for developers. There’s no better evidence of how Microsoft has been revitalized under the leadership of Satya Nadella than to point to bold moves like this, which would have seemed incredible (and also not seemed credible!) in the past. Old-timers can remember when Microsoft was often described as the Evil Empire, but their moves to embrace open source and non-Windows platforms have seemed sincere and sustained, and we’re happy to see that flourish.

Similarly, GitHub has earned its place as an indispensable developer platform through breaking ground as the first large-scale social coding experience over 10 years ago. Having strong leadership from Microsoft can only be good news, especially for developers using Microsoft platforms.

But if we have a concern, it’s that there hasn’t been a huge leap forward in social coding in the last decade. We simply haven’t seen enough innovation in recent years in the way that coders collaborate, and since every developer will be thinking about these big ideas right now, we wanted to paint a picture of what social coding could look like over the *next *decade. A lot of people will (understandably) be thinking about backing up their GitHub projects just in case, and we think you should use that opportunity to look at Glitch and consider if it’s time to rethink traditional views on version control entirely.

(Spoilers: If you’re using Glitch, you’ve already got a preview of where we’re headed. If you’re not, here’s how to import a GitHub repo to Glitch. If you have a Node app that you’ve built or like to use, start with that!)

First, some background. Many developers may not know this, but at Fog Creek, we have a deep background in distributed version control systems. We launched Kiln (now available as an integrated version control system in Manuscript) almost a decade ago with a number of groundbreaking features for teams to collaborate on coding. Our path was to take great project management and add version control to it, and this approach taught us a lot about how people can do their best coding together.

We learned exactly what parts of the typical commit-pull request-merge workflow were still far too difficult and complex to understand.

Based on what we had learned, and what we heard from the developer community, we started rethinking some of the assumptions about workflow and collaboration that everyone was taking for granted in version control. Then, earlier this year, we brought Glitch out of beta with a complete re-imagining of version control, and we called it Glitch Rewind. It uses regular git under the hood, but the user experience is a huge leap forward.

Glitch does a few things nobody’s pulled off before:

Glitch automatically commits your changes while you work to a git repo in the background — even with multiple simultaneous people editing the same file at the same time. Imagine if the basic commit process was as easy, and as multi-player, as editing in Google Docs. Even non-devs can do it instantly.
Glitch Rewind lets you** roll back commits on a project just by moving back a slider** like you’re rewinding a video. If you want to work from that older version, just hit play and keep working. You’ll get a live preview of your changes as you slide around the timeline. Anybody who can play a YouTube video can revert git commits now. Even if you do know the arcane git command line options, you’ll prefer working this way most of the time.
Under the hood, it’s all just git. This means your tools, processes, workflows, integrations and automations can move seamlessly over to projects on Glitch.
We’re building on Glitch’s “remix” feature that lets you clone live, running, code and will make merging changes from remixes as easy as rewinding commits is today.
Glitch’s project pages and ** are an open source project** maintained on Glitch itself. That means if you want the community features and social networking features on Glitch to evolve, you can make it happen yourself, and become part of a vibrant new community when you do so.
The business tools you use to collaborate on code should be a seamlessly connected part of the larger network where everyone codes together. Glitch for Teams is bringing all the power of Glitch’s collaboration to your work, but without the complexity of having to go through an enterprise procurement process.
Glitch is also trying to be a better, more inclusive community with everything from a friendly and approachable design, to built-in tools for managing codes of conduct and licensing, to our unique Glitch Help feature — if you get stuck coding on Glitch, you can** just raise your hand** to ask for help! We’ve got more coming, but you have to see it in action to really understand the magic.

The skeptics among you must be thinking, “Well, that’s all fine, but we’ve got GitLab or BitBucket as alternatives now, why not just use those?” And those are great tools! But they make the same fundamental assumptions about workflow that all the older generation of tools — including our own — had settled upon.

We now think those assumptions didn’t try hard enough. This is where we want to raise the bar:

**The basic building block of social coding should be an app, not a commit. **The default state of a project should be a functional, running app or site or bot, not a pile of code that you then have to figure out how to get running. (“Start from something that works.”)
Creativity is enabled when everyone can make changes to code and try new things out without fear, thanks to automatically being able to undo any change.
Every member of your team should be able to commit to a project, even if they’ve never coded before, don’t know what git is, or haven’t even heard of git.
Even experienced developers shouldn’t have to memorize obscure command line tools for common tasks like reverting a commit. Very, very few developers feel confident about their expertise in git, yet nearly all have to make use of it. This mismatch helps make coding more stressful, less inclusive, and less fun.
The social network where we show off our code should be as delightful and creative as networks where we find great photos or videos or music.
The community platform that coders use to share their work should be open source, so that we can all improve it together. The business model behind a coding community should be transparent and sustainable, so we can trust it. And the company behind a coding community should be credible, with a track record of being accountable. There’s a lot more — in fact, we wrote a whole list of the if you want to check it out. But the bottom line is simple: GitHub has radically changed coding in the last 10 years, and we should all celebrate this milestone for Microsoft and for the community. It’s a validation of an important idea: We don’t code alone.

This is also the perfect time to ask ourselves as coders and as creators, how we can set our sights far higher than merely being social while we code, and truly bring community and culture into the heart of how we create together.

That’s what Glitch is all about. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Import Any of Your Code to Glitch!

It’s now easier than ever to get your existing code on to Glitch. From today, you can import code from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and any other Git repo hosting service.

To do so, select the ‘clone-from-repo’ option from the ‘New Project’ drop-down menu under the ‘Project Info’ menu at the top-left of the editor. Then enter the full HTTPS git web URL and the repo will be cloned. This clone includes all files and the full commit history.

We’ve wanted to provide more git import options for a while, but with recent news we know this has become more important to many of you and we wanted to be responsive to that!

Beyond making it easier to get your code on to Glitch, what’s cool is that the full commit history is then viewable in Glitch Rewind. This means you can visually see how a project has evolved over time. We think this is important — by seeing the development of a project laid out in front of you, knowing what was changed and why you get a better understanding of how an app was created.

You can also invite other users to your project who can explore the project history too, even if they’re not familiar with Git.

Folks are already thinking up creative ways to use this new capability:

We’re excited to see how else this gets used, as well as the amazing projects you import and work on.

For more specifics on how to import a git repo into Glitch, check out our help docs! 📚

Social Coding, Making MIDI, and Doing It Live

On Monday, Microsoft announced their acquisition of GitHub, and it seemed like developers had something to say about it. We’re excited about the news, and Fog Creek Software’s CEO Anil Dash thinks it will be good news for developers! He outlined his thoughts on a new vision for social coding by highlighting Glitch and our fantastic Rewind feature, which lets you roll back changes on a project as simply as rewinding a video on YouTube.

Anil sums up his perspective here:

We’re Doing It Live! #

Ada Rose Cannon, developer advocate at Samsung, began streaming coding sessions on Twitch this week. She went over isomorphic rendering with HyperHTML and ES modules, and used Glitch in her livestream to illustrate these concepts in a format that is easy to follow. This is a great way to show just how powerful Glitch can be as a tool for teaching!

Speaking of using Glitch for education purposes, software engineer Omayeli Arenyeka recently held a workshop on dev.to where she taught developers how to build a Twitter bot in JavaScript using Node.js. Events like this are a great way to help others!

Guess The Year in Australian History! #

A photo roulette can be a fun way to learn about history. Glitch user @thurstanwork created an app using data from the State Library of Queensland which uses their API to pull images and prompt users to guess which year the photo was taken.

Can you find the right year without using all your guesses?

Make MIDI Music! #

MIDI Ditty Notation uses a nice, compact notation to let you create small songs. MIDI is an industry-standard protocol, and this neat Glitch app from Glitch user @hYPotenuser allows you to make songs and apply transformations to them like changing pitch, direction, and transposing notes.

Give it a try and come up with your own jazzy tunes!

Keep Your To-Do List Together #

If you’re a heavy Slack user, connecting it to different services lets you handle a multitude of tasks. Glitch user @mikker created an app that cleverly lets you add to-do items to Things directly from Slack!

Remix the project and check out the readme.md for instructions for making it all work.

It’s been a really great week on Glitch, and these projects are just the tip of the iceberg. Show us your app and maybe we’ll feature it in a future post!

Creative Expression with Omayeli Arenyeka

Omayeli Arenyeka, better known as Yeli, is a creative technologist. From Lagos in Nigeria, she’s currently “playing with data” at the Recurse Center in NYC.

Despite holding a Computer Science degree from NYU and having worked as a Software Engineer at LinkedIn, she doesn’t think of herself as a coder but “more of an artist that uses code as a tool”.

She deploys that tool to explore the intersection of art, design and technology — creating disparate projects that range from Twitter bots to data analysis and visualizations.

Let’s take a look at some of her projects! #

**Y-Under-**Y A bot that generates awards for everyone. Created as a response to youth-obsessed culture and a societal pressure to accomplish things by a certain age.

It borrows the syntax of the famed Forbes ‘30 under 30’ but lists awards for any age.

**Art-Connoisseu**r A bot that generates tweets interpreting art, juxtaposing those interpretations with images from Artsy.

**Twit-Origina**l A project which analyses your tweets determining whether you’re a tweeter or retweeter. Try it out:

Side Projects as a Creative Outlet #

A common thread between these otherwise unrelated projects is creativity. Yeli’s side projects are how she expresses herself creatively. The goal of which is that expression, not necessarily perfection.

“Bypassing perfection allows us to create more”, says Yeli. “The projects we make, whether crappy, riddled with errors, or failures, have the added benefit of teaching us how to make the small fraction of our work that soars.”

For creators, the internet makes it easier than ever to get feedback on your work, to discover exciting new creations and to bring us all together to collaborate. But it’s not without its drawbacks.

Our social media feeds are awash with uninspired, derivative content, slapped together with virality in mind. The modern internet is built upon acquiring “likes”, “followers” and “page views”. Such measures of success hamper creativity. It can lead us to worry about perfecting something before publishing it, or to focus on superficial aesthetics rather than exploring creative ideas or tackling the hard, ugly problems that really need to be solved.

Creativity is fuelled when we can put our egos and insecurities aside and put ourselves out there. Both the design and product decisions we’ve made when building Glitch are in response to, and in furtherance of, the bold step taken by inspiring creators like Yeli to build and share her creations — warts and all — with the world! 💪🏿✨

You can follow Yeli on Twitter, learn more about her on her site, and see what she creates next on Glitch.

Show Your Pride!

At Glitch, we know the web is better when everyone can express themselves, so we’re thrilled to see the community create projects during Pride as an opportunity to honor LGBTQIA+ history and help others show the world who they are.

Let’s dive right in!

The current rainbow flag was first popularized by Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco-based artist, in 1978. Since then, it’s been used at Pride events all over the world. Thanks to Glitch user Jack Preston (@unwitting), now you can change your Twitter banner to this famous flag. Connect the app with your Twitter account to get started!

There are many flag variations used to represent the spectrum of the LGBTQIA+ community, and this month is a great time to raise awareness about them all.

Glitch user Noelle Leigh (@noahleigh) created an app to add a circular transgender pride frame to your profile picture, which you can then upload to Twitter, YouTube, or any other website which displays your profile picture in a circle.

Noelle’s app was such a hit that it has also been remixed by other Glitch users to create frames for lesbian, bisexual, non-binary, and genderfluid people as well! Check them out below!

In the LGBTQIA+ community, transgender people can face an extreme degree of discrimination and bias when it comes to healthcare. Finding an understanding medical professional is important, and thanks to Glitch user Uve Avanto (@uveavanto), there’s now a resource which can make this process a lot easier.

Trans GP Finder uses Google Maps along with data pulled from Transfigurations — a transgender support group based in Devon, UK — to list trans-friendly doctors and general practitioners throughout the United Kingdom. According to Uve, The app was built during Trans*Code, the UK’s only hack event series focused solely on transgender issues and opportunities.

LGBTQIA+ Pride Month is in June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots in New York City and their impact on the world. We love this VR experience from Katie Huras (@katiehuras) which is a 360-degree view of Yonge Street, the location of Toronto’s annual Pride parade.

As you look around, you can interact with tiles which give you quick audio lessons on the Stonewall Riots, the Gay Activist newspaper from the Gay Activists Alliance, and Toronto’s gay pride parade. This type of visual storytelling allows users to become immersed in all kinds of locations and can really make history come alive!

Glitch is a friendly place for everyone, and these projects are just a sample of what our community is creating here. Remix any of these projects and show the world who you are! You got this! 😄

World Cup, Generative Art, and Pride

The Glitch community has been working overtime this week! We’re spotlighting a variety of projects this week, so let’s check out what people are creating!

Previously on the blog: Profiling Omayeli Arenyeka and Showing Your Pride #

Earlier this week, we showcased Glitch user Omayeli “Yeli” Arenyeka (@oa495). She is a creative technologist from Lagos, Nigeria who is currently working in New York City.

Take a look at our creator profile video and find out more about Yeli and her work!

We also looked at some projects on Glitch that have a focus on the LGBTQIA+ community. Add some Pride flair to your Twitter profile or online avatar, find trans-friendly doctors in the UK, and get a history lesson on gay history in a VR setting on Toronto’s Yonge Street!

Art Scrolling app #

Glitch is a fantastic playground for digital artists. You can make your own digital masterpiece, collaborate with others, or remix someone else’s concept and make it your own!

Glitch user Jay Wren (@jrwren) created an ode to his childhood with a project that generates dozens of colored lines in an endless scroll. Check out the embed and watch the cascade in action!

World Cup Scheduler #

Billions of people tune in to the FIFA World Cup to watch teams from all over the world battle it out. It’s easily the world’s most widely viewed sporting event, far surpassing the Olympic Games.

This year’s matches are already underway, so if you need to keep up with the tournament, Glitch user Sebastian Delmont (@sd) created a calendar feed that you can use in your online calendar of choice. The feed continuously updates with the teams playing in specific matches, the score, and other statistics.

Even better, Glitch user Josh Metcalfe (@geekypeacock) remixed Sebastian’s original project and added the USA TV schedule into the feed!

Which team are you rooting for to win?

Shake The Dice #

CSS 3D transforms allow you to create some pretty impressive visualizations right in the browser. They can even be used to make something simple and functional, like a game die. Just ask Glitch user Joe Gaffey (@joegaffey)!

Joe’s app is simple and functional — just pull up the app and tap the die to roll it! They say necessity is the mother of invention, and Glitch makes it easy to build the app of your dreams.

Uncover the Magic of CSS Houdini #

Houdini is a new set of specifications that bring help extend the styling and layout capabilities of CSS. It’s still a bit bleeding edge, but thanks to Glitch user Sam Richard (@snugug), there’s now an interactive introduction to Houdini, including examples and code snippets.

Play around with the API examples, and view the Resources page for more information on Houdini!

Create Old School WordArt #

Back in the day, you could create some really cool retro word art in Microsoft Word. The feature isn’t available in the new versions of the program, but thanks to Glitch user Cory McDonald (@cory), you can take a walk down memory lane and re-live those glory days with his WordArt project!

Cory has nine styles available for you to choose from ranging from a golden gradient to a perspective skew. Everything is styled using CSS, so it works in all modern browsers too. And since this is text and CSS, the styles even work with emoji. Give it a try!

Track Congress’ Progress on Gun Reform #

Glitch user Jason Crane (@jasonlcrane) wanted a way to keep track of what the current U.S. Congressional representatives were doing and saying about guns. With the help of an API from ProPublica and the magic of Glitch, he created Congress on Guns, the latest statements and bills by members of Congress on gun violence.

According to his Glitch user profile, Jason calls himself a web developer and journalist at heart, and a project like this shows the power of using Glitch as a medium for activism!

Answering Questions on Stack Overflow with Glitch #

Developers worldwide use Stack Overflow to learn about new topics and answer questions from others.

Joseph Wer recently had a question about creating a sticky header on AMP pages. He tried CSS workarounds but couldn’t come up with a solution. After several examples, Sebastian Benz built a quick solution on Glitch that solved the issue! It’s always a good thing when you have the support of the community behind you.

We have covered a lot this week, and the Glitch community just keeps creating projects that bring out the fun and excitement that makes Glitch a friendly place to be. Do you know any Glitch projects that we should cover? Share them with us! 👍🏾

Making Web Apps with React

A free, 28-page zine that will help you to learn some of the key concepts needed to create web apps using React.js, including:

When to use React
Essential parts of a React App UI
What's Routing?
Understanding Redux
Find out how Suz Hinton, Justin Falcone and Florida Elago got into coding.
Must-know advice for those new to React from experienced programmers.

Virtual Possibilities

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. If that’s not an call-to-action to create something new, then check out what’s happening in the Glitch community and get some inspiration.

You Got This Zine! The React Edition #

Earlier this week, we launched the next release of the You Got This! Zine — the React Edition! This 24-page zine includes information on some of the key concepts to create apps using React, tips and profiles from React experts, and a spotlight on Glitch creators Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) and Omayeli Arenyeka (@oa495)! We hope that this zine gets your gears turning and gives you some ideas on what to build, or at least to build it.

Go on WebVR adventures! #

Jamiroquai sang about the future being made of virtual insanity; on Glitch, the future is made of virtual reality! Using A-Frame, anyone can make their own VR space directly in the browser. Glitch user Bian Yunxiang (@BianYx) created a colorful project titled Upwardꜛnot northward which takes you through six vibrant and interactive worlds. Can you escape?

Glitch user Karen Vanderpool (@kvpool) also built her own virtual room, complete with music and a fun surprise! Take a look around, explore, and make yourself at home.

Make and Learn Music! #

Beautiful music and beautiful apps happen when people work together on Glitch. That’s definitely the case with Face the Music, a music-making app controlled by your face!

The app was created by Omayeli Arenyeka (@oa495) and Okay with help from Nicolas Hahn, Eugene Ha, and fellow Glitch user Sean Catangui (@seancaat). We’re almost sure the app isn’t just an elaborate ploy to capture photos of folks gurning at their laptops! Play around with the app, download your creation, and share it with the world.

Making music is awesome, but Glitch can also help you learn to play music as well! Graham Macphee (@gmph) wrote a useful app to help with mastering ukulele chords. Just type your chords in the Ukulele Chord Extractor 3000™ and receive chord diagrams to help you play. Give it a try and you’ll be playing in no time!

Experiments and Extensions #

When you have a friendly community behind you and a powerful tool to create projects, that’s a great recipe for trying new concepts.

Glitch users Ben Garvey (@bengarvey) and Sasha Garvey (@sashatgarvey) built an HTML canvas experiment with dozens of creatures they call “dot cats”. The end result is hypnotic — try refreshing the page to come up with different configurations!

Glitch is also a great way to build apps to interact with other services. Take this Airtable API proxy built by Glitch user, Danilo Campos (@daniloc). According to Danilo, the app uses Node.js and Express, and it helps people use Airtable for projects by solving some common problems like caching, rate limiting, and key secrecy.

Take a look at the readme information for the project and remix it for your own Airtable bases!

This week’s round-up projects can be summed up by a quote from Dusty Phillips, director of engineering at Dataquest:

We know that learning new things can be tough, but it’s also a lot of fun! With the help of the Glitch community behind you, you’re only limited by your own imagination. Don’t worry — you got this! ✨

It’s Not Just Code, It’s a Network

The tech world has had a little time to digest the dramatic news that Microsoft is acquiring GitHub, and is starting to form its opinions. Amidst the flurry of hot takes, most of the immediate responses focused on the obvious business value for Microsoft: boosting its connection to developers and helping its Azure cloud platform to compete with Amazon.

But as we’ve been creating Glitch, we’ve learned a lot about what happens when coders collaborate together in realtime, and this reveals a deeper insight into where coding is headed. It’s something far bigger than just hoping to encourage developers to use one cloud services provider instead of another.

A network of coders isn’t just useful as a way of collaborating on programming, but is perhaps even more important as insight into social behavior, and as a foundation for machine learning about the way coders work.

Right now on Glitch, millions of users have created, remixed and discover projects, and we’ve listened closely as they told us how we can make those community members more productive. As a result, we’ve begun exploring the power of networked coding. “What if JavaScript wins?” described the ecosystem around coding is increasingly driven by network effects, so there’s an opportunity in building tools and infrastructure which recognize that reality and take advantage of this new environment.

Smart analysts like Ben Thompson have laid out why Microsoft would pay a premium for GitHub by describing the cost of acquiring developers for a platform. Microsoft’s own deck describing the deal emphasizes “the developer’s marketplace,” hinting at a sort of app store for coders, which could indeed be useful.

But the far greater value comes from radically increasing the number of people who can create software, while improving the quality of software that they make. That’s not incremental improvement in coding productivity, it’s an order of magnitude increase in who can create technology — a win for inclusion, innovation and invention as much as it is for productivity.

Imagine a few scenarios that networked coding makes possible:

Analyze code that’s already been written, to understand which functions, methods and libraries are used most often. Then, use that data to build better support for these capabilities, or create new web services or infrastructure that can solve these problems more efficiently. (This is the potential that’s furthest along today.)
Monitor new code as commits are made, seeing trending behaviors in design patterns, and gathering insight into repeated efforts that might be redundant, wasteful, or frustrating. You could even capture errors as they happen or provide examples of how others have solved similar problems.
Identify the social relationships between collaborators, and the invisible network of connections between contributors to a project, to understand which people collaborate well together — or which people could collaborate together. On Glitch, the ability to just raise your hand to get help is already building relationships between coders, whether they’re on the same team or complete strangers, around the way they can collaborate together.
And finally, and perhaps most excitingly, networked code provides a broad set of training data for machine learning about code that’s written in the real world. In the short term, this can provide better tools which anticipate the most common choices that coders make, but in the long term, we can identify likely mistakes or unexpected errors that make software less reliable, less maintainable, less secure, or more expensive. Some parts of this are theoretically possible with GitHub today, and some rudimentary versions of these capabilities are starting to show up in tools from Microsoft and others, including Glitch. But most tools that try to solve these problems are resorting to brute-force indexing of code or commits after a person has already created their work.

Reaching the full potential of networked coding can’t just happen by trying to analyze “dead” code that’s locked away in old repositories. Instead, networked code requires being connected to creators while they’re coding, responding and even anticipating the work that they’re doing. (And no, not like Clippy — more like the way we share photos of an event with faraway friends so they’ll feel like they’re in the moment with us, together.)

When we started preparing to launch Glitch’s earliest versions, one of our internal goals was, “writing code anywhere else should feel lonely in comparison”. Though it’s still very early, we think we’re well on our way toward achieving that mission.

But in reflecting on that goal, we realized it connected with a lot of the values that we think are important for coding overall , like unlocking the creativity of more people, including those who don’t even think of themselves as coders. Or freeing up creativity by giving people room to experiment or even to make mistakes while still being supported by a community. And tapping into the latest advances in artificial intelligence to give people more confidence that the code they write is secure, stable, scalable, reliable, and legible.

By all means, we should get excited about the potential for new cloud services. And it’s great if more companies are competing harder to earn the attention of today’s developers. But given the central importance of code in shaping the future of culture and society, one of the most important things we can do to set a standard for code going forward, is to make sure it’s more connected.

It’s not just about code connecting to our devices and to our data, but code being a medium through which we form connections to one another. We can’t wait to see what you create!

A Million Brilliant Moments: Creating the Best of the Web

I love working on Glitch. One of the things I like most is the amazingly creative, friendly, and thoughtful community that I get to work alongside each day.

Tech has been getting a good kicking in the media lately, and rightly so. From execs being jerks to privacy woes — at times the outlook for those making tech can seem bleak. But what gives me hope for the future is the genuine positivity and creativity that I see in the Glitch community every single day.

Glitch is the creative community where the cutting-edge of the web is invented. It’s comprised of coders, designers, artists, activists, students and educators. There are those who love to code, and others that think of it as a tool to get stuff done. There are code newbies, and folks who’ve been creating and coding for years. But what they all have in common is that they’re building the apps of their dreams on Glitch.

These apps cover everything from bots and websites, to art projects, virtual reality experiences, interactive infographics and much more.

Creators are building on Glitch for fun, creating hit apps, like:

** **by caseyf: An app that mashes up webcomicname panels, enabling you to create your own mashup comics.
** **by jakearchibald: Test your reactions with this F1 start simulator. This app was even used by real-life F1 drivers.
by notwaldorf: Generate a random emoji garden.

For others, it’s not just fun, it’s funding. Like Sam Wilcoxon at Lorem, who created an MVP on Glitch that would go on to help them secure $1.1M in funding and launch their product to the masses. But many in the community are just creating apps as a way of expressing themselves. Some through music, like: 🎶🎧🎶️

by arirawr: Slide and tweak the settings to create a super-customizable Spotify recommendation track list.
by PatrickWeaver: A Rube Goldberg Machine-like mashup of the Google Cloud Vision and Spotify APIs that selects a song based on an image you upload. It’s like Shazam, but for album covers. While others are expressing themselves through art: 🎨 🖼️
by mehtapaydin: A 360 immersive experience that follows a water droplet’s journey crossing the desert. Made during Tribeca Film Institute’s Immigration Colab.
by noahleigh: Make pixelated gradient GIFs with words.
by AVGP: A fun, wintery WebVR scene. Did you spot the bears’ Christmas get together?

Of course there are those who are building apps on Glitch to help teach others how to code. They’re creating resources like tutorials and workshops. While others are using such resources to try out new technologies and learn new skills. Many people in the community are creating apps to help people in other ways too: 😍🤟🏾

by picsoung: Looks out for Glitch Help questions and notifies you about new ones in Slack.
by uveavanto: A map showing trans-friendly GPs in the UK.
by Riley Walz‏: An app that helps people make routes for running, walking or cycling.

But for me, a clear sign that Glitch truly is a friendly, helpful community is when its members feel safe and empowered to try out new things and share them with the world. There might be almost 1M projects on Glitch, but among them are many that are someone’s first. Whether that’s their first time trying something new:

Or even their first public app ever!

One thing’s for certain, though — as the Glitch community continues to grow and create the best of the web, we’re looking forward to many more firsts to come.

But who will create the 1 millionth app on Glitch? We can’t wait to see what you create 🎏✨

We’ll be hosting a special event soon with our CEO, Anil Dash, where you can ask him anything about the community and the future of Glitch itself.

1 Million Apps on Glitch: The Creative Web is Back!

We’re excited to reach the **one million app **milestone as it shows how we’ve created the easiest way for coders to create and collaborate online. With functionality like real-time collaborative editing, instant deployment, automatic secure hosting and Rewind, we’ve removed many of the technical barriers to getting started with building on the web. By turning “developer tools” into a set of creative and expressive tools, we’ve enabled people of any skill level to be able to create online.

So it makes sense that the millionth Glitch app was created by someone who’s learning to code. freeCodeCamp is a community that helps you learn to code and get experience by contributing to open source projects used by nonprofits. And it was a freeCodeCamp student learning Node.js used Glitch who created the project that marked the million-app milestone. freeCodeCamp was an early adopter of Glitch and their community members use it extensively to learn back-end development, testing, and security. Their approach is hands-on — through coding challenges and building projects, you learn to code, which is exactly the type of thing we wanted to help make more accessible when we set out building Glitch.

And best of all, those beginning coders like knowing that when they use Glitch, they’re using a tool that even some of the most experienced professional developers also use for their work.

But Glitch is about more than apps. It’s helping people create the best of the web by enabling creativity like no tool has done before. Or, at least not since GeoCities. But most people on the web today weren’t around for the heyday of GeoCities, or NeoPets, or MySpace, or any of the other places where an earlier generation of creators got their start dabbling with code. They’ve never known a truly creative web, having grown up on an internet dominated by major social networks.

So we’re bringing that creative, personal, human web back.

With this milestone, we’re showing how a creative community can change the way the web is made to be more open and inclusive, and can come together to invent the cutting edge of the web. Glitch is a place where you’ll find cool apps, websites, and creations that you simply can’t find anywhere else. Think of this community’s future as being like YouTube, but for apps, bots, web art and VR instead of just videos.

We’ve been working hard to make it a welcoming community, whether you’re an experienced professional developer or you’re just getting started. A community where everybody feels comfortable expressing themselves and sharing their creations with the world. And in doing so we’re reminding some, and introducing others, to a fun, creative web that any of us can build. And it’s working. The result is: we’re growing fast!

We love Glitch and we want to do this thing right. We think that means remaining fiercely independent and opinionated. Now, we’re not some flighty startup — Glitch is bootstrapped by Fog Creek Software, the inventors of Trello and co-creators of Stack Overflow. We’re not building Glitch just so we can sell it to some big company in a year and let the community fall apart.

But running Glitch this way brings up an important issue: sustainability. How does a tiny little team support a huge community that’s going to change the web? Well, we’re going to need your help to get the word out about Glitch. We’re committed to making this a sustainable business for the long term. And we’ll be doing this in a few ways, but the first is with Glitch Teams.

From development and DevRel, to marketing and learning, we know many of you love Glitch too and want to use it at work. So we’re building our roadmap around the tools that help you adopt Glitch within your organization. We’re doing this based on feedback direct from the community, and it will include the things you’ve been asking for, such as:

Team Member Authentication: Flexible, integrated authentication with providers that your team already uses to track and manage team members
**Flexible Project Permissions: **Control over who can access or update different projects and pages
**Team Pages: **Enabling discovery, remixing and reuse of private apps within teams
**Notifications: **Get notified about key events as they happen on Glitch But we’re keen to know what else your team would find valuable enough to pay for.

Then please get back to building one of the next million apps on Glitch. We can’t wait to see what you create! 🎏🎆

We’ll be hosting a special event soon with the Glitch team, where you can ask us anything about the community, Glitch Teams and the future of Glitch itself.

One In a Million

As we say goodbye to another week on Glitch, let’s take some time to look at some really fun apps we discovered. But first, we’ve got an announcement to make! Drumroll please! 🥁

One Million Projects #

Time flies when you’re having fun, right? Since we launched Glitch, we have seen such an outpouring of love and support from the community. And this week, we celebrated our one millionth project!

And I have to say, it’s so fitting that our one millionth project was by a freeCodeCamp student learning how to use Node.js. Their hands-on approach to teaching coding through practice, combined with the power and flexibility of Glitch is a winning combination to help people of any skill level create something awesome online!

Celebrate in VR #

We love A-Frame because of how simple it makes creating virtual reality experiences. There are lots of examples on Glitch for you to view and remix, and you can create something really amazing without a lot of complicated setup.

Glitch user Ada Rose Cannon (@adarosecannon) made a delightful VR scene to celebrate getting 5000 Twitter followers! Try reloading the app and see how the top lands in a different place each time. Very neat!

Play Around with Music Sequencing #

We’ve featured the work of the talented Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) before, and her latest project is filled with the same playfulness and wit that make her a popular creator on Glitch!

Tenori-off is a music sequencer based on the popular Tenori-on music sequencer by Yamaha, and includes, drums, synth, and a metronome to control the tempo. Monica’s project also includes machine learning which tries to match drums to a synth melody that you create. Clever!

You Get A Dog! And You Get A Dog #

Glitch user Annaia Berry (@jarcane) might be on to something big here:

Dubbed as “a simple application for edifying oneself with the cutest of dogs”, this app is exactly as advertised — pure doggie delight at the push of a button.

But what if you want to see some different dogs? That’s where the Glitch community has your back. Check out the other variations on this app!

The Pembroke Corgi Generator by @makrohn
The Pug Generator by @jarcane
The Goldie Generator by @JulianKittelson-Aldred
The Shiba Generator by @icco These apps use the open-source Dog API, so you can remix any of the apps above and pull photos of dogs from Affenpischers to Yorkshire Terriers. 🐾

Create Your Own RPG Character #

Customizing and creating your own character has been around since the beginning of role-playing games (or RPGs, for short). Sometimes character traits and stats are chosen from a list of preset demographics or by rolling dice (for tabletop games), and part of the fun is seeing what you can make.

Glitch user Matt Walsh (@walsh9) built a way to generate new RPG characters on the fly, including stats, abilities, spells, and even more information. There’s even a randomly created backstory for the character for a little added personality. The app was built as part of PROCJAM, a fun, friendly community of people who like getting computers to make things. And using Glitch to make those things is a win, no matter how you roll the dice!

An Intro to Dynamical Systems #

Dynamical systems illustrate how one state develops into another state over a period of time. It’s used a lot in the fields of biomechanics and cognitive science to study the emergence of patterns of movement and behavior, respectively, but they can be applied in other fields as well.

Mathematician and Glitch user Christian Lawson-Perfect (@christianp) recently built a project in Glitch showing how dynamical systems work, and it uses green and red squares to denote on and off states. There’s also a speed control which varies the toggling of the squares. Try toggling the squares yourself and see how the behavior of the entire system changes!

Answering Stack Overflow Questions Using Glitch #

Converting multiple images into a PDF may be simple if you have a program like Adobe Acrobat, but is there a way to do this using JavaScript (specifically Node.js)?

Gaurav Kandpal wondered how to accomplish this, so he took the question to Stack Overflow. Felix Fong came up with an example using Glitch, and from there, Gaurav was able to edit that into a workable solution! Even if you’re not able to get the right answer immediately, something like this can help get you on the right track to solving your problem.

We hope these examples show you just how powerful and fun it is to create the app of your dreams on Glitch! Do you know any Glitch projects that we should cover? Share them with us! 😄

Every Project Counts

The year is halfway over, and with that, many people are counting down the days to their next vacation or holiday. This week’s round-up of apps mostly share a common theme of counting so let’s kick things off in 3…2…1…🚀

Christmas Comes But Once A Year #

Glitch user Crystal Camarao (@crystalcamarao) is a huge fan of Christmas. While she’s been busy counting down the days until the big holiday, she couldn’t find a bot that would do this for her. So she built one on Glitch!

Crystal details her process in a Medium post, but you can see the bot in action on Twitter over at @time_until_xmas. Right now, the bot updates once a day until Christmas Eve, when it then updates every 30 minutes.

Tracking Referrals Without Being Tracked #

On the web nowadays, it’s fairly well-known that web pages and apps are collecting data and tracking your usage on a consistent basis. And if you host a website and want to know where your users are visiting you from, then you’ve encountered referrer logs filled with these trackers. It can really throw off the numbers of which pages on your site are being visited by humans, not bots.

Glitch user Ada Rose Cannon (@adarosecannon) made a simple solution to this by spinning up her own tracker! Remix the app for yourself, make a few simple changes, and include the provided code on the websites you want to track. If you need a more complex version with real-time updating, Ada’s got you covered there as well.

Playing With Pendulums #

Meetings can be a great time for unexpected inspiration to strike. For Rowan Merewood (@rowan-m), Glitch is his new “doodling in meetings”, and that brought forth this delightful rainbow pendulum animation!

One of the great things about Glitch is how easy it is to get started creating a project based on any idea you have. What changes would you make to this app? Try remixing it and make it your own.

Learning JavaScript Functions #

Functions are one of the most fundamental tools in JavaScript, but when you’re learning to code it can be difficult to remember when to use the right function (or what to use it for). Even experienced programmers run into this issue!

Glitch user David Sharp (@davidsharp) devised a great way to illustrate how the slice(), substr() and substring() functions work, which can save you a lot of time and stress in case you get them confused. What other JavaScript functions can be easily explained by creating an app like this?

Getting Good with GraphQL #

Apollo Architect and Glitch user Jake Dawkins (@JakeDawkins) likes learning, building and teaching others to do the same. His Twitter presence is a prime example of this, including a recent thread of example apps he built on Glitch answering some common questions about GraphQL!

There are several more examples, all of which use an Apollo Server playground app which you can remix and use for your own GraphQL projects. I love how Jake is using Glitch as a way to educate others while also showing off the capabilities of Apollo Server!

Our New Mini-Zine — “Understanding Webpack”! #

Webpack gets millions of downloads every month, and powers tens of thousands of websites and apps. But what does Webpack actually do? And why is it useful?

We’ve just released a shiny new mini-zine on Instagram that shows you the basics of Webpack, along with a video example so you can see it in action. There’s even a remixable example app for you to work with once you’ve finished the zine.

What other mini-zines would you like to see from Glitch? Let us know!

Here It Is, Your Moment of Zen #

There’s a lot going on out there in the world, and social media and our 24-hour news cycle can keep all of us anxious, stressed, and on heightened alert. Sometimes, you just need to chill out and relax, and Glitch user @MinervaArcher came up with an app that can help you ease into a state of calm.

Your Moment of Zen guides you through a simple mindful breathing exercise — just inhale and exhale along with the throbbing circle. This app is a fantastic way to use technology to solve a real world problem. Bookmark the app on your phone and use it whenever you need to feel some peace.

Whether you’re counting characters in a string, counting the pages in our new mini-zine, or counting down the days until Christmas, you’ll find the app you’re looking for on Glitch. Even better, you can build the app of your dreams with the support of a helpful and friendly community. So what will you create today? Show us what you’ve got in 3…2…1…. 👍

Fun Apps, and Meaningful Change with Patrick Weaver

By day, he helps young people learn to code, but by night, he creates hit apps that have been used by thousands of people. As Learning Design Manager at Mouse, Patrick works on projects and curriculum that empowers students to create technology that solves real problems and make meaningful change.

He has a long history of working with and creating educational material for kids. This includes writing and illustrating a series of children’s books — like “The Ungrumblies”, a book about allergies — as well as others about adventures in and around New York City.

His apps on Glitch range from functional tools to fun, creative games and experiments.

**Beachcombe**r A colorful Minesweeper-clone made with React. You are a beachcomber on the hunt for treasure. You can dig to try to find some hints, but don’t reveal the treasure now while the beach is full!

**Emoji Wallpape**r A simple app that generates your own emoji wallpaper! Add any emojis you want to make a custom emoji wallpaper for your desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

**Record Playe**r From Spotify playlist generators to Stranger Things tributes — audio apps are always a hit on Glitch. Music is perhaps the industry that has been most transformed by technology, and it’s created a nearly insatiable appetite for ways to augment your listening experience with technology.

This is proven out by the popularity of Patrick’s Record Player app. Like a Rube Goldberg machine for music, he linked the output of the Google Cloud Vision API with Spotify’s Search API to find music based on an uploaded image of an album’s cover art. Dubbed “Shazam for album covers” by Pitchfork, his app was covered by both music and culture outlets like NME and Paste as well as tech press.

Much like Google’s Art and Culture app, Record Player is given a new dimension with selfies. By uploading a pic of yourself you can see which album Spotify thinks you look like most. So perhaps “Shazam for your face” is a better description! 😙🤳🏾

Apps for Good #

Patrick’s work typifies the positive impact apps and technology can have on people’s lives. Record Player is not just a fun mashup of APIs, but an app that bridges the gap from useful tool — like identifying an album overheard in a busy record store — to a fun way to pass the time when hanging out with friends, such as seeing whose selfie results in the best or most obscure song.

Patrick’s day job at Mouse, a national youth development nonprofit, helps create more diversity in STEM and opens up opportunities for students from under-served communities across the US.

You can learn more about Patrick on his website, follow him on Twitter, and see what he creates next on his Glitch profile.

Making Fun Apps, and Meaningful Change

His apps on Glitch range from functional tools to fun, creative games and experiments.

Let’s take a look at some of his projects: #

A colorful Minesweeper-clone made with React. You are a beachcomber on the hunt for treasure. You can dig to try to find some hints, but don’t reveal the treasure now while the beach is full!

A simple app that generates your own emoji wallpaper! Add any emojis you want to make a custom emoji wallpaper for your desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

From Spotify playlist generators to Stranger Things tributes — audio apps are always a hit on Glitch. Music is perhaps the industry that has been most transformed by technology, and it’s created a nearly insatiable appetite for ways to augment your listening experience with technology.

Patrick’s day job at Mouse, a national youth development nonprofit, helps create more diversity in STEM and opens up opportunities for students from under-served communities across the US.

You can learn more about Patrick on his website, follow him on Twitter, and see what he creates next on his Glitch profile.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go

The days are longer and the temperatures are warmer, which makes it a perfect time to get away from the regular grind for a little rest and relaxation. Whether you’ve got a big trip planned or you’re just taking a weekend getaway, bring these apps with you for some fun with Glitch on the go!

Did Someone Say “Road Trip”? #

For me, childhood road trips bring up memories of games played to pass the time. But with smartphones and handheld consoles, the days of 20 Questions and I Spy are probably long gone.

That’s where Glitch User Malte Ubl (@cramforce) and his app Road Trip come into the picture! This app uses a combination of Google Maps and Wikipedia to serve up information about places and points of interests along your trip. Even better, the app reads the information aloud to you!

In an interview with The Verge, Ubl says “I made [the app] for myself, because I frequently drive through places and was thinking it would be nice to learn more about my environment while I have nothing better to do sitting behind the steering wheel.” I’d say this app definitely accomplishes that task!

Divisibility Diagrams #

Long and short division always tripped me up as a kid in elementary school. Eventually, I learned a few mental math tricks to help me out, and one thing you quickly pick up is how multiplication and division is related. That works for the decimal number system base 10 — which is what most people use — but it gets trickier with different bases.

Thankfully, Glitch user Christian Lawson-Perfect (@christianp) has come up with a super useful app that maps out divisibility using a series of chords. Whether you’re into math or not, try adding in different positive integers for both values and see what elaborate diagrams you can create!

It’s Maaaagic! #

Every good magician needs a magic wand! Channel your inner Criss Angel with this fun app from Glitch user Natalia Wojtkowska (@titolstwo). Wave it around dramatically for your next act, or if you’re on your desktop or laptop, click and hold the wand for a little extra flair!

SVG Animator #

Animated GIFs have grown in popularity in the past few years, and so have SVGs, a vector-based file format which renders in the browser. You can perform a lot of effects with SVG files, but what about animating them?

Glitch user Tiffany Tseng (@ttseng) created SVG Animator as a way to add some motion to SVG files. Write or paste in your SVG code, change up the animation type and the output width, and export the result as an animated GIF. It’s the best of both worlds!

Making Words from Moons #

World Emoji Day is right around the corner, and one way we have seen people use emojis is for making other types of interesting creations, such as a garden or even a game of Tetris!

Glitch users Matt Haughey (@mathowie) and Javan Makhmali (@javan) built an app that turns text into a series of moon emoji characters. You can also copy and paste these to use on Twitter or Facebook or wherever you’d like!

Try remixing this app, using different emoji, and show us what you create!

A Glorious Tribute to Microsoft Paint #

Before GIMP, Corel PaintShop Pro, or even Adobe Photoshop, there was Microsoft Paint. It’s been around since 1985, and is still used for simple image processing tasks or just for doodling.

The spirit of this humble raster graphics editor is alive and well thanks to Glitch user Doug Valenta (@dougvalenta) and his app Remarkable Battery, a faithful and functional interpretation of Microsoft Paint completely in the browser. Draw and color anything you like, and save it as a square image up to 64x64 pixels in size.

Who Are Your Twitter Followers? #

How well do you know the people who are following you on Twitter? Put your memory to the test with twitter-quizz, a simple app from Glitch user Xavier Lepaul (@xalep) that lets you match the displayed avatar to the follower. If you have a large number of followers, keep refreshing the app for new combinations and try to get a score of 100%!

As usual, we have a grab bag of great apps created by the Glitch community. Which one did you like best? Did any of these inspire you to make something awesome? Let your imagination run wild and make the app of your dreams on Glitch!

It’s World Emoji Day! 📅🎂🎉

Today is World Emoji Day, a worldwide celebration of the humble emoji and everything they represent. Starting out on Japanese mobile phones in 1999, emoji gained international appeal once they appeared on iOS and Android. Now there are emoji pillows, emoji clothing, and even an emoji movie 🤨

Emoji can have literal and figurative meanings, and plenty of users on Glitch have used emoji for all types of fun and creative projects. Let’s have a look!

Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) is a self-proclaimed ‘Emojineer’ at Google, and her projects on Glitch embody the whimsical and delightful spirit that World Emoji Day is all about!

This is a perfect app for World Emoji Day — an English to emoji translator. Paste in your text, and the app will do its best to change that text into emoji.

Monica’s emoji garden isn’t just beautiful to look at it, it’s also helped inspire a number of different remixes, including an emoji desert and an emoji-filled otherworldly voidscape. What type of emoji setting can you create?

Patrick Weaver (@patrickweaver) is the Learning Design Manager at New York-based nonprofit Mouse. He builds projects that put a new emoji-fied spin on nostalgic games and services. Let’s look at some of them:

When I was a teenager, I loved making computer wallpapers. Now you can make your own wallpaper using the emoji of your choice. Put it on your laptop, your mobile phone, or whatever digital device you like!

Minesweeper is a classic video game on Microsoft Windows, and Patrick has updated it for the emoji age. Plant your flag and find the treasure.

Monica and Patrick’s apps have been remixed and enjoyed by countless users, and there are several others who have built apps in the same spirit of emoji. Here are a few we really like.

Glitch user Jackson Calloway (@jcksncllwy) built Nomoji as a way to fill your screen with cascading flows of emojis.

Two emojis enter, but only one will emerge as victorious! Glitch user Axel Freeman (@axelfreeman) pits emojis against each other in a turn-based battle to the end. Which one will reign supreme?

This app from Glitch user Mikkel Malmberg (@mikker) behaves similar to Facebook Live videos. Remix the app to add the video of your choice, and have people react to it using emojis.

These apps are just a handful of the creative and fun ways that Glitch users are incorporating emoji into their work. Happy World Emoji Day! 😄

New App Pages and Snappier Profiles

Every app on Glitch now has a beautiful, simple page to help people discover and explore useful and delightful projects.

To see what’s changed, let’s take a look at the app page for the latest creation by serial Glitch creator, Noelle Leigh: glitch.com/~emoji-gender-reveal

The page starts off with the key app details, like who made it, what it’s called and what it does, along with action buttons to view your app, view the code or remix it.

But now there’s also a live embed that shows off a preview of your app. Visitors can toggle between the code or the live app, see both, or remix it from within the embed itself. Learn more about how to embed Glitch apps on your own sites, and soon visitors will be able to create embeds on the app page too.

Of course, your readme is included beneath the embed, so you can include details about your app, along with any setup instructions or other key details you want to highlight.

Finally, at the bottom of the app page, we feature some of the other apps you’ve made. Apps that you’ve pinned on your profile page are prioritized, so you can choose which apps are shown here. They’re a great way to encourage visitors to explore your other creations.

Behind the scenes, we’ve also made some SEO improvements, with relevant metadata being exposed so it’s now easier for search engines to index your apps. They also look great when shared on social media or when saved in read-later apps like Pocket.

But it’s not just app pages which have been getting some love — we’ve been working on profile and team pages too.

You can now fully personalize your profile page directly on the page, including all the usual stuff like your avatar, display name, username, and a cover image — it’s got almost the same dimensions as a Twitter cover, so you can reuse that image if you have one. What’s more, you can leave and delete projects straight from your profile page, in addition to pinning apps to the top and undeleting apps you previously deleted.

While we can’t talk too much about Teams yet, we can let you know that both team pages and your Glitch profile just got performance enhancements making them 10x faster.

And you, yes you, can make profile pages even better too!

These performance improvements come in part from our hard work to move the community site over to using React. This not only makes it faster but also easier to understand. This is important because, in case you didn’t know, the Glitch community site is open-source! So if you’ve been wishing for an enhancement that hasn’t already been mentioned above, then you can always make them happen yourself! There are details about how to contribute and suggestions of contributions you might like to make.

We hope you like these improvements, and we can’t wait to see what you build next! 🎏🙌🏿

Something For Everyone

Did you hear? We just rolled out new improvements to our app pages and profiles, making it easier than ever to create something awesome on Glitch. Check out the variety of fun new apps we’re featuring this week!

Prank Your Friends with a Remote Airhorn #

Have a little fun with your buddies using this nifty remote airhorn app from Glitch user Paul Kinlan (@PaulKinlan). Open the airhorn to control it from another tab, or click the Cast button and control the horn from any Cast-enabled device on your network! Just don’t get in trouble!

What Are You Listening To? #

Remember when AOL Instant Messenger had that feature that would broadcast the current song you were playing on your computer as your status? Glitch user Pamela Ocampo (@pamo) does, and she built an app that syncs your Slack status to whatever song you’re playing on Spotify.

Now all your co-workers can see that you’ve been playing “In My Feelings” for the past hour!

Two Examples of Stunning, Random Art #

This simple yet colorful app from Glitch user Zac Colley (@zaccolley) utilizes p5.js to generate a series of line drawings. The result is a quilt-like display of tiles which changes every time you refresh the page.

Zac created the app after being inspired by London-based artist and educator Saskia Freeke as part of a p5.js workshop from Queer Code London, and he did a great job capturing the essence of Saskia’s design!

Try remixing this project and adding your own flair to it! ✨

Looking for some more vibrant art? Generative Crystals from software engineer Stephan Max implements the Generative Crystal Design System from IDEO.org’s Matthew Epler into an app that randomly creates hexagonal and six-pronged crystal designs. Keep refreshing the page for new designs!

Congrats! It’s a Sport Utility Vehicle! #

Take the unnecessary fanfare out of revealing the gender of your baby with the latest app from Glitch user Noelle Leigh (@noelleleigh)! Click or tap the “Reveal Gender” button, and the app will tell you exactly what your new kid’s gender will be.

It’s better living through technology, and the app was released on World Emoji Day! Have a look at our round-up of other emoji-inspired apps on Glitch!

Make Your Own 360° Tour! #

Several users have made great, immersive environments using Aframe and WebVR on Glitch, but this app by Glitch user Josh Marinacci (@joshmarinacci) takes that concept to a whole other level.

360 Workshop stitches together several 3D photos into a 360° tour — just hover over the red, yellow, or blue dots to navigate the tour. The full process is outlined on Mozilla Hacks, and it looks like a great weekend project to try. Build your own tour by remixing the project — Josh has even included some Creative Commons images for you to use!

These apps are a true testament to how the Glitch community uses their creativity to make projects that are useful, beautiful, and easily approachable. What Glitch apps should we feature next? Share them with us! 🌟

It’s an Arty Party

Live-Coding and Algoraving #

Bogotá-based coder and cartographer, Olivia Jack, has been sharing some awesome sketches this week. Created with Hydra, a set of tools Jack created for live coding networked visuals, it uses streaming for routing video sources and outputs in real-time and often with hypnotic results.

CSS Grid Repros of Marlow Moss’ Art #

We’re suckers for a bit of De-Stijl. Our own Jenn Schiffer has even previously created her own Mondrian-generator. So we were excited to see the project “marlow-moss” by former Snap and Google product manager turned software engineer, Sheridan Kates.

Wanting an excuse to play around with CSS Grid-based projects, Kates took to Glitch to recreate the works of British Constructivist artist, Marlow Moss. Moss’ use of overlapping elements made her work a great candidate for CSS Grid, and Kates clever use of clip-path CSS polygons made sure the drop shadows still looked en pointe, giving her creations the 3D feel of Moss’ original works.

Take some time to look at her art and see how it was created by viewing the source code.

Fellow fans of De-Stijl will also appreciate Jack Preston’s earlier project “de-stijl”, which enables you to create Mondrian-inspired art in your browser!

Mind-bending Munker Illusions #

Have you been confounded by Professor Dr. David Novick’s optical illusions that have been shared across the net this week? If so, you’ll enjoy experimenting with “confetti-munker” by K-12 school teacher, Erik Nauman. Change the colors and alter the layers to explore and make your own Munker illusions.

Give “WavyWavy” a Wave #

Just as artful and mind-bending is the latest creation by Sean Catangui — “wavywavy”. He creates a cool, organic waveform effect by rotating and transforming letters as you scroll up and down the page.

You can see how the final effect was refined from his earlier experiments:

Emoji Garden Takes to the Sky #

We’ve been known to appreciate an emoji or two in our time. So it’ll come as no surprise then that we’re in love with “emoji-sky”. Created by Jane Solomon and friends, it’s a fun project that generates skyscapes with emoji. And it’s the latest in a long line of remixes of Monica Dinculescu’s original project, “emoji-garden”. Keep the remixes coming!

Remixable Machine #

Lastly for this week, I wanted to call out this fantastic project by Brian Peiris, “teachable-redux”. The mixed reality developer at Mozilla created his own hackable take on Google’s fab “Teachable Machine” experiment.

By removing the fancy UI he’s made a simplified version that’s easier to understand. And of course, since it’s on Glitch it’s remixable too — so you can quickly get your own version going and start playing around with the code straight away.

Hopefully, that art-filled little lot has your creative juices flowing. Get building, and let us know what you come up with. We can’t wait to see what you create! 🎏🎆

Game On

Galaxies, Constellations, and Gems! #

I'm obsessed with this great VR game built on Glitch called Crystalis. Created by Alfredo Consebola as part of the 2018 Virtuleap WebXR Hackathon, the retro-inspired immersive action puzzle is versatile enough to be played on your desktop, mobile device, or using a VR headset like Oculus Go. Match trios of floating gems and watch as the spacescape comes alive with colorful constellations!

What's Behind That Door? #

Remember the game show ? Contestants are presented with a prize behind one of three doors, and they have an opportunity to either keep the current prize or trade it for what lies behind the remaining doors. Which would you choose?

Glitch user Ido Green (@greenido) created an app which simulates this paradox up to 1,000,000 times to give you an idea of the outcome. Surprisingly, Ido says, the odds are not 50/50 -- you'll actually win 2/3 of the time if you switch!

Experiments with Variable Fonts #

Variable fonts are single files that behave like multiple fonts, allowing you to change a number of different display features without installing different variations of the typeface. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe are behind the new format, and nearly 70% of modern browsers support them.

Mustafa Kurtuldu, a design advocate at Google and a Glitch user (@mustafa-x), built an app which lets you experiment with variable fonts so you can see how they behave. Select any of the three typefaces, and use the sliders on the left to change the corresponding property. Advancements like this are the future of typography on the web!

Sneaky Epic! #

Glitch users @jon and @snotskie created Sneaky Epic -- a game about software design that's being dubbed as "team deliberation training meets Jackbox meets Secret Hitler meets Werewolf meets Coup." (That does sound pretty epic!) You'll need at least five people to play, so gather some co-workers and give it a go!

Dive Into A Virtual Ball Pit #

There's a lot of fun environments that you can create on Glitch using AFrame and WebVR, and Giltch user Kelly Lougheed (@kellylougheed84055) built an app that mimics that old childhood favorite -- the ball pit. This ball pit has physics control, so try tilting from side to side to see the balls react.

Creating New Worlds through VRDI #

The Virtual Reality Diversity Initiative (VRDI) began in 2017 as a way to provide events and skills to underrepresented groups in media and technology who are considering a career in VR. The initiative is back for its second year, and a recent VRDI event paired VR pros and newcomers in the United Kingdom.

Check out some of the projects:

As you can see, you're only limited by your own imagination when it comes to creating on Glitch. Get inspired by the friendly community here, then get started making your own apps. You got this!

Making Government Work with Bots & Hacking

Angelina Bethoney created a bot that tweets legislation being worked on in Massachusetts. But she didn’t stop there. She made it a remixable template on Glitch, and the response she got when she shared the project was amazing!

As co-organizer of Botwiki, Bethoney helps lead a community of passionate makers who create all manner of weird and wonderful bots across platforms like Twitter, Messenger, Slack, Mastodon, and others.

But when she tweeted about her law bot template, which makes it easy for anyone to make a bot that tweets legislation in any state, it took off 🚀

Over the next few days, folks started remixing the bot, making tweaks, suggesting edits, and discussing the legislation being tweeted about. Even more exciting though is that these bot creators weren’t necessarily software developers. They were just folks with a passion for local government and a desire to better understand the changes being voted on and legislation being brought in around them.

For many it was their first time making a bot. For some it was their first time coding at all. But having a great template project to work from helped — and a few tweets quickly brought any additional help needed as the community rallied to support each other.

So far, bots have been created for 19 states right across the country from California to New York. Alex Martin even put together a master list to help people keep track of what bots have been created and for where.

Under-the-hood the bots are using the Open States API to get the list of legislation currently being worked on. But, “you can make a bot that tracks certain types of bills, or tracks particular sponsors — whatever you want,” says Bethoney.

“I’m really excited that people are not only making these bots but are taking a critical look at what these bills actually are”.

Indeed a number of people quickly noticed how much quicker bills about sick banks and commendations for government employees seemed to be passed through than other types. “For me, the point of this project was to not only bring awareness of the current [legislation] but to see patterns of the past as well,” adds Bethoney. And by following the law bots you do quickly get a sense of these patterns when you’re able to see what bills are being proposed and how they progress.

As Code for America says “Government works best when it’s government by the People.” And what these law bots show is not only how people can leverage technology to make Government more accessible, but how it really is something that anyone can help with— you don’t need to be an expert developer.

Code for America’s upcoming National Day of Civic Hacking is a great way to get involved with local government, regardless of your technical skill level. This weekend, August 11th 2018, you can join the Code for America Brigades for a nationwide day of action that brings together civic leaders, local governments, and community organizations to tackle some of our toughest challenges.

Events are being run across the country. There are Hackathons where people come in with ideas for an app and create prototypes at the event. There are City Camps, which are unconference events to discuss local problems and find connections to solve them. And there are Design Camps — user-centered events to reimagine government services.

Learn more about the National Day of Civic Hacking and check out Botwiki’s extensive range of bot template projects on Glitch that you can remix.

We can’t wait to see what you create! 🎏🎇

Busy Bees, Boxes, and Bots

Make Your Own Packaging Templates! #

Fancy packages with cut-out handles and unique closures are beautiful to look at, but designing and constructing them can be difficult. Tiffany Tseng (@scientiffic), has been learning about packaging design lately and discovered a way to convert beautiful packaging templates that she's discovered into SVG files!

SVG Tracer makes vector graphics from packaging template images, including creating solid and dashed lines for cutting and scoring. Tiffany detailed the whole project on Medium, which is definitely worth a read if you want to see her creative process behind the project.

Placeholder Text for Busy Bees #

Lots of print and web designers use placeholder text for typesetting purposes to get a sense of how text will look in their work. Often times, this placeholder text used is a series of Latin phrases which starts with the words "lorem ipsum", but Glitch user Kate Beard (@sbinlondon) has put a fun spin on this time-honored tradition.

Bee Ipsum replaces the standard lorem ipsum text with lines from -- a really great way to inject some personality into your work. Just type in how many sentences you need, click the button, and you're in business! (Or is that buzzness?)

Shapes, Sprays, and Squiggles #

Artist, creative coder, and educator Sean Catangui (@seancaat) is one of the most prolific creators on Glitch, and his latest work is with high school students at Gakko, Lisha Zheng and Vithya Srikumar.

They recently built a drawing app where you can make all types of shapes and sketches directly in your browser! There are also undo, redo, and erase features, and when you're ready to share your masterpiece, just right-click on your creation and save it to your desktop.

Take The Scenic Route #

Glitch user Ben Garvey (@bengarvey) builds projects on Glitch that really make you slow down and take a moment. His latest project is called take-a-walk, and the real beauty of the app unfolds the longer you leave it running. Colorful lines slowly fill the browser with squares and paths, and it's really quite mesmerizing.

Check out Ben's profile to see more of his work!

Make Your Own Generative Art Bot! #

If these projects are inspiring inner artist, then say hello to pollock.exe, a generative art bot from Botwiki.

Remix the generative art starter project and have your own generative Twitter bot in no time!

GraphQL on Glitch #

Of course, Glitch is more than just a platform for awesome visual work -- it's also versatile enough to use for a number of other applications.

Prisma uses Glitch in their blog entries to introduce GraphQL Middleware, and they include a demonstration of how to install the library and show developers how it works. Glitch is an easy way to show developers how to use your API, and they love it!

Answering Questions on Stack Overflow with Glitch! #

Over on Stack Overflow, Harish Karthick was having an issue with implementing an add to home screen (A2HS) shortcut for his PWA. After listing out the code for his JSON file, Mathias came to the rescue with a solution to the issue that he built using Glitch.

Check out the Add to Home Screen Tester below, and remix it to use for your own project!

We've featured quite a variety of projects this week! Some are about making beautiful art, and others are about solving problems. The one thing they have in common though, is that their creators were willing to give things a go, even if they hadn't created something like it before. As Patrick McKenzie points out in the quote above, we're all learning all the time. And creating a project on Glitch is a great way to try things out and learn something new. What will you create today?

Making Twitter Tolerable, One Glitch App At A Time

There’s no shortage of opinions these these days about Twitter. Whether it’s their design decisions, their response (or lack thereof) to harassment and abuse, their on-again-off-again relationship with developers or their handling of the Alex Jones situation that’s resulting in tomorrow’s “D-Day”. Twitter is its own trending topic.

But there’s one treatise about Twitter that caught my eye — “The Case Against Retweets: a modest proposal to improve Twitter”, or as the web-published version puts a little more pointedly, “Retweets are trash”. Alexis Madrigal, a reporter at The Atlantic, shares his experience of using Twitter with retweets disabled.

It’s not a new idea, but the impact from his perspective was a breakthrough.

It was in pursuit of this quieter, more serene Twitter experience that lead Stripe software engineer, Julia Evans, to create “turn-off-retweets” on Glitch. It’s an app that automates the process of turning off retweets for all your followers. Granted, you can individually disable retweets, but as Julia points out, “doing it manually was a pain — I had to do it one person at a time. So I wrote a tiny Glitch app to do it for me!”

“Twitter gets MUCH MORE QUIET”, comments Angela Ambroz, who used the app to turn off retweets for the folks she follows. And there are many others too:

As you can see, it’s not just Julia and Alexis who have taken active steps to refine their Twitter experience.

“I love feeds and the people I follow on Twitter,” Luca Hammer says. He made “opml”, a Glitch app that makes it easy to monitor your followers in your favorite RSS reader. It looks for feeds in the URLs of your followers and puts them in an OPML file for easy importing. So if you’re trying to spend less time on Twitter but don’t want to miss out on updates, you’re all set!

Luca also created “follow-management”, an app which adds everyone you follow to a list. That way you can read the list, as tweets in lists are still ordered chronologically.

If Twitter threads are hard to follow in your main timeline, check out “tweetstorms” by Reyner Crosby. This Glitch app allows you to browse through the threads — or tweetstorms — of any particular Twitter user. This can be extremely useful for prolific tweetstormers like Marc Andreessen and Andrew Chen, for example.

When someone targets and harasses you on Twitter, it can make you feel helpless. Reporting them is an option, but for a more immediate fix, try “poop-blocker”. This Glitch app from Argentina-based indie game developer, Rumpel, enables you to quickly block users that retweet a specific tweet and report them as spam.

While each of these apps is useful in their own right, together they highlight a powerful truth: **the web doesn’t have to be a thing that’s done ** It’s something we can make, not just consume.

With a little time and ingenuity, you can refine even the highly-controlled user experiences of major social networks and tailor them to your needs. You’re not at the mercy of some CEO’s latest idea; you can take things into your own hands.

At Glitch, you’re joining a creative community that’s inventing the cutting-edge of tech to make a more open, inclusive and thoughtful web.

We can’t wait to see what you create! 🎏🌟

A Delight for the Senses

Nowadays, we're flooded with prompts online that want your email address. All these subscription services can really add up, but if you can't beat 'em, then why not join 'em?

That's what Glitch user Kristen Cabrera (@kris10cabrera) had in mind when she created Subscribe! Use this nifty generator to get in on the mailbox mania and watch the results roll in! Each click brings you a randomly generated subscription prompt.

(Results and delivery are not guaranteed, of course 😜)

Radio Gender Parity #

Most radio stations often cycle through a playlist of whatever songs are hot at the moment. Maybe you've got Nicki Minaj playing on one station, while another is playing a song from Death Cab for Cutie. But as the hours pass, have you ever thought about how many male artists are being played versus female artists?

That's where Glitch user Corey Dutson (@cdutson) and his app Radio Station Music Gender Analysis Tool comes in. According to Corey, the app is "a combination of techs one could use to scrape a website's playback data in order to assess gender disparity in song distribution." Clever!

Corey has made a remixable version of the app you can use to try out for your favorite radio station. The answers may surprise (and disappoint) you!

Sound and Color #

Some people possess a unique ability to assign sounds to colors called chromesthesia. Certain speech sounds or notes can have unique color pairings. Imagine if whenever you heard a car horn, you thought of the color red, or if the sound of water boiling was blue.

Software researcher, musician, and Glitch user Pablo Samuel Castro (@psc-g) created a fantastic app called jidiji which converts between music and colors, and it's a really cool experiment in musical representation.

Choose a preloaded song or image using the buttons in the app, or upload your own MIDI or image file, and let the magic begin! How does your favorite image sound? And what does your favorite song look like?

Reader View Everywhere! #

If you live in a major metropolitan area, it can be easy to forget how readily available high speed Internet access can be. Because of this, we might not notice just how technically heavy a lot of the Web can be. Visiting a website that takes a second to load on your desktop may load much slower depending on your data connection. Some websites have helped to make this process easier by introducing a low-bandwidth "reader view" version of their website, but it's not a global standard.

That's why this Glitch app from software engineer Ben Kuhn (@benkuhn) is so important. Just enter the URL of your choice, and the app will present a stripped down "reader view" version of the website. Very cool! Even better, he was able to create this app on Glitch in spite of the low-bandwidth he had while coding from a small city in Senegal.

Splatnite? Forttoon? Let's Dance! #

Fortnite is one of the most popular video games out right now, and so is Splatoon! Both games involve teamwork and collaboration, so Glitch user Uve Avanto (@uveavanto) decided to combine the two into this delightful WebVR experience! Watch as Callie and Marie from Splatoon do one of the victory dances from Fortnite!

Like Becky Simpson says in the quote above, the key goal with Glitch is to just get started when it comes to creating. Maybe these apps will help inspire you to make something awesome today. If it does, then let us know what you create!

Moving Forward with Manuscript

First, the fundamentals: For current Manuscript customers, nothing is changing today — neither functionality nor licensing. And good things are changing in the future. We see lots of good progress coming, like long-overdue platform improvements, modernization of infrastructure behind Manuscript, and a re-engagement with the community to revitalize one of the most venerable and respected tools for creating great software.

Manuscript has been part of Fog Creek’s DNA for nearly two decades. First as FogBugz, which pioneered the market for bug tracking and project management, and then later with the addition of Kiln, which was groundbreaking in its innovations around version control. Then, with last year’s launch of Manuscript on top of that FogBugz engine, came the expansion of the ambitions of the platform to provide all the core tools needed to make great software.

But honestly, we’ve been resource-constrained as a small company to do justice to Manuscript, especially as Glitch has taken off and demanded our attention, and the market for software project management tools has gotten more competitive. So recently, we started looking at whether we could find a new home for Manuscript that would provide it with the investment and focus needed to not just support the current users and functionality of the platform, but to expand both.

Today, we’re letting the world know that we think we’ve found that path forward, with the team at DevFactory. The same team that’s been developing and supporting Manuscript at Fog Creek has overseen a transition to DevFactory’s processes and infrastructure for weeks, ensuring that this transition is seamless for users.

We’re proud of the nearly 20-year history that starts with FogBugz, leads to Manuscript, and has brought us to this new chapter. We’re thankful to all the people who’ve used these tools over the years. And I want to thank in particular the many team members, past and present, who’ve helped create a platform that’s enabled so many people to do their best work.

Here’s to the next chapter in Manuscript’s evolution, and to the continued success of the innovative community who’ll continue to build inspiring work with the help of the platform.

Free and Open Learning Resources for All

We’ve seen all kinds of people use Glitch to build the apps of their dreams. One of the most popular reasons that folks use Glitch is for learning. As a matter of fact, harnessing that power is how we started 2018:

Teaching someone to code can be quite an endeavor, but with Glitch’s tools for collaboration, customization, and our take on version control, you’ve got everything you need to succeed. Let’s take a closer look at some more resources available for educators on Glitch as you get ready to go back to school.

The React Starter Kit is a free 5-part video course that includes interactive code examples to help you begin learning React. It includes interviews by our community engineering lead, Jenn Schiffer, with software engineers at some of the Web’s top companies talking about how they use React on a daily basis. Together, the components of the React Starter Kit are an excellent way to help bridge the gap between learning coding concepts and their real-world applications.

If diving straight into React is a little too much, try the Website Starter Kit. Like the React Starter Kit, this is a free video course with interactive code examples, but the focus here is on creating a website using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Node.js. Along with Jenn, you’ll see two members of our team, Jude Allred, and Niki Simonutti, as they help explain the languages that make up the Web that we know today.

When you visit the Glitch homepage, you’ll find several collections of apps based on specific themes. Let’s take a closer look at a few of them.

“Hello world” isn’t just a simple phrase — it’s also well known as a starter program that introduces you to a programming language. Our Hello Worlds collection aggregates dozens of Glitch projects that provide basic steps for getting started with a number of different languages and frameworks. Learn how to run console applications on Glitch, get started creating VR experiences on the web with A-Frame, or make your own website using the HTML5 boilerplate!

Our Learn to Code collection is perfect for hands-on teaching. This selection of Glitch projects takes learning to the next level with demos, courses, and other interactive examples. If you want to get an intro on machine learning, check out Hello Tensorflow and read up on Tensorflow.js. CSS Houdini is an interactive presentation about Houdini, a cutting-edge web tech! This collection also contains a few primers on Node.js, including Node School and Node Beginner. You can even learn how to write your own drum machine (complete with annotated source code!)

Building Blocks is a collection that focuses on databases, APIs, and some of the other basic parts of modern web development. Need to learn how to send an email using SendGrid? There’s a project for that. Stuck on authorization for your PWA? We’ve got a few example projects using Dropbox, Foursquare, or Slack that may help. We even have a nifty hackathon starter that you can use as a boilerplate for Node.js web applications!

We also publish *You Got This! Zine *in both print and digital formats. Our first issue was all about making web apps with Node.js, including tips for new coders, contributions from expert developers Cassidy Williams, Saron Yitbarek, and Steve Klabnik, and links to Glitch projects so you can extend what you’ve learned. In our second issue, we turned our focus to React.js, including more tips and contributions from developers, and we included profiles of some exciting creators on Glitch. We even launched a little mini-zine about Webpack on Instagram and Twitter!

Best of all, the Glitch community has helped create resources help others learn new technologies. Mozilla developer, Brian Peiris (@brianpeiris), constructed a remixable example project that illustrates machine learning concepts.

Programmer Emily Cain (@EMCain) created a fun Glitch app that lets you make your own doggie meme images. Remix the app for yourself and check out the extensively detailed README to help you and your students build their own!

Software developer and educator, Kelly Lougheed, has created a number of tutorials that guide you through learning and using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WebVR. Like ‘Dark & Stormy Night’, a beginner-friendly tutorial introducing HTML and CSS as you create a simple stormy night scene using CSS animations. As well as ‘JavaScript Magic 8 Ball’, a WebVR ball pit with physics and many more.

Meanwhile, the crew at Botwiki has created a bevy of bots for all sorts of purposes. Start with a simple Twitter or Tumblr bot and see where your imagination takes you!

Whether you’re teaching a class or just learning on your own, there’s a multitude of resources available on Glitch to help you reach your goals. Our starter kits, collections, and zines take coding concepts and make them approachable, interactive, and most of all…fun! Along with these tools, you also have a friendly community to back you up. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Floating Heads and Musical Machines

#Remix4Change to Empower Black Voters #

We've partnered with Color of Change on an online hackathon called #Remix4Change. The aim is simple: empower Black voters by turning technology into power. Color of Change has built an app that displays a list of your local representatives, along with current bills in your state categorized by bail, police, prison, or discrimination - all issues with long term effects on some of the lives of people in your community.

How would you customize this app to help people know about proposed legislation or where your city's representatives stand on the issues that matter most? The app is ready for remixing; submit your version of the app by August 26, and we'll share the best entries on social media! You got this!

Quotes from #

NBC's is a smash-hit comedy. It's spawned some memorable characters and quotes, and it's beloved by critics and fans all over the world.

Klaudia Rozgonyiova (@EffingKay), a software developer at the BBC, loves the show too and created a Glitch app that displays random quotes. Just click on Tahani to get started!

This Is What It Sounds Like When Machines Learn #

A lot of machine learning is about curve-fitting, and tuning a guitar is a lot like curve-fitting too! That got Pablo Samuel Castro thinking. 🤔

The senior research software engineer at Google created "sound-of-learning", where you can literally hear a guitar being tuned as a machine learns how to create a satisfying E chord! 🎸

Metadata via the Medium API #

Ghana-based software developer Clinton Mbah put together a useful little utility app that grabs a list of articles for any Medium user. Just add a username to the end of the URL (like so!) and "mdm" will return the posts of any Medium user in JSON format. Handy!

Heading into Augmented Reality #

Interaction designer Joel Gethin Lewis, created an augmented reality web app that puts a recreation of his head out into the world! 🤯

Created in WebXR, a proposed cross-platform Web API for creating AR and VR experiences, it needs Mozilla's experimental WebXR Viewer on iOS to run. But it's totally worth getting and playing around with to get a glimpse of the future (so long as you have the right kit!)

Whac-emoji! #

We're no strangers to an emoji or two here at Glitch, so it'll come as no surprise that we love "whac-emoji"! Created by Berlin-based Glitch user 1337core, it combines emojis with a 'whack-a-mole' type game. You'll be flattening 👻, and crushing 🦂 for hours. Just make sure that you don't bash a 👶 though!

This week's creators show that by sharing our creations with the world we can make people laugh, show folks new ways of doing things, and even give people the information they need to improve their lives. So Tharp might be right -- creativity can be tough, but it's definitely something worth fighting for!

How Glitch Is Used In The Classroom

If you’re teaching a class, running a hackathon, or just showing a friend how to code, we recently wrote about a collection of free and open learning resources, including starter kits, zines, and more! But we wanted to go beyond the code, and hear just how teachers are using Glitch in the classroom and what types of apps they’re working on.

From Remix to Learning #

“I first discovered Glitch through an A-frame tutorial,” says Eric Eisaman, a high school teacher at Edward Little HS in Auburn, ME. “I was prompted to remix a project which accompanied an article I was reading at the time.”

It’s fascinating how the discovery of a new piece of information can encourage you to learn more. “At some point over the following weeks, I investigated [Glitch] further and shared the article and project with my students, and nearly all the students remixed the project on their own. That was just the loud, clamoring cymbal for me to just get out there and be more serious about integrating [Glitch] into the classroom.”

With a shared, collaborative editor, the ability to remix projects, and an easy way to ask for help if you get stuck, Glitch is a powerful tool to use for teaching all types of coding concepts. And remixing from a working example is a great way to start students off by getting them straight into the code. Rather than beginning with all of the theory first, getting them using code to make something fun is a useful hook that can motivate students to learn the theory they need later.

Using Starter Projects to Teach All Abilities #

Daniel Carter, assistant professor of digital media at Texas State University uses “Glitch almost like a live improvisation environment in my classes. I set up a really basic demo or really basic web template, and then I just use it as a space where we can all come together”.

It can be tough finding the right level to pitch a whole class. But by creating flexible starter projects you can cater to all coding experience levels and abilities.

“I’ll literally go around the classroom and have each student either type code or explain to me what the code is doing, and I like that because I can be really flexible, and I can change what I’m asking students to do based on what they need reinforced or based on ideas they have,” says Carter.

He isn’t the only one using starter projects. Kelly Lougheed, a middle and high school computer science teacher in Los Angeles says “oftentimes, I create starter projects and have students remix them so that they can focus on learning or reinforcing the salient concepts (rather than setting up their HTML/CSS/JS templates).”

We know many teachers have to be their own IT support. Using Glitch means you don’t have to worry about installing or updating anything, as everything runs in the browser. “Whether I was teaching basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or frameworks like A-Frame, Glitch was an easy way to expedite the file setup process and have students immediately see their work live on the internet,” Lougheed adds.

Re-using Resources from Across the Web #

Justin Riley, a computer science teacher at Hilliard Bradley High School in Columbus, OH, found a complete use for Glitch across all his classes.

“Last year, I used [Glitch] in my game design class, my web design class…even my introductory level programming course. My students and I just loved how easy it was to work collaboratively, how easy it was to work with p5.js and Node. We really liked following along The Coding Train tutorials on YouTube, and being able to recreate the p5.js activities and games in Glitch.”

Re-using existing resources is a smart way of reducing the work involved in creating compelling examples for students to work from. You can identify the hit videos and tutorials and use that to inform your choices, along side other factors like technology used and difficulty level etc.

Keeping Students (and Teachers!) On Track #

“I’ve noticed that if we don’t have that environment where we can all watch each other coding, they just kind of scatter really quickly. But if we’re in Glitch, they all tend to stay engaged and they’re better able to keep up and respond to what we’re doing,” says Carter. The Glitch editor is collaborative, so you can pair with students on code in a workshop, or they can watch you coding live.

But it’s not just students who can be helped by Glitch. Prof. Greg McVerry of Southern Connecticut State University, is even using Glitch to help empower fellow instructors.

“My goal is to create resources to help educators that want to move into open educational resources and open pedagogy. Instead of having us remix all these crazy classes in LMS, let’s just use plain HTML as much as we can and keep our websites and our instructions simple and remixable and shareable.”

What Is Everyone Building? #

So that’s how educators are using Glitch, but what are they all building? With each of these educators using Glitch in different ways in their classrooms, we were curious to see the projects their students have created.

“Right now, [my students] are doing trading cards of people on the open Web. It’s just a tiny bit of CSS animation to flip the cards. They’re also doing a meme generator. I try to think about the projects that will scaffold folks into learning HTML a bit. I’m not building any apps with my students yet; we’re just pretty much using the website and the HTML editors,” says McVerry.

“I actually taught summer IoT camp for middle-schoolers, and I had integrated Glitch there. Students made different renditions of a controller, an administrative application for an IoT network,” says Eric. According to him, students also asked him to teach multi-player game design during the camp! He was hesitant at first, but by the end of the day, he decided to squeeze in a quick lesson.

“I spun up a quick multi-player demo in Glitch, using A-frame, to give them a context to ask questions. As soon as I spun up that demo at Glitch, it was just like, boom, boom, a bunch of different possibilities that were going on in these students’ heads. So I’m currently working with students on that project, and they’re doing remixes of it and giving feedback to each other, instruction to each other. And that’s where I think things are most effective, when students are teaching each other.”

Games are a fun way to get folks into coding. But bots are popular too, as Lougheed describes. “During one lesson, I had students create Twitter bots using the Node.js starter code and instructions on Glitch”. “This activity followed a lesson where students used JavaScript arrays and Math.random() to make a Magic 8 Ball website. It was a natural extension for them to use the same JavaScript techniques to make their Twitter bot produce a random tweet, just like the Magic 8 Ball generated a random response.”

“At first, I wasn’t sure if Glitch was going to work for the classroom because of everything being public by default and easy to share. But this ended up being awesome. This was a feature, not a bug,” adds Riley.

These are just a few ways that educators are using Glitch in the classroom (and beyond). You’ve got the power of an entire creative community behind you when you’re teaching using Glitch. To learn a little more about using Glitch for learning, check out this short overview video:

Talking Privacy and Data Detox with Baratunde Thurston

There’s rightly a huge distrust of big tech companies right now. From execs being jerks to constant privacy woes, it’s easy to despair at the current state of tech. But in “A New Tech Manifesto” and “Find out what Google and Facebook know about you,” Thurston outlines why this is, in fact, a massive opportunity for ourselves and for big tech. We can use this moment to rewrite the rules governing how the data we generate is collected, used, and valued. And on a personal level, we can take back control of our own data.

What initially prompted you to do a data detox? #

Baratunde Thurston: I had an experience, a physical world experience at a pop-up kind of art installation called The Glass Room — a walk-through experience of our data and ourselves, and I left terrified. It’s not easy to terrify me with technology ’cause I’ve been using it for a long time. Even with all that history, I was like, “Man, this is worse than I thought.” At the end of the exhibition, they had a data detox bar to understand and detox yourself in eight days.

So I was like, “Oh I’m gonna take this. I’m gonna do this.” So I just kind of documented every step and I took track of my feelings and emotional response and joke possibilities and frustrations and all that in an Evernote notebook and then a big Google doc.

I had way too much. Even what we published was maybe a half to two-thirds of the overall experience. I didn’t get to go in much on my ISP or browser trackers, like website trackers, which I think are one of the most evil pieces of shit that we have online right now. It’s just terrible the amount of weight that our web pages carry that slow down our connections, that consume bandwidth that some of us are paying for, especially on mobile, and that is being used against us. Not in a court of law, but in a marketplace where we are the product.

What are the implications of this collection and usage our data?What are the implications of this collection and usage our data? #

Baratunde Thurston: I mean, we’ve seen some of the early negative implications in terms of election interference, cyber attacks, and information warfare broadly speaking. When we have been sliced and diced for marketing purposes, we can also be sliced and diced for propaganda purposes of non-commercial but political points of view. So that’s happening. I think that made it a less hypothetical concern.

Identify theft is a real and proven concern. Hacking and theft of financial data and value? I mean it happens every day. Every day somebody’s hacking into somebody’s database that they probably shouldn’t have ever built, and sucking our stuff out of it. The Russians probably have voter rolls and all kinds of personal details on people that they could then cross reference and use for targeted Facebook ads. It makes it more difficult to live. So I think from a practical convenience standpoint, we have a very inconvenient future when we constantly have to reset our identities.

In the more frightening sense, I think that you read Cathy O’Neil’s “Weapons of Math Destruction” as an example of how the faith that we put in automated systems, which are built on interpretations of historic data, can make the future too much like the past when it comes to discrimination and unequal treatment and bias. So that shows up in a really deadly way potentially with policing. It’s like, “Oh, this is how we’re gonna determine where to deploy armed men with the power of the state to kill based on historic patterns.” Well those historic patterns are also powered by over-policing and under-schooling and lack of education and jobs. So if your algorithm doesn’t take into account all those things, if it only reflects history and doesn’t try to mitigate its effects, then it’s not as dope as it could be.

I think we could use the power of connectivity, of algorithms, of data to unscrew ourselves out of an oppressive past, or out of a terrible or uneven economic presence. I’d love to see people using algorithms for justice.

Recently, we’ve seen people online deactivate their Facebook or Twitter accounts en masse. Do you think that these businesses are aware how coordinated detox efforts like these might affect their products? #

Baratunde Thurston: I am sure they’re aware of it. I hope that they take it seriously. I don’t necessarily want all these companies to go out of business. I want them to change the way they do business. That’s possible. Companies have changed before. The jury is still out on these two I’m thinking of right now — Wells Fargo and Uber — but they’re expending massive amounts of energy to try to right some serious wrongs from their past. I mean, Wells Fargo? I can’t listen to a podcast without an ad from them. “Founded in 1868, re-founded in 2018.” Why? Because they were guilty of fraud at scale, giving people credit cards that didn’t ask for them, denying mortgages in a discriminatory fashion, and probably some other shenanigans that I can’t remember that we don’t know about.

So could Facebook or witter try to re-earn our trust? I want them to try. Whether they succeed is up to us and them and probably some luck and circumstance. Yeah, I hope that these movements to shock and to talk openly more about the risks to leave en masse relative to historic attempts have some effect.

I say unplug, deactivate, reactivate, streamline, trim down.

I hope that the leave will shock these companies, but I also hope that for the people doing it or hearing about it, it encourages us to think about how much we’ve advocated control over the things we say matter.

What’s one setting that you think everyone should disable when they use the web? #

Baratunde Thurston: I mean if it’s one, then I’m gonna invert it and say install a VPN — a virtual private network — and browse more privately. What that will do is encrypt a connection between you and whatever server you’re connected to so no one in between can snoop, including our Internet service providers, whose violation of our sovereignty of people is really, the dramatic way I see it, deeply offensive. These are companies whose job is to connect us. Instead, they’re exploiting and extracting. They promise big talk. Fastest network, this and that, but they can’t cover impoverished inner city neighborhoods. They can’t cover rural American neighborhoods. When I say they can’t? They’ve chosen not to. They could, but they’ve chosen not to.

Until such time as they can run a network competently and ubiquitously, I’m really less interested in them trying to turn themselves into ad agencies. That is so far from their core competency. Focus on the network. When you’re killing it at that? When I am sick and tired of my bandwidth? Then sure, we can talk about you selling out my browsing patterns to cross promote a TV ad on the service that you’re also running ’cause you’re not satisfied making money off my voice communication and my data communications. You want my video entertainment budget as well.

That’s too much. So the one point that I would drive home is to deny them access by installing a VPN.

Let’s go into your talk at this year’s XOXO and the app that you’re creating with Glitch. Why is making an app about the issues of over-policing worthwhile? #

Baratunde Thurston: I think because over-policing is still an issue, and a particular one to particular communities. I think we need to make all kinds of art and use all forms of media to highlight challenges and opportunities to improve ourselves. This is one such area, and apps are one such form of media and one such expression of art. I think apps are a new mode of expression, relative to some other ones like literature or plays of culture. But it’s about this theme of “living while black” and these headlines which are kind of the new version of police shooting videos that have this perverse, macabre, viral moment where that was like the new hotness in not an exciting way, but in an impressive and devastating way. It just felt like every day we were seeing a state-sponsored murder play out in our feeds.

Now to some degree, thankfully, we’re not seeing the murder — we’re seeing the call. We’re seeing the person who called the police when they don’t know what else to do, when they don’t have communications and tools crossed with empathy to just talk to their fellow citizens and their fellow resident, but instead call in men with guns to resolve the situation. That certainly, in most cases, doesn’t require it.

People need to understand more that this is a problem.

You’ve done this work, not just around tech advocacy, but political advocacy as well for years now. The thread through all of that has been humor. Why do you use humor in your approach to serious issues like this? #

Baratunde Thurston: People don’t always want to be lectured at, man. It’s exhausting to just have truth shoved in your face. Truth is like the proverbial Brussels sprouts to a child. I need some Honey Nut Cheerios. I need some hot sauce on that truth. Humor’s the hot sauce. Humor’s the sugar that helps the truth go down. In an attempt to selfishly and internally manage my own emotional response and burden, humor helps me. It’s my survival technique for existing. In terms of communication and reaching other people, it has often helped open a door.

Folks will listen to a joke. They’ll laugh. That’s like an emotionally open moment where they’re connecting with the person, and then you just drop in that pellet.

I have found that humor is a more compassionate welcome and invitation to a conversation versus a straight up lecture, and certainly versus self-righteous condescension. Humor is one tool that’s available to me, so it’s an opportunity to use it.

Baratunde Thurston is speaking more about topics like these as part of Art+Code at XOXO 2018 on Friday, September 7 at 7:20pm.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Randomosity!

Art+Code at XOXO #

But first, we're excited to tell you about this evening's Art+Code event at XOXO fest. MC'd by our own Director of Community Engineering, Jenn Schiffer, it's an evening of creators working at the intersection of art and technology. Included in the incredible line-up are some of our favorite creators from the Glitch community, including Monica Dinculescu, Omayeli Arenyeka and Mozilla Open Web Fellow, Becca Ricks.

AI-powered Interactive Music #

OK, let's get into the apps! First up we have "incredible-spinners", an AI-powered interactive music experience created by software developer and music hacker Tero Parviainen.

Tero has combined Google Magenta MusicVAE, Magenta.js, TensorFlow.js, Tone.js, and three.js to create a musical experiment in which you can listen and move around a grid of musical measures generated by a neural network, creating your own musical patterns.

Do yourself a favor though and try it out on your desktop computer. This thing is making TensorFlow work hard in the browser and your mobile phone will struggle to keep up.

Remember This One? #

is a random episode generator which links off to Netflix for easy viewing. Cory Evan Wright captures the randomness of TV re-runs with this little app that's perfect for cord-cutters and Friends fans alike.

Become the Curator #

With "curator-and-the-machine", Stefan Bohacek explores ideas of creativity and authorship. You can curate the output of a random generative art script and share it via the @curator_machine Twitter bot. Currently, every visitor sees a unique artwork, but what if everyone saw the same thing? Should curating the artwork reset it? and should the curator have more influence over the art? Try it out and see what you think.

Make Your Own Art #

Inspired by a lightning talk about generative art, Matt DuLeone created "tranquil-island" - a generative art maker. Change the background color, line thickness, cell width and shape to customize and create your own generated art masterpiece.

An Array of Live Coded Visuals #

We've featured Olivia Jack's Hydra before. It's a set of tools for livecoding networked visuals. But it has been great to see the amazing things being created by music hackers and tinkerers using it on Glitch.

Featured Apps #

Of course, the above aren't the only great apps you can find on Glitch this week -- we regularly feature projects on glitch.com itself. And starting this week, we're doing something new and fun. We'll be featuring different artists illustrating the featured apps, to help you discover the coolest new projects and show off the community's creativity.

So this week, our inaugural set of featured apps have been illustrated by Roman Muradov. Muradov is an award-winning artist who is Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts. He's worked with major publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times, as well as tech brands like Dropbox and Notion. See more of his work on Instagram and his website.

Talking Tech with Baratunde Thurston 🗣️🎙️ #

We haven't just spent the week playing around with awesome apps though (we pinky promise!) We squeezed in some time to chat with comedian and best-selling author Baratunde Thurston. We got into topics like the current climate around data privacy, social media, and why he uses humor to tackle tough topics. Check it out.

Help Us Bring Back the Creative Web!

It’s easy to forget in this era of billion-dollar Internet startups, that many people got started on the web by learning to tweak HTML creating a GeoCities page, or fiddling with CSS to perfect their MySpace profile. Back then, people were almost as likely to make a web page as to read one — it was a rite of passage growing up.

Now though, things are a little different. Many modern websites all look the same, and people spend most of their time online using just three apps. So it seems more important than ever to remind ourselves that the web is still a thing we all make, not just something we consume.

We know the good, fun internet is still out there. Help us bring back the creative web and show everyone how you got started building the web. Bring back your first web projects and share them with the world, and help encourage a diverse community of creators to experiment with their broadest set of ideas.

To help you out, we’ve created the . An easy way for you to grab your first website from archive.org and bring it back to life on Glitch.

It’s complete with an authentic early-web design of course — check out that cursor animation!

And we’re showcasing peoples’ first websites in a collection, alongside some classic layouts from sites like LiveJournal, Neopets, Movable Type and many other old-school ways of publishing a web page.

If you were on the Internet back then, or are just curious about web history, you should check it out, and remix some sites to make your own new classic.

If you do make a page, let us know by sharing it on social media. We can’t wait to see what you create❣️

Space and Time

What Was Your First Website? #

The early days of the Web were full of curious little websites. Whether you had a simple Geocities page or a tricked out Blackplanet or MySpace profile, those beginning days felt like a totally different space than the Internet we know today.

But guess what -- that whimsical, creative web is still out there, and we want to help you rediscover it! The Glitch team has created the Wayback Importer, an easy way for you to grab your first website from archive.org and bring it back to life on Glitch. Everything old is new again!

Spot The Fake Headline #

Every day, there seems to be a new incident in the news that makes you shake your head in disbelief. Comedian and New York Times bestselling author Baratunde Thurston worked with Color of Change and the team here at Glitch on an app that debuted at this year's XOXO in Portland, Oregon.

Living While Black cycles through ten headlines and asks you to figure out which one is real and which one is fake. The answers may surprise you!

Jump Jump Jump To It #

Do you remember jumping on a trampoline as a kid? Nothing beats that fun feeling of leaping into the air and continuously bouncing higher and higher. Educator and Glitch user Justin Riley (@OhioFi) brought back that fun feeling in this app which features multicolored robots jumping joyfully on a trampoline. Try remixing the project and adding some variety to the robots!

Revisiting Old Twitter Faves #

If you've been active on Twitter for a few years, chances are you've "favorited" a number of tweets from other users. Over time those can add up, and you may not remember which tweets you liked, made you smile, or gave you a good laugh.

Now there's a solution to ths problem! 15-year-old Samarth Jajoo (@jajoosam) whipped up a project over the span of a weekend called the Twitter Wayback Machine. Just type in your Twitter username, and the app will show you a new tweet from your list of favorites. Best of all, there's no app permissions!

Now You See It, Now You Don't #

When I was younger, tilt cards were everywhere -- postcards, trading cards, bookmarks...you name it! The process goes back to the late 16th century, and it's still used today as an effective way to add interactive effects to a static print design.

Front-end developer and Glitch user Dan Wilson (@danwilson) built a nifty app that takes this lenticular design process and applies it to an image via CSS transforms. Remix the app and add your own images!

Make Your Own Planet #

Space: the final frontier. The vast expanse beyond our world has captivated humans since time immemorial. Satellites and probes give us an idea of what else lies past Earth's atmosphere, and our imaginations fill in the rest.

That sense of wonder is behind this planet generating app from Glitch user Root Angel (@acgillette). Click the randomize button to create a new planet, and let the soothing, meditative music take you to another world!

This Week's Featured Artist: Yacoyon #

We're honored to have the work of Tokyo-based illustrator Yacoyon for our featured apps this week! Yacoyon's style draws from fashion and video game culture, and the result is a mix of modern style and retro pixel art.

Check out Yacoyon's illustrations for our featured apps, and see more of Yacoyon's work on Instagram!

As industrial designer George Nelson says, you don't think your way to creative work; you work your way to creative thinking. This week's collection of apps are proof that the web can still be a fun place full of creativity. And Glitch is just the community to help you (re)discover that!

Art+Code: Glitch at XOXO 2018

From the opening party on Thursday, September 7, it was clear that this year’s XOXO was going to be different from previous years. Event creators Andy Baio and Andy McMillan — colloquially known as “The Andys” by attendees — spoke about how XOXO has become more than a festival.

“Really, it’s a community, here to support each other through dark and difficult times — and these are certainly dark and difficult times,” according to the official festival guide from The Andys. “We took a break last year to think about what XOXO should be going forward. In its absence, we realized we needed each other more than ever.”

XOXO has always been referred to by both its creators and the community as an experiment, and this year’s event was no different. A lot of new things happened: attendance numbers were scaled up, hundreds of passes were offered for free, and one of two new events were added to the festival schedule — Art+Code.

Art+Code was hosted by Glitch’s director of community engineering Jenn Schiffer, and she kicked off the event with a rousing presentation that not only had the crowd in stitches, but also prepared them for the other presenters for the night.

Part of Jenn’s talk also included our new Wayback Importer app, a way to help you bring your first website back to life. Several people’s first websites even made their way onto the big screen for everyone to see! As Jenn eloquently put it near the end of her talk, “don’t be surprised if you end up with a feeling of hope listening to our speakers tonight.”

She wasn’t wrong.

From here, the eager crowd was rewarded with the comedic stylings of Baratunde Thurston, Emmy-nominated writer, cultural critic, and New York Times best-selling author.

Baratunde’s talk was a lead-in to the unveiling of Living While Black, a Glitch app that quizzes users on the difference between true and fabricated headlines about white people calling the cops on Black people. His talk pushed the audience to consider the implications of unnecessary over-policing and breaking down the grammar and patterns of how it occurs.

The remaining speakers talked about their projects and the processes behind them, further building upon the premise that the good, fun Internet from decades ago is not only still here, but that it’s a place full of unexpected surprises.

Research scientist Janelle Shane talked about training AI to do everything from generating other-worldly knitting patterns to coming up with unique flavors of ice cream. Nicole He is a programmer and artist, and the creator of , a voice-enabled game played in your browser that forces you to “zoom in” and “enhance” to find the solution to the puzzle. Web developer Diana Smith is the brilliant mind behind Francine, a breath-taking Rococo-style portrait rendered entirely using CSS.

Becca Ricks, current Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow at Human Rights Watch, extrapolated data from her Facebook account to make 3D maps of her locations, and even create eigenvector values of her face (which she turned into a jacket). Her apps Fuzzify.me and How PayPal Shares Your Data (built on Glitch!) illustrated just how much data web services have on us, and how we can obscure it or see where it goes.

The brilliant interdisciplinary artist Everest Pipkin crafted a haunting tale involving language and code, illustrating the softness in digital spaces such as this tiny star field Twitter bot or generative poetics vis-à-vis spambots. Roberto Baldwin of The Hard G Project, along with the mononymous (and anonymous) entity known on Twitter as @darth, detailed a collective art project showcasing original animated GIFs from a variety of artists all through the streets of San Francisco. And artist and inventor Kate Compton displayed her generative art on stage and in the theater, compelling the audience to consider a more “baroque” future where AI possesses an ornate opulence.

Omayeli Arenyeka and Monica Dinculescu are two creators we’ve featured here on Glitch in the past. Monica displayed her wildly popular Glitch apps emoji-garden and tenori-off, while also showing us her current work with Magenta.js. Omayeli’s talk was about a phenomenon known as the “creative savior complex” which forced the audience to consider if they work they’re creating is making an impact and a difference in the world.

Even better, both Monica and Omayeli’s presentations are online for you to view. Monica’s slides are even hosted on Glitch! Check them out below:

And lastly, the sweet comedic sounds of Botnik Studios got the audience on their feet at the end of the night, singing along to their auto-generated song lyrics, such as this ditty about P90X reviews on Amazon sung in the style of Morrissey.

By the end of the night, attendees were awed and delighted. Just look at this feedback!

Thank you to the XOXO crew and volunteer staff, and for all the presenters and attendees for helping make Art+Code a success!

Doing It Yourself

Glitch In The News #

Extra extra! Read all about it! XOXO 2018 has come to a close, and we're still giddy off of the reaction of the Art+Code sessions from this year's event. From generative art to renegade GIFs across San Francisco, Art+Code really showed the wonder and magic that still exists out there on the Internet. Check out our recap and learn about how it all went down!

While you're browsing the web, listen to the latest episode of Product Hunt Radio with our CEO, Anil Dash. He talks with guest Allison Esposito and host Ryan Hoover about the early days of the web, what's changed since then, and the challenges with building community online.

Should I or Shouldn't I? #

Every project needs to start somewhere, but often times that first step can be the hardest one to take. If you're stuck in analysis paralysis mode, then Glitch user Jillian Meehan (@jilliangmeehan) has just the app for you. Shouldidoit is a simple yet handy exercise for figuring out whether or not you should do a new project. Apps like this can really help decrease your anxiety around starting something new!

From Light to Dark #

Monica Dinculescu is one of our most prolific creators, and her work embodies that spirit of creation that Glitch is all about. Her app Color Gradient was a way for her to lighten, darken, and blend colors in JavaScript. Remix the app and use whatever colors you like to make your own color gradients!

Make Your Own Spotify Collections #

Spotify's algorithms for making playlists are top notch, but have you ever wanted to make collections out of artists or albums? If so, Spotify's head of engineering (and Glitch user) Josh Blaney has the tool for you. Collections uses Spotify's web API to add artists and albums to collections that live as playlists on your account. Take a look at Spotify's collection page for more Glitch apps!

Prime Factors #

Did you know that 10,000 is just 2 x 5? Or that 1999 is a prime number? In case you didn't, then you can keep those bits of knowledge for your next trivia night. But if you're interested in prime numbers and factorizations, then Glitch user and mathematician Christian Lawson-Perfect (@christianp) made an app that generates a never-ending list of both. As he puts it, "you can't scroll faster than the absolutely most naive algorithm imaginable can keep up with." (I tried, too. The app just keeps going!)

Bongo-Cat #

This really fun Bongo-Cat app from our design engineer Tiffany Tseng (@scientiffic) came about in such a cool way. Earlier in the week during our regular design review, we learned about the bongo cat meme. Tiff mentioned wanting to make an app around this, and a few hours later Bongo-Cat Creator was born. Upload the song of your choice, and use your keyboard to play along with the furry feline!

Tiff's app has already gained some fans, including a few who have remixed bongo cat in some interesting and fun ways!

DIY Course Templates #

Educators across the country are using Glitch to teach the next generation of coders. You may remember Prof. Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) from our article about how Glitch is used in the classroom. In that article, he talked about creating resources to help educators move into open educational resources, and his Indie Web Course Template is the first step to making that happen. Remix the course template and check out the detailed README for information on how you can customize this for your own course!

This Week's Featured Illustrator: Ailsa Johnson #

You may have noticed the illustrations of Ailsa Johnson on the Glitch homepage this week. The British-born, Tokyo-based illustrator's distinct flat style mixes vibrant colors with slightly rough textures and sharp angles.

Have a look at Ailsa's illustrations for our featured apps, and see more of her work at her website!

Sometimes, the solution to the issue you're having is just right outside of your grasp. Like this quote from Questlove implies, our thoughts are the launchpad from where great ideas take flight. Hopefully these apps inspire you to "do it yourself" and create something awesome!

To the Creekosystem and Beyond

Tech’s history is full of startup founders who all shared a common connection or history, from the “Traitorous Eight” at Fairchild Semiconductor and the resulting “Fairchildren” companies like Intel and AMD, to the more recent PayPal mafia, which spawned Palantir, LinkedIn, Tesla, and various VC firms, among others. But one of the most successful tech founder networks of all time often gets overlooked.

The network of companies built by Fog Creek employees, alumni and the descendants of those efforts is extraordinary. Fog Creek’s founders and alumni have co-founded or led many of the most beloved and important tech companies of the last decade. If we were a little bit more cheesy, we might call it the “Creekosystem”.

First, there was Fog Creek. Founded by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor in 2000, it began as a consulting company working out of Joel’s grandmother’s brownstone apartment in New York. But while the origins may have been humble, their ambition was far from it: Joel and Michael set out to create the best place for developers to work.

Although it’s hard to imagine now, back then, software developers weren’t treated very well. Joel and Michael couldn’t find a place to work where programmers had decent working conditions and got an opportunity to do great work, so they decided to create their own.

They began with the physical environment, creating an office that was custom-designed by a top architect to be the ideal programming workspace. With private offices, windows everywhere, really comfortable chairs and all the large screen monitors you could want. But their people-friendly thinking didn’t stop there — it went into every decision they made. So Fog Creek set out to remove all the barriers that can get in the way of people from doing their best work. There was no getting sign-off to buy the tools you needed, and technical decisions were made by people with technical expertise, instead of having mandates handed down from above.

And it worked. Fog Creek successfully navigated the dot-com crash, bootstrapping the company into a growing business lead by its pioneering bug tracking product, FogBugz. Over the coming years, more products followed and lots of them were hugely successful. Fog Creek’s focus on treating developers well meant our company has always been able to attract talented individuals who were given autonomy to try out ideas and see where they went.

Noah Weiss, a young programmer who spent the summer of 2006 at Fog Creek, was one of those people with an idea. He proposed to Joel that a developer job listing business might be worth creating. The job listings were a runaway success, and the idea would later inform a big part of the business model behind Stack Overflow, which Joel teamed up with Jeff Atwood to create. It’s now the largest online community for programmers to learn, share their knowledge, and advance their careers.

The next huge break out from Fog Creek was Trello. It began during a “Creek Week” — the internal hackathons where new ideas at Fog Creek get invented. Trello was an instant hit and went on to be used by millions of people around the world to organize everything from their work to their wedding.

Fog Creek, Stack Overflow, and Trello operated as a family of companies, connected not just by their co-founders, but by their shared DNA of people-first principles. As people moved on, they embedded these principles wherever they went. Many staff from Fog Creek went on to roles at Trello and Stack Overflow, while others worked for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Twilio, Slack, Heroku, GitHub, Dropbox, and Amazon. But working at Fog Creek didn’t just help them upgrade their careers — through their contributions they’ve upgraded the whole tech industry, too.

Take Ben Kamens, for example. He became the founding engineer at Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization who create online tools that have helped educate millions of students around the world. He’s now founder and CEO of Spring Discovery, a health-tech company who use machine learning to develop therapies that reduce disease.

Fellow alumni, Andrew Song, co-founded Whisper.ai who use deep learning in hearing aids, after roles at Facebook and Google. William Zimrin is co-founder and CTO at OrganizeTogether, who create tools for grassroots organizing. The super-handy secure tunnel software, ngrok, was created by another Fog Creek alumni, Alan Shreve. And Emmett Nicholas is cofounder and CTO at Airtable, who launched the popular, VC-backed collaboration tool company after working for many years at Stack Overflow.

But former Creekers haven’t just created their own businesses, they’ve helped grow major companies too. Like Noah Weiss, the ‘job listings guy’ we mentioned earlier. He leads the Search, Learning & Intelligence group at Slack, having forged a fantastic career via roles at Google and Foursquare. And there’s Liz Hall, one of the earliest Fog Creek employees who almost single-handedly ran recruiting at Trello, and is now having the same impact as VP People Ops for the innovative real estate platform, Cadre.

This network of companies and people have been hugely successful. But what really joins them are just a few simple, shared principles and practices:

The most important tenet that began it all back in 2000 is still as important as ever today. By putting people first, they’re free to do their best work and it’s a big part of why Fog Creek’s impact on the world rivals companies a thousand times its size.

Fog Creek alumni haven’t created growth-at-all-costs, get-rich-quick businesses. Instead, they’ve applied the bootstrapped sensibilities learned at Fog Creek and have established business models that thrive only when they’re creating real value for their customers.

This is more than just selling shovels in a gold rush, it’s a desire to really make a difference. Whether that’s helping people work together with products like Airtable, ngrok and Trello, or by preserving their health and advancing their personal development at Whisper, Spring Discovery, and Khan Academy.

Few sites have been a force multiplier for developers quite like Stack Overflow. But with Glitch, we aim to have an even greater positive impact. We’re innovating on what to date has just been seen as “developer tools”, turning them into a set of creative and expressive tools that enable people of any skill level to be able to create online. And as a platform, Glitch is reminding folks that the web is still a fun, creative place that any of us can build. It’s already inspired people to create over a million apps — from cutting-edge VR apps to distributed apps, bots, and more.

Perhaps what’s most exciting is that now Fog Creek employees and alumni are joined by the creative coders, designers, artists, activists, and educators from all over the world who comprise the friendly, creative Glitch community. And together, the impact we can all have on the web is far greater than anything we’ve seen as a company so far.

Fog Creek is now Glitch!

TLDR: We’ve renamed Fog Creek to Glitch, Inc. to represent our single-minded focus on Glitch. We’re hiring for a bunch of new positions (with more to come!) and welcoming a slate of new advisors. And it’s all in service of making Glitch one of the most important creative communities on the Internet, and having our company set the standard for thoughtful, ethical technology.

Back in 2000, two visionary founders, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, envisioned a new tech company that would distinguish itself by the way it treated people — both its employees and its customers. Their belief was that being better to people would yield more invention, more innovation, and a much more pleasant place to work.

Well, they were right. The company they created, Fog Creek Software, has gone on to create multiple groundbreaking products and to help change the entire tech industry along the way.

From inventing Trello to co-creating Stack Overflow to pioneering bug tracking with FogBugz and launching other successful and influential products like Manuscript and Kiln and Copilot and CityDesk and many other experiments. Fog Creek has been a bastion of innovation for nearly two decades.

And today, we’re turning the page on that chapter for something new.

Becoming Glitch #

When we started working on the project that would become Glitch, it was originally just part of our regular “Creek Week” process — the internal hackathons where members on our team come up with new ideas and try to inspire each other with cool projects. It became obvious pretty quickly that Glitch was something special.

Then earlier this year, when Glitch came out of beta, we saw an incredible groundswell. As a creative community, Glitch inspired people to create over a million apps in record time — including cutting-edge work in VR, machine learning, distributed apps, bots, and more. And Glitch has won the hearts of developers around the world who now feel that coding with other tools feels a lot more lonely and less productive. Just as importantly, Glitch has reminded an entire community that a healthy, independent, open web generates enormous value for everyone on the Internet, earning the attention and respect of many of the biggest players on the web.

One of the guiding principles for Glitch is that we should communicate with clarity, and that our purpose and goals should be self-evident in all we do. And that’s led us to recognize it’s time for us to become Glitch. It’s not just what we’re building, it’s who we are as a company. While the core values of Fog Creek still persist, we’ve also learned a lot and evolved a lot over the last two decades, and now our name and identity are evolving, too.

What’s Changing, What’s Not #

In terms of Glitch as a community and as a product, nothing’s changing. We’re doubling down on being a friendly and welcoming community, and focusing our efforts and investment on extending our lead in innovative features that creators and developers love.

We’re holding tight to our values, honoring our core principles of valuing people — whether that’s our community members or the workers on our team. And we’re expanding our history of transparency and accountability, with meaningful efforts like publishing our entire employee handbook publicly. (It’s a Glitch app, naturally.) This lets us show the world how we put our values into practice. We also want to do more: Glitch, Inc. is designed to be a company that sets the bar on best practices for how we treat our community, customers, coworkers and collaborators.

There’s lots of news coming for Glitch as a product, too. We’re getting ready to open up , to make it easy for your whole organization to collaborate on Glitch. (Tell your boss you want your team to be one of the first to use this new super-productive set of tools!) We’ll be building a powerful and valuable set of paid features on top of Teams to give even more options for organizations that want to get more out of Glitch, and to build a long-term sustainable business model for the platform and the company.

And we’re ecstatic to welcome a formidable slate of new advisors to help us grow Glitch, and expand our vision, and ensure that we practice the values we aspire to exemplify. Kimberly Bryant, Alan Cooper, Jason Goldman, and Franklin Leonard have a broad set of backgrounds covering everything from education to policy, user experience to filmmaking, social networks to social justice. And each of them brings unique expertise and insight into how we’re going to bring Glitch to millions more people around the world. We’re so thankful to them for joining us!

Join Us #

That brings us to perhaps our most important announcement today: . Whether that’s as a member of the Glitch community, or by checking out the new job listings we’ve rolled out today (with more to come soon), we want you to be part of where Glitch is going.

Glitch is a very different kind of tech company, explicitly committed to setting the standard on thoughtful and ethical practices, and with an unparalleled track record of nonstop innovation for almost two decades. If that combination is appealing to you, take a look at the positions we’ve listed, and share the job openings with your friends who share those values.

Transform!

Fog Creek is now Glitch #

What better way to kick off this week's theme than with news of our own transformation?

After 18 years, we have said goodbye to the Fog Creek name and we are now Glitch. Read the official announcement here, and learn about how we came to this decision, take a look at what's coming up in the future, and hear about our new slate of advisors. Also, we're hiring!

The Web Is Alive With The Sound of Music #

Sonification sounds like a relatively new term, but it has been around for well over 100 years! The concept involves using non-speech audio (like a musical tone) to convey data. Both sonar and the clicks of a Geiger counter are two such examples of sonification.

In his recent talk at the Web Audio Conference this year, software engineer and Glitch user Nick Violi (@nvioli) showed a demo of sonification using Glitch and Google Analytics! View his slides and have a listen at the sound of real-time website traffic!

From Mars, With Love #

Are deep space radio signals like the famous Wow! signal from the 1970s evidence of a world out there beyond our own? Only time will tell, but until then, Root Angel (@acgillette) has provided the Internet with an app providing mysterious dispatches from Mars. Keep clicking for new entries from the Red Planet!

I Hear The Tweets Echoing Tonight #

Digesting the ongoing Twitter timeline can be like drinking from a fire hose. So it's always fun when people like Lesley pull off a really entertaining feat like slyly meting out the lyrics to Toto's over the span of about a month. It's really one of those fun "blink and you'll miss it" type of experiences that make you love the Web.

In case you missed it, Glitch user Brian Arnold Sinclair (@brianarn) created an app that not only displays Lesley's tweets, but also syncs them to a video of ! It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from this app!

Mountains and Waves #

If you're having a rough day, take a breather and go to the islands! Well, maybe not , but this app from Glitch user Brian Jones (@jonesbp) is a good substitute! Islands Division is a riff off the famous Joy Division album cover, with a bit of a generative art twist inspired by Web tinkerer Tim Holman. Clicking the circle arrow will generate a new landscape and color scheme, and you can just sit back and watch the gently undulating waves. I'm feeling more relaxed already!

This Week's Featured Illustrator: Jonathan Vermersch #

Have you seen our highlighted apps this week on the Glitch homepage? Each app is accompanied by the artwork of London-based illustrator Jonathan Vermersch. His work is character-based, drawing on vibrant colors and surreal elements to create his unique and fantastic style.

Have a look at this week's featured illustrations, and head over to Jonathan's website to see more of his awesome work!

One of the features that makes Glitch great for anyone is the ability to take an app, remix it, and transform it into something new! These apps are just a sample, and you're only limited by your own imagination. Create something awesome today!

Make Time to Get Away

A Trip To The Mountains #

The brisk air, the bright foliage...nothing quite says fall like a weekend getaway to the mountains. But if you're in a part of the world where that's not possible, then full-stack developer and Glitch user Daniel Schep (@dschep) has something for you.

This gorgeous app displays the Blue Ridge Mountains, including a sun that displays based on the time of the year! Use the slider at the top left to change the hue of the mountains, or click the fullscreen button at the bottom right for the full-range experience. Remix the app and change the coordinates to see the mountains from your city!

Flower in Orbit #

There's something magical and whimsical about the Orbit app from artist and Glitch user n-schedé (@n-schede). They call Orbit a "lil spacey flower thing", and you can randomize the creation of the flower to make images with different background colors, locus point size, and speed of growth. Once you're happy with your creation, click the "Save" button and download the finished product!

Code and Ink Throughout October #

It's October, and illustrators and artists worldwide are participating in Inktober, a challenge to do one ink drawing a day for the entire month. You can follow the official prompts, but if you want to kick the difficulty up a notch, try the Randomtober app from Glitch users Brie Alsbury (@BrieAlsbury) and Jessica Johnston (@JJLoa). Just click the "Prompt Me" button to generate new prompts like an angry General Leia or a steampunk clown!

And in true Glitchy fashion, Glitch users Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) and Chris Joel (@cdata) are doing their own takes on Inktober by building and adding onto a Glitch app each day. Take a look at what they've created so far!

Designing Conversations with DialogFlow #

If you're looking to build Actions for Google Assistant, Dialogflow is the way to go. The technology behind it is based on natural language conversations, and it supports English, French, and over a dozen other languages.

Developer and Glitch user Bernard Chhun (@bchhun) created an example app on Glitch that illustrates how you can link Dialogflow with a Google spreadsheet. Remix the app and you can change what information is returned from the spreadsheet!

Get Your PoseNet On #

Interactive apps on Glitch really push the boundaries of what's possible using technology. This is especially the case with educators that are utilizing Glitch as a way to teach the next generation of creators.

Student and Glitch user Char Stiles (@CharStiles), for example, created an app from a homework assignment that uses a mix of machine learning (via ml5.js), PoseNet, and your webcam, to accurately map a motion capture skeleton! Give it a try for yourself!

Make Your Resume in VR #

The modern job search is tough, and skilled candidates have to try new methods to stand out from the crowd. I've seen people make viral videos, start social media campaigns, and even bake cookies to get closer to their dream job.

Technical product manager, software producer, and Glitch user Nathan Backous (@nbackous) takes things one step further by creating his resume in virtual reality. (A , if you will.) Glance around the pink and blue VR landscape and interact with the elements there to view Nathan's work history, his LinkedIn profile, and to contact him. Good luck Nathan!

Featured Illustrator of the Week: Jackson Joyce #

We are so fortunate this week to feature the work of Louisiana-born, Brooklyn-based illustrator Jackson Joyce. His style is both vivid and dreamy, with a sketchy presentation evocative of childhood art done with colored pencils.

Take a look at Jackson's work on this week's featured apps, and check out his website for more!

Hopefully this week's round-up of apps have inspired you to help make your own space on Glitch. Lose yourself in any of the great apps created by the community, or go on a journey of your own by remixing an app, trying out new technology, or working on a side project! Who knows how far you'll go?

Creating Super Effective iOS Shortcuts with Glitch

I’ve played Pokémon since 1998, but there are still some types of Pokémon I’m never quite sure how to battle. If I’m battling a fire 🔥 Pokémon it’s pretty obvious– use water 💧! But what about a dark type?

I wish I could ask Siri for all my Pokémon battle on-the-go type matchup needs. Sadly, if you ask her, she directs you to a web search. And who has time for that?

But now I can create my own Siri commands with Glitch and the new iOS Shortcuts app. Well, new-ish; the Shortcuts app is really just a new version of Workflow, an automation app created in 2014. Apple bought it in 2017. With the rename, it also gets something Workflow didn’t have: Siri integration.

Each Shortcut is almost like a little spell 🧙🏼‍♀️ you can cast to do a task. You build Shortcuts from “Actions” such as:

Creating an image 🌠
Rearranging text 📝
Tweeting 📢🐦
Add an event to your calendar 📆
And recording video (which can come in handy for serious stuff, like getting pulled over by the police!) It’s a little like programming because you can use stuff from one Action and pass it to another. For example, taking the title of a calendar event and tweeting it. Or taking two images and making one image out of them.

Where Glitch comes in is as a handy tool for:

Advanced processing of data grabbed by a Shortcut Action.
Capturing data from somewhere else to use in your shortcut. Together, iOS Shortcuts and Glitch are a powerful duo. We’ll show you some examples of what people have already created using Shortcuts and Glitch. Then I’ll walk you through, step-by-step, an example Glitch-powered Shortcut that you can remix to create your own.

We got inspired by these two nifty Glitch projects:

If you uninstall the News App on your iOS device, every time you visit an apple.news link it will be broken 😭

Luckily you can open it with the Chapel Pews shortcut by Ashur. It passes the URL to Glitch, then Glitch tries to find the link to the HTML article. If it finds it, it will redirect you to the article. If it doesn’t, it will show a nifty error page that will tell you how to reinstall news.

When is “Game of Thrones” on next? This Shortcut by WilsonSmith asks you what show you want to know about, then passes it Glitch. Then the Glitch application grabs some data from Nextair.tv to tell you when it’s on next! Nice!

But how does it all work? Well, the secret is that you can pass text from Shortcuts to Glitch by adding it to the end of the Glitch app URL.

For example

super-effective.glitch.me/DATA

For my shortcut, I want it to take a Pokémon type and pass it to the Glitch app, so it would be

super-effective.glitch.me/TYPE-OF-POKEMON

I get the Pokémon type by adding the Action “dictate text.” This means Siri asks me what type I want to know about, then Shortcuts can use whatever I say in Shortcuts Actions.

Now let’s tell it to use the results and put them at the end of the URL of my Glitch app. To do that let’s use the “URL” Action.

And guess what’s an option to put at the end of the URL? The text we just collected from our “dictate text” Action.

And finally, grab the contents of our fancy ✨ new URL with the “Get Contents of URL” Action.

This is how we pass it to Glitch. How? Well, my app was created from “New Project” → Node Express. So it’s built off of Express.

Express is a “web framework.” What’s important to us is it can serve our website and do our things based on the “route” at the end of the URL.

For example

super-effective.glitch.me/dark

Passes “dark” to our Glitch application. ” What is it going to do with it? It’s going to query the PokéAPI. Yes, there’s an API for Pokémon! It started as a simple weekend project, but now it has almost everything you could ever want to know about Pokémon. Not just Pokémon, but berries, items, and of course what we need: type matchup info. Check out the results for “dark” to see the type of data we’ll be working with.

I called the API using “pokedex-promise-v2”, a nice little tool that allows me to query the PokéAPI with just a few lines of code.

Once it gets back the data, I use plain Javascript to take the data and turn it into a sentence that Siri can say.

Now, back to our Shortcut. Let’s add the “Speak Text” Action and “add to Siri” which means when we say “Super Effective” to Siri, it will trigger our new shortcut.

It will then ask me what ‘type’ I need to know about. Once I tell it, the Glitch app does its thing. Finally, Siri tells me what types of Pokémon are super effective against Dark!

Of course you can use the PokéAPI in Shortcuts without Glitch if you want, but that requires building a much more complicated Shortcut. I also like that I can use my Glitch app as a plain old-fashioned website or tool for other devices like Alexa.

Want to create your own Glitch-powered iOS Shortcuts? Well, our Super Effective app is remixable 🎤🎶! Just click “remix” and start coding. Here are some ideas:

Want to know what types of Pokémon are effective against a specific Pokémon like Snorlax? Use Shortcuts to get a Pokémon name and then use the PokéAPI in Glitch to find out what type are effective against it.
Use Shortcuts to pass a food name to Glitch. Then Query an API like Nutritionix or the USDA to get information about it on the go.
Want to go super fancy? Create your own API in Glitch to use with Shortcuts! We can’t wait to see what you create!

Game and Watch

Can You Believe These Food Trends? 🍲📈 #

I consider myself a pretty adventurous eater, but some of the latest culinary crazes are a bit hard to swallow. Forget cronuts and ramen burgers -- gastronomical creations like seven pound pizza burritos and soft shell crabs fried in hot Cheetos can quickly go from interesting to Instagrammable.

UX engineer and Glitch user Aaron Z. Best (@AaronZBest) created an app called FoodHype that cashes in on these fads with "auto-generated food trend journalism at your fingertips!" While all of these headlines are fake, they're not that far from the truth. Sprout ice cream, anyone?

Spider-Man: Save The People! 🕷️😱 #

The latest Spider-Man game on PlayStation 4 takes the wall-crawling web slinger's adventures to a whole new level. But guess what -- you can play a Spider-Man game right here on Glitch too!

High school student and Glitch user Christian Cromer (@ChristianCromer) created a full-featured tower defense style game using p5js! Protect the citizens from hordes of black widow spiders and save the day! Face front, true believers!

Think Inside The Box 📦📦 #

Speaking of p5js, educational technologist and Glitch user Erik Nauman (@enauman) uses it to teach the concept of recursion. His app Recursion Boxes gives a visual display of how recursion works with a transparent, rotating set of cubes. It's mesmerizing! 🤩

Mondrian On Demand 🔁🖼️ #

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter most well-known for his grid-based paintings. Bogotá-based educator and Glitch user Fabio Cortés (@fcor) created an app that replicates Mondrian's famous paintings with fantastic accuracy. The app is based on a generative artistry tutorial from generativeartistry.com, and every time you refresh the page, you'll get a new "painting". Who knew art and code could work so well together?

Codetober Continues 🗓👩🏻‍💻 #

Last week, we talked about Inktober, and shared some examples of Glitch users who created their own spin on this by creating a new app each day. Glitch user Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) has kept the momentum going on her Codetober apps, creating whimsical and topical variations on a theme each day. (Also, there's lots of emojis, which is always fun!)

Start from Day 1 to chart Monica's progress, and check out a few of her Codetober apps below!

Featured Illustrator of the Week: Disa Wallander #

The work of Stockholm-based illustrator and cartoonist Disa Wallander is on full display this week on Glitch! Disa combines drawings with photos and other materials to create collages that are both playful and prolific.

You can visit her website to see more of her work, and you can see her take on this week's featured apps below.

Whether you're playing fun games or just watching beautiful art projects, Glitch has something for everyone to see and do. And if any of these apps inspire you, then remix them and customize them to make something that's truly your own. Discover something new today!

Bits, Bops, Bots, and Boxes

Gotta CAPTCHA 'Em All 🤖⌨ #

A completely automated public turing test to tell computers and humans apart -- or CAPTCHA, for short -- is often used on web forms to ensure that data that's been entered and submitted has been done by a human. It's a useful way to cut down on spam. The first CAPTCHA is over 30 years old, making it a fundamental part of the World Wide Web.

Web developer and glitch user Patrick Weaver (@PatrickWeaver) has a little fun with CAPTCHAs in his Glitch app Please Confirm You Are A Robot. Enter your name, tick the checkbox, and see if you can gain access!

Build Your Own Song Bracket 🎤📊 #

Brackets aren't just for college basketball anymore! Talk to five fans of any music artist, and chances are you'll get five different answers as to which tune is their best.

Glitch user Renato (@Renato) created a bracket ranking app based on the repetoire of popular rapper Lil Peep; just click each song to advance them throughout the bracket. Try remixing it and customizing it for your favorite music artist!

Going in Circles ⭕↔⭕ #

Math is fantastic for solving problems and figuring out patterns -- that's where the famous Venn diagram comes from. But what happens if you try to merge a bunch of circles at once?

Mathematician and Glitch User Christian Lawson-Perfect (@christianp) answers that question with an app called Spontaneous Venning. As the simulation runs, people either wander about, walk in a circle, gravitate towards the center, or go towards (or away from) others like them. Refresh the app to run a new trial!

Lines, Dots, Circles, and Boxes 🔳⚫ #

Programmers are creating really stunning artwork on Glitch using P5.js. Generative artist Anders Hoff (@inconvergent) is even trying out art on Glitch and created a small sandbox with examples that you can view, remix, and make your own. Which one is your favorite?

Fun with Micro:bit! 📲🤖 #

Here at Glitch, our new design engineer Tiffany Tseng (@scientiffic) has been experimenting with micro:bit devices. These tiny tools contain sensors, LEDs and other apparatuses, and are often used to teach basic programming concepts in a tangible way.

Through her work, Tiff has built several nifty starter apps that let you control and read sensor values from a micro:bit! You'll need a micro:bit to put these apps to use, of course, but check out the videos below to get an idea of how they work!

"i hope u dance" 🎶🎧 #

Jenn Schiffer (@jennschiffer) is our director of community engineering here at Glitch...and also a recording artist! (By recording, I mean recording .)

Jenn, along with Phillip Calvin (@pnc), recently released a compilation of random song lyrics from their voicemail messages titled "i hope u dance".

Sit back, dim the lights, and click play on the fist song to listen to the dulcet tones of pOnD wAtEr. (Jenn's even made it so the songs continue playing consecutively -- no interaction required!)

Featured Illustrator of the Week: Michael DeForge #

This week, our featured illustrator on Glitch is Michael DeForge! Michael is based out of Toronto, and his illustrations are both esoteric and familiar, filled with vibrant colors and simple, childlike wonder.

View more of Michael's work at his website, and check out his illustrations based on our featured apps!

The variety of apps in this week's roundup really shows how flexible Glitch is as a tool for creation and self-expression. You can start from scratch, build something with a buddy, or remix an already existing app and customize it to your heart's content. What will you create today?

Music To Your Ears

What Does The Fox Say? #

There are several hilarious characters on the Canadian sitcom Schitt's Creek, especially the dramatic and verbose Moira Rose. If you love fruit wine as much as she does, then you'll find this app from Glitch user Emily C. (@emilyca11) positively delightful.

What Would Moira Rose Say? cycles through quotes from Moira along with definitions from Dictionary.com. Try remixing the app and making your own vocabulary builder!

Lite Spots #

One of the latest projects from creative coder and Glitch user Sean Catangui (@seancaat) takes us back to the days of Winamp and audio visualization plugins.

VJ is a work in progress (you could say it's complete), and uses SVG animations to create a trippy and colorful scene. Press the F key for a waveform to appear, and press the spacebar to change the color and size of the circles. The artist's name is fixed, but you can remix the app and change it to whatever you'd like. Show us how else you would improve upon this app!

Blurred Lines #

Developer and Glitch user Johan Karlsson (@DonkarlssonSan) calls himself a "creative coder by night," and Text by Lines is the latest in a series of projects exploring motion and geometry.

Type the text of your choice in the text field at the top left of the page to change what's displayed. Try using some fancy Unicode text, and then right-click anywhere in the app to save your creation as an image.

Electric Slide #

Generative artist and Glitch user Kate Compton (@galaxykate) is well known for the beautiful visual works she creates using code.

Her latest project is Slidertoy, a platform for creating procedurally-generated terrains and other art. According to Kate, this platform is best for those with at least some knowledge of JavaScript, and so far has only been tested for Chrome.

Try out the Slidertoy example for yourself!

Patchwork Quilt #

Fall is here, and that means cooler temperatures, warmer beverages, and cozy interiors — especially if you've got a nice quilt to snuggle under to keep warm. But if you don't, maybe you can get some quilting inspiration from web developer and Glitch user Clara Beyer (@csb324).

QuiltBot is a generative art project that not only creates new colorful quilts, but also tweets out the designs with some helpful quilting tips and other koans. Now all I need is a cozy fireplace app and I'm good for the season.

Featured Illustrator of the Week: Pepa Prieto Puy #

This week's featured illustrator is the talented Pepa Prieto Puy. Her use of bright colors, minimal textures, and simple line art allows the viewer to immediately experience and interpret the meaning of her work.

Take a look at Pepa's work for our featured apps this week, and see more of her portfolio at http://pepaprietopuy.tumblr.com!

Whether you're coding solo or working with a group, Glitch makes creating apps as clear as a bell. Remix any of the apps you like here and fine tune them to your heart's content. And if you get stuck, just raise your hand and someone will be there to chime in and help! You got this!

Build Firebase Apps Instantly, on Glitch

There’s nothing quite like that feeling of having a new project idea and jumping straight into building it. You’re buzzing with excitement to get coding and create this new thing, but then reality hits. Staring at a blank editor, there’s a lot of decisions you have to think through up front. From configuring servers to storing data, to authenticating users, to how to set up your app to support the other technologies you might need down the line.

Of course, Glitch can help with that — it’s the easiest way to get started building on the web. You never have to start from a blank slate, you can remix an already working project and off you go. But once you’re started, we want you to use whichever tools you’re comfortable with, and so we’ve always made easy to build your app on Glitch and on other services too.

Today, we’re making that even easier. With our new integration with Firebase Hosting, we automatically detect when you’re creating a Firebase app on Glitch, and magically provide the option to deploy it straight to Firebase — directly from within Glitch. As well as view the Firebase console, and the deployed app.

A Firebase App in 5 Seconds #

You can combine the power and simplicity of Glitch with the extensive tools provided by Firebase — Google’s mobile and web application development platform. Firebase doesn’t just provide useful technologies that can help you build and refine your apps, like user authentication and crash reporting, it also provides features that can help you grow your user base, like notifications and Firebase Dynamic Links. And if you’re looking to monetize your creations there’s Admob and Google Adwords integrations too.

This flexibility means you don’t have to worry about those future possibilities — between Glitch and Firebase, we’ve got you covered wherever your idea takes you.

Getting Started #

To get started, add a ‘firebase.json’ file to any project on Glitch. The Firebase team at Google have created a set of remixable starter projects that show you how it works. Just remix them, make your changes and when you’re ready, hit ‘Deploy to Firebase’ 🚀

If you get stuck, check out our help doc or just raise your hand.

See the Firebase team live-coding an app on Glitch using the new integration at Firebase Summit:

From day one, we’ve made sure you have complete code portability on Glitch. We don’t use any proprietary protocols or libraries, so you can download or export your project and it will just work elsewhere without requiring any changes. And with our new Firebase Hosting integration, we’ve taken that a step further. We can’t wait to see what you create! 🎆💪🏾

The Cutting-Edge of the Web with Ada Rose Cannon

As developer advocate and principal engineer at Samsung, Ada Rose Cannon works on the cutting-edge of Web technologies. From helping promote advanced web features like progressive web apps, web virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), to contributing to open source projects that help developers build great web applications.

As co-chair of the W3C Immersive Web Working Group, Ada is helping to bring high-performance VR and AR to the open Web, with APIs to build fully immersive experiences that work with almost any browser-connected VR headset. Her projects on Glitch range from fun games to useful utilities, including the following:

**Ada-Game-Engin**e A WebVR game, built in a week. It's a 3rd-person RPG that enables you to explore the world around you by interacting with text or by moving around the 3D environment.

**Adalytics-Liv**e An auto-updating page hit counter that doesn't use cookies or tracking to provide web stats for a project.

**Earthy-Cours**e The Japanese animated fantasy film character Totoro in a rainy, evening-time WebVR scene.

Shipping Beats Perfection #

Ada has always been exploring what's possible on the Web, whether researching and discovering new web tech and trends at FTLabs or working with coveted creators while at PlayStation. A core part of this work has involved building short-life prototypes, leading to an appreciation of the value of shipping - getting stuff out into the world for people to use and provide feedback on, rather than endless optimization behind closed doors.

"Stuff doesn't have to be perfect," says Ada, "it just needs to work for people." And you can see this approach in action in her write-up "How I built a game in a week". It walks you through the resources, tools, and compromises needed to rapidly create a WebVR game in such a short time-frame.

It's courageous developers like Ada, who not only try things out but who share their code and document their process that helps us all appreciate, that everyone, no matter their skill level or experience, have to make pragmatic choices when coding. By enabling us all to understand how impressive projects really get made, this helps alleviate feelings of impostor syndrome and frustration in others just starting out. Ada's work inspires by making it feel like we can all learn something new and experience the cutting-edge of the Web.

You can follow Ada on Twitter, learn more about her on her site, or see what she creates next on Glitch.

Remember The Time

Deploy to Firebase #

Glitch is an amazing tool for creating a web project from start to finish, and with our new integration with Firebase it's become even better. You can now combine the power and simplicity of Glitch, along with the extensive tools provided by Firebase and deploy your app to Firebase Hosting in a matter of seconds. What's more, the Firebase team at Google have created a few nifty starter apps to help you begin.

Read more in our official announcement, and watch the video below to see the Firebase team live code an app on Glitch!

Listen to Our New Podcast: Function #

We also launched our first podcast this week -- Function

is a podcast from host and Glitch CEO Anil Dash, and is all about how technology shapes culture and communications. Each week, Anil sits down with the developers behind some of the world's best-known apps, games and services, and also talks with users, critics and culture experts to unpack the effects of these features.

Listen to the first episode below where Anil chats with former Dance Dance Revolution animator Ty Robinson and Brooklyn rapper 2 Milly about the concept of commodifying culture through video games. Subscribe to Function wherever you find fine podcasts.

Spider-Man vs. Green Goblin #

Last month, we showed you a really fun Spider-Man themed tower defense style game from high school student and Glitch user Christian Cromer (@ChristianCromer). Christian is back at it with his latest app, a side-scroller adventure game with a new foe -- the infamous Green Goblin!

Jump between the platforms and shoot webs at the Green Goblin to win the game. Don't fall -- one slip-up and it's game over.

A Coda for Codetober #

Throughout last month, many of you participated in Codetober - a variation on the popular Inktober challenge. Engineer and Glitch user Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) put her own spin on the challenge by making variations on the same app every day in October.

View all the days of #inktober: an experiment below. Which one is your favorite?

You Want HOW MANY Years Experience? #

The tech industry moves pretty fast, and recruiters know this well. There always seems to be a new language or framework to learn, but it can be frustrating when you encounter a job listing that wants you to have 5+ years of experience in a half-dozen skills for an entry-level junior developer position. Worse still is if the language or framework hasn't even existed for that long!

Luckily, Glitch user James (@jsrn) built an app for tech recruiters that should prevent this from happening in the future. This list lets you know just how long certain technologies have existed, and you can filter the list by typing in the language or framework of your choice. Send this off to the next recruiter who requires you to have a decade of Tensorflow experience!

An Ode to Generative Poetry #

Okay, my poetry skills could use some work, but luckily writer, coder and Glitch user Rory Green (@rorycodinstuff) has just the app to help. This generative poem template continually creates random stanzas the longer it runs. Try remixing it and changing up the code and language and become your own poet laureate!

Visualize A Library of Color #

Earlier this year, we spoke with Jer Thorp, innovator-in-residence at the Library of Congress. We spoke about Jer creating apps using Glitch, and one of his experiments, A Library of Color, is both informative and colorful.

Use the selection box at the top left to toggle between data sets, and watch as the bands of colors change based on the text interepreted from the titles of the records.

Featured Illustrator of the Week: David Biskup #

This week, we are honored to have the work of London-based illustrator David Biskup. His minimalist style combines strong lines, bold colors, and playful expressions to create a look that's all his own.

View more of David's work at his website, and check out his illustrations based on our featured apps.

As you move forward in life, sometimes it helps to take a look back. The apps we've featured this week show what we can create by building on a theme. Do you have a project on Glitch that deserves a second look? Dust it off, remix it, and make it into something new!

Put a Spin on It

This Week on Function: Apple Notes Apologies #

Why do so many celebrities use the Apple Notes app for social media apologies? On the latest episode of Function, we took a deep dive into this topic with insights from writer and culture expert Kara Brown and senior user experience designer Regine Gilbert.

Listen to the episode below, and subscribe to Function on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hands-Free Duck Hunt #

One of my earliest gaming memories is playing with my brother... and cheating by placing the Zapper right against the TV screen to shoot the ducks. Eventually I improved my aim and played the game regularly (I promise!)

Now you can relive the fun of Zapper-free with this really fun app by developer and Glitch user Oz Ramos (@labofoz). It uses your computer's webcam to trace your facial movements; just look at the ducks to aim, and smile to shoot. Check out the video below for an example of how it works!

The Dark Souls of Chess #

Chess is one of the oldest games in the world, but that hasn't stopped developer and Glitch user Byron Hulcher (@byronhulcher) from finding a new, unique way to make the game even more challenging.

Chess but harder is like the classic game you already know, but there's a '' twist with some of the board being hidden by a mysterious darkness. Can you capture the king when you can't even see where it is?

Fun with Fractals #

Have you heard of fractals? Wikipedia defines them as a "detailed, recursive, and infinitely self-similar mathematical set", and if you've seen lightning bolts or even frost crystals on glass, then you know that fractals are all around us.

The Sierpinski triangle is a special fractal, and perhaps one of the most recognizable and easily created ones as well. K-12 computer science teacher and Glitch user Erik Nauman (@enauman) built an app that lets you adjust the "nuttiness" on a Sierpinski triangle and explode the fractal into its seperate components, with artistic results. Click the "redraw" button for a new triangle.

To N-Finity and Beyond #

Algorithmic artist and Glitch user n-schedé (@n-schede) builds beautiful browser-based creations, and their latest work of art is another masterpiece.

N-finity is an ever-changing geometric wonder, and it's quite hypnotizing to watch. Click the "Randomise" button for new colors, and then sit back and watch the pattern slowly morph over time. Isn't math beautiful?

Featured Illustrator of the Week: Tor Brandt #

We're lucky this week to have the talent of Denmark-based artist Tor Brandt on full display. His simple line drawings and use of a limited but dreamy color palette are pleasing, dreamy and ethereal.

View more of Tor's work at his website, and look at his work on our featured apps of the week.

What's old can become new again - you just need a little thought and creativity. The apps we've highlighted on Glitch this week exemplify just that. Why not remix one of them and put your own spin on it too?

Kickstarting Creativity

New on Glitch: Custom Domains #

One of our most requested features is the ability to use your own domains with Glitch, and now you can! We've teamed up with Fly.io to enable custom domains on Glitch in just a couple of clicks.

Function: All About the GIF #

Ah, the humble animated GIF. We use them on social media or in text messages as a way to signify a reaction, tell a story, or just to have a laugh. It's not all fun and games though — organizations and media companies are cracking down on animated GIF usage, with some going as far as issuing copyright notices against animated GIF creators. On the latest episode of Function, we take a closer look at this and other GIF-related issues with our guests Kenyatta Cheese and T. Kyle MacMahon.

Hands-on Code Labs in Google's Web.Dev #

This week was Google's Chrome Dev Summit. Among their many exciting announcements was web.dev, their fab new learning platform which helps you learn and apply the web's modern capabilities to your own sites and apps. They've integrated Glitch into the platform to power their hands-on code labs. Check it out!

Kicking-off with Codevember #

Last month we highlighted some of the amazing apps folks were creating on Glitch for Codetober. Now Codevember is in full swing and it's got many people creating too. Codevember is a challenge for developers to sharpen their creativity and improve their skills. The goal is to build a creative piece of code every day of November.

Algorithmic art creator n–schedé has been busy, creating spindles, cat-eyes, bomp and more.

Of course, this one is a fave of ours! 💖

Building Blocks #

We collaborated with WeTransfer on "facebox" - an audio and video recording app that enables you to record yourself in your browser and download the recording. It's a super-simple way to get started with WeTransfer's APIs that allow you to send things from one place to another, or organize content onto visual boards.

Michael Käsdorf created "face-api-js-for-beginners". It's a remixable version of Jeremy Ellis' face-api.js starter app, which makes it easier to get started with face detection and face recognition in the browser.

And if you’re curious about using Magenta to make music with Machine Learning but don’t know where to start, "hello-magenta" is an interactive introduction by Google Software Engineer Monica Dinculescu.

A Blast from the Past #

The 90s brought us a lot of things... the Spice Girls, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Power Rangers, Tomb Raider, Hypercolor t-shirts, and Magic Eye.

For me, Magic Eye mostly meant staring cross-eyed at a picture for hours, yelling "it's not working!" I hope you had more luck with them though, as Glitch Design Engineer Tiffany Tseng has brought them back!

In "magic-eye" you can draw an image, click 'Show Magic Eye' and it'll be transformed into a "Magic Eye" picture (also known as a random dot stereogram!). Save the image and share it with friends.

Serendipitous Connections #

Next up, we have a couple of creations by the Library of Congress' Innovator-in-Residence, Jer Thorp. Both help you explore the library's enormous collection through serendipitous connections.

'Library of Time' for example is a clock, and the numbers which tell you the time relate to the 25 million objects in the library's holdings. Every time you look at it, it's different!

And there's 'Library of Color' too. This one finds colorful words in the titles of objects in the collection and paints huge interactive rainbows that you can use to explore it.

If you're interested to learn more about innovation at the Library of Congress, then check out our interview with Jer about his work and exploring the human-side of data.

Featured Illustrator of the Week: Annie Ruygt #

Annie Ruygt is a freelance illustrator who works primarily with startups, helping them bring their brand and story to life through illustration. We're excited to have her as the guest illustrator on Glitch this week as she's worked closely with Fly.io, who we worked with on our new custom domain support.

See more of Annie's work on her website and Instagram.

Our featured apps this week are all about kicking-off creative endeavors - whether it's bringing things back from the past, or starting things afresh. We're excited to see what you create next on Glitch 💪🏼

Look, Listen and Learn

Should Twitter Have an Edit Button? #

This week on Function, we answer one of the most requested questions in tech: should Twitter have an edit button? We talk with Leslie Miley, former engineering manager at Twitter, about the behind-the-scenes technical and ethical considerations that need to take place to carry out this feature from a product level.

We also talk to Andy Carvin, author, professor, and former social media editor at NPR. Andy knows firsthand how one misinformed tweet can have a dangerous ripple effect, and talks about how the possibility of editing that tweet may have caused even more damage.

Listen to the episode below, and subscribe to Function on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

The Sound of Art #

Pioneering computer artist Vera Molnár's work is characterized by bold, geometric themes and shapes. Molnár used Fortran and BASIC in her work, which seems like a lifetime ago when you think about the speed at which technology and computer graphics have changed.

Software Engineer and Glitch user Monica Dinculsescu (@notwaldorf) builds on Molnár's creations by transforming one of her earliest works, "Un Deux Trois," into a mysterious 8-bit song. As the music goes on, the painting comes to life. Keep refreshing the app to hear different instruments and melodies.

Bringing Hands-Free Web Functionality to Everyone #

Portland-based digital creator Oz Ramos (@LabOfOz) is doing some really awesome work using Handsfree.js, a library he created that adds hands-free functionality to any website or web service. As a School of AI Fellow, Oz has a goal to connect one million people to the web using Handsfree.js.

Oz has made his work available on Glitch as a helpful starter kit, so anyone can begin using Handsfree.js in their own projects. Remix the app and show us what you create!

Adding 3D and AR Content with Polymer #

At this year's Chrome Dev Summit, Google talked about the next great platform for the immersive web: your web browser. A lot of this is made possible by the Polymer project, a set of libraries, tools, and standards to help build a better web.

Sounds pretty cool, right? If this piques your interest, then take a look at model-viewer. This app by Glitch user Christopher Joel (@cdata) uses LitElement, a simple base class for creating fast, lightweight web components. Remix the app and give it a try!

Getting Started with Material Design #

The Material Design framework gives you an expansive set of guidelines and tools to create user interfaces, apps, and websites. But it can be difficult to figure out where or how to start using it.

Design advocate Yasmine Evjen (@yasmineevjen) and software engineers Matt Goo (@moog16), Bonnie Zhou (@bonniezhou), and Lynn Jepsen (@lynnmercier) — have created a useful app that serves as a primer to Material Components and Theming. Even better, it features a bunch of great photos of dogs to help you learn. Remix the app and follow the well-documented README for more information.

Striking a Chord #

To the average person, math may just seem like a bunch of numbers and equations, but there's a lot of elegance and beauty if you peek just under the surface. Fractals, tesselations, the golden ratio...math is all around us in many ways.

This chord machine app from technologist and Glitch user Andrew Rodgers (@acedrew) is a great example of this kind of mathematical beauty. As chords are drawn around a circle, a cardioid pattern is revealed; adjust the line color, multiplicand, and scale to generate different drawings. You can also record the animation and save it as a video. Experiment with the settings and see what you can create.

Featured Illustrator of the Week: Bill Rebholz #

We are so honored this week to feature the work of New York-based illustrator Bill Rebholz. His bold style, thick lines, and chunky graphics are charmingly retro, yet very much modern and fresh. Is it possible for a drawing to have charisma? I think so!

Check more of Bill's amazing work at his website, and take a look at his illustrations for this week's slate of featured apps.

As we head into the long holiday weekend, we can't help but feel thankful for the tremendous community and the outpouring of creativity and innovation on Glitch. What are you thankful for this year?

Home for the Holidays

This Week on Function: Copyrights on YouTube #

On this week's episode of Function, we look into YouTube and copyright infringement with entertainment lawyer Gordon Firemark and YouTuber and musician Paul Davids. Gordon specializes in theatre, film, television, and new media law, and he breaks down how works become copyright, talks about the concept of fair use, and discusses with Anil why a copyright disclaimer could do more harm than good.

Later, Anil speaks with Paul about how YouTube's Content ID system resulted in getting a copyright strike on his own original song. As someone who has been on the other side of this issue, Paul offers a thoughtful and nuanced explanation on his situation that will influence how you think about your work and copyrights.

Listen to the episode below, and subscribe to Function on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

Love, Santa Claus #

Kids all over the world -- including those who are kids at heart -- are busy writing letters to Santa Claus so he knows exactly what gifts to bring when he slides down the chimney on Christmas Eve. Riley Walz created a project called Santa, Mail Me! which lets parents order handwritten, personalized letters from Santa to their children, and a Glitch app is part of the engine behind it!

Riley detailed the entire process on Twitter, which includes connecting to Airtable's API using a Glitch app to manage the orders. It's a really fantastic example of how Glitch can be used to help connect services (and even spread a little holiday cheer).

Feed Your Obsession #

One of my favorite ways to pass the time when I'm waiting in the airport is by researching random topics online. If you have a curious mind and want to dive into some new information, check out randomobsession, an app from Glitch user @elankiderman.

The app pulls from Quartz's daily newsletter called , and every time you click or tap the big red button in the app, you'll be served a new subject to learn about to stimulate your mind. What did you learn about today?

A Year in Review #

Santa's not the only one making a list and checking it twice! A lot of people are making their year-end lists right now, including our own Tiffany Tseng (@scientiffic). Her app includes her favorite books of 2018, but feel free to remix the app for yourself and customize it with your own books (or movies or albums or whatever you'd like).

Pinching Cartoon Cheeks #

When I was a kid, the holidays meant seeing relatives visit from out of town and having them furiously pinch my chubby cheeks. "Oh, you are just so cute that I could eat you up!" It's endearing, sure, but also...pinched cheeks hurt, man. Not cool.

Luckily, Glitch user qwer (@Gumball12) has created an app so you can pinch and stretch the cheeks of the characters from Choose from Gumball, Darwin, or Anaïs and start pinching and stretching. No pain necessary!

Icons at the Disco #

The holidays are also the perfect time for parties and get-togethers. If you need some quick festive cheer for your winter shindig, Glitch user Jonathan Daggerhart (@daggerhart) has you covered.

Abstract Disco! is a disco. And it's abstract. But more than that, it's a grid of randomly flashing colors that you can customize using different emoji and icons. Add a little pop art flair to your next holiday hangout.

Evergreen Evernote #

I jot down ideas and other things in a notes app on my phone all the time. Sometimes, it's easy to find what I'm looking for when I need it, but other times, notes will easily get lost in the shuffle.

If you use Evernote and find yourself in this same situation, Glitch user and IBM engineer Christopher Galtenberg (@galtenberg) created an app which randomly presents new notes from your archive. You will need to remix the app and add your Evernote credentials to get started, but once you've done that, it will help you remember and discover insights you completely forgot about.

Featured Illustrator of the Week: Conxhita Herrero #

This week, we have the illustrations of the talented Conxhita Herrero here on Glitch. Her linework, rich use of color, and eccentric character design give her work a distinct charm.

Take a look at her tiles below on this week's featured apps, and learn more about her at her website.

There's a lot of activity going on this time of year, so we hope this week's roundup of apps helps you with organizing, unwinding, or just having a little fun. 'Tis the season for creativity! What will you make?

Computer? Make It So.

This Week on Function: Podcast Advertising #

Squarespace. Mailchimp. Casper. Blue Apron. If you’re a regular podcast listener, then there’s no doubt you’ve heard ads from these companies, among many others.

This week on Function, we examine the world of podcast advertising. Host and Glitch CEO Anil Dash sits down with Francesco Baschieri, president of Voxnest, and talks about some of the trends and technology behind podcast ads. We also hear from New York City podcasting duo Jade + XD and pull back the curtain on advertising and monetization from an independent media perspective.

Listen to the episode below, and subscribe to Function on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

Make Your Own Audiograms #

Speaking of podcasts, you may have seen some of your favorite shows share small clips from recent episodes in the form of a video. (We even do it for our podcast.)

There's several ways to make these shareable videos -- also called audiograms -- and Glitch user Tennyson (@tennyson) created an app that lets you build your own custom audiograms. Upload your audio of choice, edit the waveform, and use your own image to make the audiogram come alive.

Become A Piano Virtuoso #

When I was a kid, there was someone in my class who was a whiz on the piano. He could hear a song on the radio, sit down at the keys, and play it and riff on it like he wrote it himself. Except for a jazzy version of , the piano was never my forte. But thanks to engineer and Glitch user Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf), I can finally tickle the ivories like a true professional. And so can you!

Monica's app Piano Genie mimics an entire piano in just eight keys, and it uses magenta.js to automatically improvise new notes. Check out the explanation behind how the app works, then give it a try and compose the next smash hit!

Write An Unreadable Novel #

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) takes place every November, and hundreds of thousands of people participate in the marathon journey of writing a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days. National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo) is...a bit different. Instead of stressing over characters and plot lines, you can let your computer write your novel for you. There is one rule: you must share at least one novel along with your source code at the end.

Artist, musician and Glitch user Emma Winston (@emmawinston) published her NaNoGenMo novel "Boring Tales From Tiny Places", and it was generated using JavaScript, RiTa and Tracery. Read the novel below, and remix it to make your own tech-generated magnum opus.

Teach Your Computer To Talk #

Humans have created machines to emulate human speech for over a hundred years. Bell Labs created the vocoder in the 1930s, and as computing has grown over the years, now we have apps like web-speech from Glitch user @yung_kropotkin. Type in the text of your choice, and select from over twenty different speech types, and change up the rate and pitch to find the voice that you like best.

Change The Government #

If 2018 has taught us anything, it's that tech innovation and modern government aren't exactly the best of friends. Regardless of that, we still use technology to rally behind candidates, champion important causes and spread the word about the laws that effect us all.

Canadian high schooler and Glitch user Maggie Lee (@Margaretl33) wanted to clear up the confusion about the upcoming referendum in British Columbia around electoral reform. She built a website on Glitch that explains the three proposed systems, and it's been so popular that her local newspaper even helped amplify it to their readers.

According to Maggie, this is an important issue that "could really change who we see in our legislature and what happens in our province."

Featured Illustrator of the Week: Yacoyon #

We are so pleased to once again feature the work of Yacoyon! With a nod to the early days of computing, Yacoyon's pixel art style is a perfect accompaniment to our roundup.

View more of Yacoyon's work on Instagram, and see Yacoyon's visions for this week's featured apps.

Technology allows us to do so much, and with Glitch, you can make your ideas come alive. Start from any project, remix it, and come up with your own unique creation. What will you make today?

Looky What We Made

A riot of color and creativity, is a free, 76-page book showcasing some of the 1 million projects the Glitch community has created in 2018. There's everything from useful tools to cutting-edge VR experiences, smart bots, and apps that help advance important causes.

Be inspired by over 100 projects from 75 creators, and artwork by a dozen guest illustrators from all over the world.

Better Living Through Apps

This Week on Function: Behind the Rising Labor Movement in Tech #

On November 1, 2018, thousands of Google employees around the world staged a mass walkout in protest of how the company handled claims of sexual misconduct. While this is not the first time we have seen protests at this scale, it does signal to the larger community that workers at huge tech companies like these are at an inflection point. When is enough, enough?

This week on Function, host and Glitch CEO Anil Dash sits down with Leigh Honeywell, Mark S. Luckie, and Matt Rivitz to take a look at the rising labor movement in tech from those whose advocacy helped set the foundation for what we see today around the dissent from tech workers.

Listen to the episode below, and subscribe to Function on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

Private Playlists, Please #

'Tis the season for holiday cheer, and for a lot of people, that means making and jamming out to playlists on Spotify. Sharing playlists is always great, but since they're public by default, anyone following you can see every playlist you have, including that one for Swedish pop from the 90s called . (Okay, that may just be me.)

But thanks to engineer and Glitch user Eric Lewis (@EricLewis), you can now make all your Spotify playlists private with a single click. Just click the green button to give the app permisions to your Spotify account, and voila -- your playlists are now for your eyes (and ears) only.

Dive Into #

Today's games are a feast for the senses with 4K graphics and killer surround sound. But back when I first started gaming, text-based RPGs were king. All the graphics and sound were in your mind. It sort of gives a new meaning to virtual reality, if you think about it.

Dive: The Game is a callback to those early days of video games. You start off as an intrepid adventure with a calling to the sea. Each choice leads you deeper into the story as you discover the mysteries of the briny deep. Thank you for the trip down memory lane, Eve (@eveahe)!

A Bouquet of Sound #

An app that can "ingest music and generate a field of visualization flowers" sounds pretty trippy, but the effect it creates is stunning. WaveWall is the latest app from technologist and Glitch user Andrew Rodgers (@acedrew), and it turns music into an animated visualization of revolved waveforms. You can upload a song or talk into your microphone, and then download the resulting design as an SVG or PNG file.

Take Your Medicine, Elsie #

As the saying goes, invention is the mother of necessity. What started out as a simple request between two Twitter users ended up becoming a handy way for small farmers to figure out dosage amounts for their livestock. Enter in the weight of your animal along with recommended dosage and preparation strength numbers, and let the calculator do the rest. Thank you Glitch user Adrienne L. Travis (@adrienne) for your ingeniuity!

Watch Your Language #

The best technology doesn't need to smack you over the head to let you know that it's doing its job. Sometimes, a gentle reminder is enough. This is especially the case when it comes to inclusive language, and this app from Glitch user Knut Melvær (@kmelve) is a handy little Slack bot that pops in to suggest alernate terms to use instead of the word "guys". It's quick, non-shaming, and best of all, easy to install. Just click the "Add to Slack" button and start improving your Slack team today.

Featured Illustrator of the Week: Aaron Fernandez #

Aaron Fernandez — also known as "Aaron The Illustrator" — is our featured illustrator on Glitch for this week! His distinct linework, combined with bright, flourescent colors, makes his drawings instantly stand out from the crowd.

Check out more of Aaron's incredible work on his website or on Instagram, and see what he's created for our featured apps.

Our apps for this week's roundup embody the spirit that makes Glitch such a tremendous community for creators. Whether you're collaborating with someone or just whipping up a quick idea for yourself, Glitch has the tools you need to get the job done.

Welcoming Thimble to Glitch

TL;DR: Mozilla is beginning the process of shutting down Thimble. While Thimble won’t be closed until December 2019, we’re working with the Thimble team at Mozilla to make it as easy as possible to migrate your Thimble projects to Glitch now, so you can continue to build and publish apps, web pages, and more for free.

Thimble is Mozilla’s browser-based, educational code editor. As Mozilla has refocused its resources on other projects, the Thimble project has been in maintenance mode for some time, and recently the team made a plan to sunset the Thimble project in December 2019.

At Glitch, we’re committed to the Thimble community, which means keeping the more than 1.4 million Thimble projects online, and providing Thimble users with a new home for your projects and users so that you can continue to edit and build new projects on Glitch for free.

We’re working to make the migration process as simple as possible — it’ll be just a few clicks. What’s more, Thimble’s incremental shut-down is being deliberately timed around semesters to minimize disruption to course schedules.

If you’re not already familiar with Glitch, then learn more by watching this video and reading about how Glitch works.

The connection between the Thimble and Glitch communities goes much deeper than just being able to import projects. At Glitch, we also celebrate creativity, inclusion, and openness and we’re committed to making learning to code more accessible. We already work with some of the most respected tech education organizations and folks in the world, including many who’ve been major parts of the Thimble community. From national youth development nonprofits like Mouse, and student coding communities like freeCodeCamp and Major League Hacking (MLH), to individual K-12 and College educators.

Mouse has written about their experience using Glitch for their educational work.

If you’re a Thimble user who wants to learn more about migrating your project to Glitch, then take a look at our Thimble help docs and Mozilla’s FAQ. But if you have any questions right now, then just let us know — we’ve created a category especially for Thimble users on our forum.

Welcome to Glitch! We can’t wait to see what you create 💪🏾✨

Going Out With A Bang!

This Week on Function: Why Are Outdated Voting Machines Still Running U.S. Elections? #

The 2018 midterm elections have wrapped up here in the U.S., and issues with voting machines are back in the news cycle. It's not a hanging chad situation like the 2000 presidential election recount in Florida, but malfunctions, outdated tech, and talk of interference from foreign powers has tanked voter confidence. With the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign season about to kickoff, how do you rock the vote when you're not even sure it's being properly counted? And how do you put trust in a voting system that's full of weak links?

On Function this week, we're looking at voting machines and election security. Anil talks with Verified Voting data consultant Matt Bernhard about the history of voting machines and the broad social implications of technology and privacy. We also talk to Maurice Turner, a former poll worker and senior technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, who gives practical advice for individual voters who are worried about the trustworthiness of their local precincts.

Listen to the episode below, and subscribe to Function on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

Glitch x Thimble Announcement #

Earlier this week, Mozilla announced that they are sunsetting Thimble, their browser-based educational code editor. Fret not, because we've partnered with Thimble to bring the great community projects built there over to Glitch.

Check out our announcement on how you can migrate your work over in just a few clicks, and sign up for our introductory webinars in January and February 2019. If you have any questions, just drop us a line in our support forum.

Twitter Archive Deleter #

Twitter has made a tremendous impact on the Web, but if you've been on there for any recent amount of time, you know that it can become way too easy to tweet any and every thought that comes into your head. Not only that, your archive of tweets is ripe for the picking for any other Twitter user to amplify and completely blow out of context.

Start the year on a fresh slate with this app from Glitch user Ryan Giglio (@ryangiglio) and delete your entire Twitter archive. To get started, just remix the app and follow the directions in the README. Don't forget to download your tweet archive first (that is, if you'd like to hold on to it for nostalgia's sake).

Exploji #

Speaking of going out with a bang, London-based engineer and Glitch user Rowan Manning (@rowanmanning) created an app that turns regular boring emoji into exploding emoji -- Spice up those conversations in your Slack team and add a little to your chat room. (And unlike most exploding things, you can try this at home.)

Magic Sketchpad #

Unlock your inner Picasso this holiday season with this really fun drawing app from Google engineer and Glitch user Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf). Magic Sketchpad uses machine learning to complete a doodle you create based on a specific category you select, such as dolphin or cat. Try drawing multiple categories on the same page and let the app do the rest.

Sine-Us Waves #

Python contributor, educator, and Glitch user Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick (@cfbolz) highlights a great educational use for Glitch. In Porting Jürgen LIT Fischer's "sinus" from Fortran, Carl talks about Fischer's computer artwork, walks through the process of converting it to JavaScript, and then concludes with an interactive version of one of Fischer's pieces. If learning to code is on your list of new year's resolutions, then Carl's app is a great template to follow as you begin your coding journey.

Looky What We Made #

2018 has been a banner year on Glitch, and what better way to close things out than with a celebration of color and creativity?

is a free, 76-page book showcasing some of the 1 million projects created by the Glitch community this year. Get inspired by projects from over 75 creators, as well as artwork from a dozen guest illustrators from all over the world. Download the book today!

Featured Illustrator of the Week: María Ramos #

We're so fortunate to have the work of Madrid-based illustrator María Ramos for our final roundup of 2018. With flat, monoline drawings and a primary color palette, María's work reminds the viewer of a simpler time. View more of María's work on her website and on Instagram!

As the year comes to a close, all of here at Glitch want to wish you a safe and happy holiday season. Spend some time on Glitch discovering all that the community has to offer, and if you get inspired, then hop in and create something of your own. See you in 2019!

About MythBusters Jr.

Trailer #

MythBusters Jr. | All Episodes

Adam Savage is back satisfying some of your most burning science- and pop-culture-related questions (Can anyone hear you scream in space? Does an arrow really fly straight?), and helping him are six of the brightest young minds in America.

The junior MythBusters are:

This 15-year-old from Lancaster, CA, is a skilled builder and robotics wiz, who is also experienced in CAD drawing and 3D printing. In 2017 Valerie was the team leader of her school’s robotics team that won the state championship, qualifying them to go to the World’s VEX Robotics competition. Valerie and her partner recently won 1st place in their school’s science fair, which later won 2nd place district wide.

The 12-year-old from Brooklyn is a self-taught maker, programmer & circuit wiz. At 9 years-old, he started building PCs and “Franken-Mac” computers; at 10 years old, he took his first microcontroller and was blinking LEDs in one night, soldering his first circuit boards by the end of the same week. By 11 he was featured in “Make” for his early-model “min-tin” sized video game system, now a staple of maker culture.

A 12-year-old with a background in coding, robotics and motion physics, Cannan will be entering his second year of college in the fall at Texas Christian University where he’s a double major in Physics & Astronomy and Engineering. His dream is to be an astronaut and perhaps be one of the first humans to walk on Mars.

This Slidell, Louisiana 15-year-old has been around cars in his dad’s custom hot rod shop since he was a baby. After building a mini chopper by himself at the age of 12, he entered a car show and won 1st place. From fixing up jacked up 4x4s to building scooters, to modifying radio controlled cars, Jesse knows his way around a vehicle. He is also skilled at drawing, crafting and building models.

The 14-year-old from Metairie, Louisiana is a builder who has been involved with remodeling houses with her father since a young age. Rachel was a 2016 and 2017 Broadcom MASTERS Top 30 Finalist. In 2017 she was awarded the Duke TIP challenge certificate and presented her current project to the 2017 American Geophysical Union at Bright Stars, a forum that hosted over 20,000 earth and space scientists from around the world.

The South Dakota 13-year-old is a multiple award-winning, patent pending inventor, builder, and maker. An advocate for STEAM, in 2017 Allie was recognized as one of the 21 under 21 girls who are changing the world by Teen Vogue magazine and was also recognized by 3M as one of the top 10 young scientists in the country. In 2016 Allie won the Global Spark Lab Invent-It-Challenge with a frostbite warning system.

Also featured in MythBusters Jr. are builders Tamara Robertson, whose talents have been seen in MythBusters: The Search and SciJinks, and Jon Marcu, who has worked on a number of television and film productions.

MythBusters Jr.

Six of the nation’s most talented kids team up with Adam Savage. Together they’ll tackle a variety of myths and decide if they’re… BUSTED, PLAUSIBLE, or CONFIRMED! Find out on the all new series, MythBusters Jr.

Wednesdays at 9p on SCIENCE

Episode 8: Bug Special #

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

The Big Stick: Can a bug glue-trap trap a human runner? #

If you had a human-scaled bug trap, would you be able to run across it?

First up, Adam and the MBJr's demonstrate the properties of the sticky stuff in question, without hurting any innocent bugs (or Adams!) Next, the MBJr's split into teams and learn about adhesive and cohesive forces and how glues work. They come up with the strongest, safest formula they can, set up their human-scaled bug trap, and take a run at it!

Is spider silk really as strong as steel? #

While a spider is not technically a “bug”, they’re definitely cousins. Bugs and spiders are both in the arthropod family and that’s good enough for us — these eight-legged silk spinners are just too cool to ignore.

It’s been said that the silk of the golden orb spider is twice as strong as Kevlar and five times as strong as steel. Is this really true? The MBJr's set out to stage multiple, precision one-to-one tensile strength tests to see how this miracle silk really stands up to the strongest materials humans have to offer.

A“maze”ing Ants: An ant won't walk across a line of chalk. True or False? #

It’s a classic household remedy: you can stop ants from traipsing into unwanted areas by drawing a line of chalk across their path. Does this really work? Consultation with an entomologist quickly leads to the procurement of a few ant colonies housing the best species of ants available for this test.

The MBJr's study the ant's normal activity up close and personal with macro photography. Small-scale tests are conducted with condensed sugar water set at a distance from the ants to observe how they locate the sweet food source. Once the route to the sugary treat is established, the MBJr’s draw a line of chalk in the ant's path and chart the results!

Try it out! 🐜🐜 Draw lines of chalk to keep the ants at bay and away from your burgers!

Episode 9: Deep Space Hollywood #

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

"In space, no one can hear you scream." True or False? #

Adam and the MBJr's set out to test this famous tagline from the 1979 sci-fi classic — does sound transmit in the vacuum of space? With “vacuum” being the key here, the MBJr’s build a vacuum chamber that will be used throughout the episode.

With Adam’s guidance, they also build an analog “voice box”. They test sound results outside the chamber, but quickly realize that the device works by moving air, an interesting conundrum to be overcome in a vacuum. They then test the sound transmission in the vacuum chamber using microphones to record the results.

Can a fire extinguisher be used as a jetpack in space? #

Sandra Bullock made this maneuver famous in the movie when her character used a fire extinguisher to make a space jump from her capsule to a distant space station. Is this possible?

Adam and the MBJr's conduct a number of small scale experiments using CO cartridges in a vacuum chamber to observe results. Propulsion seems possible, but could you actually use a fire extinguisher to navigate between two points in the zero G vacuum of space?

They scale up the idea by constructing a hovercraft-type device to be used on an ice rink to achieve as frictionless a simulation as possible.

Try it out! 👩🏻‍🚀💨 Blast through the cosmos and avoid space junk to get to the escape pod! Can you make it in time before your fire extinguisher runs out?

Episode 10: Breaking Bad Blow-Up #

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

Magnet Caper: Is it possible to use a monster junkyard magnet to erase a room full of data on computer hard drives through a concrete wall? #

It’s a famous scene from one of Adam’s favorite shows, . When potentially incriminating evidence on a computer hard drive is placed a police station’s evidence room, Walter White pulls up in a panel van and uses a powerful junkyard magnet to wipe the drives inside. In the process, it pulls over shelves, sending metal objects flying, and almost tips over the van itself.

Is that a real world possibility or just television fantasy?

The MBJr's will set out to test this myth to the very last detail! Along the way, they'll study the amazing power of magnets and even stage a spectacular collision between two extremely powerful neodymium magnets.

Furniture Barricade: Can you barricade a room by blocking an unlocked door with furniture? Or can the old “chair under the door knob” technique work too? #

We’ve all seen it in cartoons, TV shows and the movies: our hero is on the run from a bad guy and tries to block the door with a chair jammed under the door knob or by using pieces of furniture. Can this really work?

It seems like common sense: the heavier the object blocking the door, the more effective it will be. But even lighter objects could work if they’re put in the proper configuration! The MBJr's test floor material and learn about friction, drag, and resistance as they test scenarios with a huge stunt man to obtain their results.

Try it out! 📄✂ Can you move the shredder to the documents in a room of magnetized furniture? Oh, it won't be as easy as you think!

All Episodes | About

Episode 1: Duct Tape Special

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

Ask any builder or handyman and they’ll tell you — duct tape is a miracle material — it seemingly can do anything. It’s no surprise that this versatile, “do-all” item has also been a MythBusters favorite over the years — using the humble adhesive tape to lift a 5000lb. car, build a bridge across a chasm, a functioning cannon, a sailboat and an outrigger canoe.

Well, the MythBusters duct tape tradition is alive and well.

Duct Tape Tire Car: Can you make a usable car tire out of duct tape? Can a car navigate an obstacle course riding on FOUR of them? #

In a classic testing of a “viral” video, Adam and the MythBusters will employ a mind boggling amount of duct tape to see how well they can re-invent the “wheel”. Starting with a proof of concept with a bicycle tire, them moving up to a car’s spare — the MythBusters will eventually replace all four tires on a car with duct tape wheels and see how well they will hold up on running the turns on an obstacle course at high speed.

Duct Tape Parachute: Can you make a viable, life-saving parachute out of duct tape? #

In a parallel build, the MBJr’s set out to see if they can construct a viable, life-saving parachute with this miracle adhesive material.

Small scale tests with Buster analogs such as Stretch Armstrong action figures and cinder blocks lead to a full-scale Buster drop — 1000 ft. out of a helicopter. Will the duct tape parachute slow down Buster’s fall to a survivable speed or will our faithful test dummy go splat? It’s a sticky question that only the MBJr’s a helicopter and boatload of duct tape can answer.

Try it out! 🎮 Can you build a parachute to help Eggy survive? If they drop too fast they might crack. 🍳

Choose the parachute material and see what happens!

MythBusters Jr. | All Episodes

About Glitch #

Glitch is the friendly community where you'll build the app of your dreams. Glitch lets you instantly create, remix, edit, and host an app, bot or site, and you can invite collaborators or helpers to simultaneously edit code with you.

Find out more about Glitch.

Making Science Come Alive with MythBusters Jr. and Glitch

Are you ready? Six of the nation’s most talented kids are teaming up with the famous Adam Savage to tackle a variety of myths on the all-new series, Wednesdays at 9pm ET starting January 2nd on SCIENCE.

Let’s take a sneak peek at what to expect this season.

On each episode, Adam and his co-hosts will perform a number of experiments to test the validity of a popular myth. For example, can you make a viable, life-saving parachute out of duct tape? Can a fire extinguisher propel you through zero gravity like a jetpack? Can chalk really keep a swarm of ants at bay? We’ll find out the answers to these mysteries and more on this season of MythBusters Jr.!

Glitch is teaming up with MythBusters Jr. to transform these scientific experiences into interactive apps. For each episode, we will create an app that corresponds to the myth in question, and viewers will have a chance to test the myths out for themselves. And because it’s Glitch, they’ll be able to take their experiments to the next level. Remix the MythBusters Jr. projects and learn how the code works, or even customize the projects to try out entirely new experiments.

And speaking of duct tape, let’s put that myth to the test with our egg drop app!

Check out our MythBusters Jr. page for the latest episodes and apps. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Glitch is the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. On Glitch, you can edit any project and have your own app running instantly. You can even invite friends or helpers to create apps with you.

Find out more about Glitch.

Episode 2: Dynamite Air Freshener

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

Air Freshener Car Blow Up: Can a single spark turn an aerosol air freshener into an explosive? #

Urban legend has it that the ember from a cigarette reacted with a can of slow-leaking aerosol air freshener and caused a bit of a blow up. In another incident, an odiferous car pumped full of air freshener by an over-eager teenager exploded when the car light came on. Could these stories possibly be true? Adam and the MBJr's are on the case!

Soggy Dog Shake: How much water can a wet dog shake off? #

Does a dog lose 70% of its weight on its first shake out of the water? Is the speed of a wet dog's shake in direct correlation to a dog's size? Adam and the MBJr's use a wide array of playful pups to test this myth. By examining the centifugal principles and forces at play, along with the speed of the dogs' oscillations and movements in relation to their size, Adam and the team will gain a lot of information on this soggy subject!

Try it out! 🎮 See how fast it takes you to shake out the water from the dog! 🐶💦

Fire up your webcam and start moving!

MythBusters Jr. | All Episodes

About Glitch #

Find out more about Glitch.

Episode 3: Battery Blast

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

Straight as an Arrow: Does an arrow really fly straight? #

An arrow flies straight — right? Adam and the MBJr's get in touch with their inner Robin Hoods with longbows, crossbows, and compound bows to test exactly how straight an arrow's flight path is. The saying must come from some true origin...or does it?

Will the "Archer's Paradox" end up being true?

Lithium-Ion Battery Garbage Truck Blow Up: Could lithium-ion batteries thrown into household trash cause a garbage truck to explode? #

Lithium ion batteries - those mini-marvels of power storage have been under fire lately – for literally – causing fires. Adam and the MBJr's examine the combustible forces at play with these tricky little devils, and discover what could happen if the wrong battery at the wrong time gets caught in the pinch point of a garbage truck’s hydraulically powered compactor.

Try it out! 🔋 No exploding garbage trucks here! Instead, we'll show you where you can responsibly dispose of your used lithium-ion batteries. Use the app below and find the closest recycling center near you. And a big thank you to Earth911.com and their nation-wide recycling search!

Here's a word from Mitch Ratcliffe, CEO and Managing Editor of Earth911.com:

MythBusters Jr. | All Episodes

About Glitch #

Find out more about Glitch.

Episode 4: Demolition Dominoes

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

Car Crushing Dominoes: Could you crush a car with the force from falling dominoes? #

Your typical store-bought dominoes are all the same size and weight. But let's say you created a set and series where each domino was approximately 1.5x the size and weight of the previous one — could the force generated and amplified from toppling a set of those dominoes be strong enough to crush a car?

Adam and the MBJr's study the math and science behind this scenario to come up with the best layout, technique, and materials necessary to create the devastating effect!

Extreme Jenga: Is it possible to move the last brick on the bottom of a Jenga tower without the entire structure collapsing? #

It takes a steady hand, a deft eye, and a light touch to win at Jenga. Inevitably, the game always ends with a crash because it's impossible to move that last bottom block without knocking down the whole tower...?

The MBJr's are on the case as they examine the principles at play with a Jenga set, including tower construction and the importance of a stable, precisely leveled base (while also keeping in mind the all-important human factor). They'll eventually build their own massive Jenga set to test their theories!

Try it out! 🚗 Test out the "demolition dominoes" for yourself and see if using different materials effects how the experiment works!

MythBusters Jr. | All Episodes

About Glitch #

Find out more about Glitch.

Episode 5: Gravity Busters

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

Gravity Busting Car: Can a 2000 pound car hanging from a crane defy gravity when it's dropped? #

When a fully exteded Slinky is dropped from a height, it seems that the bottom of the Slinky momentarily lingers in mid-air before the entire thing falls to the ground.

Based on this gravity-defying "hover effect", Adam challenges the MBJrs to study this phenomenon with all kinds of elastic materials and objects, eventually working their way up to achieve the same effect with a 2000 pound car!

35 Mile / 45,000 Word Pencil: A standard no. 2 pencil can draw a 35 mile long line and write up to 45,000 words — write or wrong? #

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned pencil to get the lead out. (Technically, pencil lead is a combination of graphite and clay — that's a longstanding myth.)

But busting myths is what this show is all about, and another pencil-related parable is that a regular no. 2 pencil holds enough graphite to draw a line about 35 miles long (or to write roughly 45,000 words). Could this be true? Adam and the MBJrs are ready to find out!

Try it out! 📝 How many pencils do you need to draw a straight line between two famous U.S. landmarks? Find out with this app!

MythBusters Jr. | All Episodes

About Glitch #

Find out more about Glitch.

Episode 7: Countdown to Gas-tastrophe

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

Flatus Power: How much effective power can you really harness from a human fart? #

You may have never heard the word before, but we’re all certainly familiar with that particular bodily function that starts with an "F" and rhymes with "art". Farts contain a number of gases — methane being one of the most commonly known — but how much effective power can you really harness from them?

The MBJr's will synthesize a bunch of these emissions and run them through a gauntlet of tests, gradually upping the ante to see if firing up a propane engine or powering a forklift can be done by a formation of farts!

Laser Flatus: Can a surgical laser ignite a fart? #

You may have heard of this urban legend: during a laser surgery, a patient's intestinal gas was released at an inopportune moment and things went up in flames. But is that a fart fact or just flatulent fiction? Adam and the MBJr's are ready to put this myth to the test. Can the localized heat generated from a surgical laser be strong enough to ignite the requisite mix of human gas?

Try it out! 😲💨 Who cut the cheese? Was it you? Prank your friends with this fun digital whoopie cushion app!

MythBusters Jr**. | **All Episodes

About Glitch #

Find out more about Glitch.

Episode 6: Shredder Explosion

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

Paper Shred Ka-Boom: Could a paper shredder explode if you use canned air to clean it while in operation? #

Paper shredders are pretty common in most corporate offices, but are these handy machines ticking time bombs? Stories have been told of paper shredders blowing up when people have tried to clean out the blades of an operating shredder using canned air. It's up to Adam and the MBJr's to see if this is true!

Starting from small tests and scaling up, the team looks at whether propellants and sparking brushed motors can end up causing huge explosions.

Electric Mayo: Is it really impossible to make mayonnaise in a lightning storm? #

As the old wives' tale goes, if you try and make mayo when there's a storm brewing, the electrical charge in the air will prevent egg yolk proteins from binding in an emulsion.

The team examines the creamy condiment at the molecular level, breaking down the emulsion process and using a Van de Graaff generator to test if this myth is plausible. Then, they devise an automated system to make perfect batches of mayo, concluding with get suited up in a grounded Faraday suit to subject the batches to the simulated lightning of a Tesla coil.

Try it out! ⚡ Get points by helping Mayo Man catch eggs while dodging lightning bolts!

MythBusters Jr. | All Episodes

About Glitch #

Find out more about Glitch.

Episode 10: Breaking Bad Blow-Up

▶ Watch the Full Episode

Magnet Caper: Is it possible to use a monster junkyard magnet to erase a room full of data on computer hard drives through a concrete wall? #

Is that a real world possibility or just television fantasy?

Furniture Barricade: Can you barricade a room by blocking an unlocked door with furniture? Or can the old “chair under the door knob” technique work too? #

Try it out! 📄✂ Can you move the shredder to the documents in a room of magnetized furniture? Oh, it won't be as easy as you think!

MythBusters Jr. | All Episodes

About Glitch #

Find out more about Glitch.

Episode 8: Bug Special

▶ Watch the Full Episode

The Big Stick: Can a bug glue-trap trap a human runner? #

If you had a human-scaled bug trap, would you be able to run across it?

Is spider silk really as strong as steel? #

A“maze”ing Ants: An ant won't walk across a line of chalk. True or False? #

Try it out! 🐜🐜 Draw lines of chalk to keep the ants at bay and away from your burgers!

MythBusters Jr. | All Episodes

About Glitch #

Find out more about Glitch.

Episode 9: Deep Space Hollywood

**▶ Watch the Full Episod**e

"In space, no one can hear you scream." True or False? #

Can a fire extinguisher be used as a jetpack in space? #

Sandra Bullock made this maneuver famous in the movie when her character used a fire extinguisher to make a space jump from her capsule to a distant space station. Is this possible?

They scale up the idea by constructing a hovercraft-type device to be used on an ice rink to achieve as frictionless a simulation as possible.

Try it out! 👩🏻‍🚀💨 Blast through the cosmos and avoid space junk to get to the escape pod! Can you make it in time before your fire extinguisher runs out?

MythBusters Jr. | All Episodes

About Glitch #

Find out more about Glitch.

An Intro to WebVR

A new generation of headsets and sensors on our mobile phones are making virtual reality more accessible than ever. But learning how to create your own VR experiences can be tricky. We created the WebVR Starter Kit with Mozilla using A-Frame to walk you through creating your first VR experience. By combining how-to videos with working code examples that you can remix, you can learn the theory and go straight to trying it out yourself.

Part 1: Intro to WebVR #

Jenn and Melissa explain what WebVR is, when you might use it, and how you can create your own experiences with it. While Jake tells us about how he started using WebVR.

Part 2: A-Frame Starter #

We take a look at how you can use A-Frame to create your own WebVR experiences. Using our 3D planetarium starter app, "starter-aframe", we learn about the main components of a WebVR scene and Jake tells us how he goes about planning his own scenes.

Try it out re-using the app featured in this video:

View Source | Remix This

Part 3: A-Frame Concepts #

We show you how to add assets like 3D models to your scenes and introduce you to the A-Frame inspector to experiment with updating your scene without code. While Jake tells us about the cool things he's used in his own WebVR creations.

Try it out for yourself:

View Source | Remix This

Part 4: A-Frame Animation #

We explain how animation works in A-Frame using mix-ins by showing you how we made the planets orbit the Sun in our example app, "starter-aframe-animated".

Try it out for yourself:

View Source | Remix This

Part 5: Extending A-Frame #

We suggest some more advanced things, like using JavaScript in your scenes, that you can try out once you've mastered the basics.

Try it out for yourself:

View Source | Remix This

Hosts #

Jenn Schiffer - Director of Community Engineering, Glitch
Melissa McEwen - Developer Education, Glitch
Jake Loeterman - Software Engineer, Kickstarter

Further Resources #

A-Frame Docs

Learn to create VR experiences with the WebVR Starter Kit

By combining how-to videos with working code examples that you can remix, you can learn the theory and go straight to trying it out yourself.

To guide you, we’ve enlisted the help of WebVR experts: Jenn Schiffer, Director of Community Engineering at Glitch, melissa mcewen, Developer Education at Glitch, and Jake Loeterman, Software Engineer at Kickstarter.

Jenn and Melissa explain what WebVR is, when you might use it, and how you can create your own experiences with it. While Jake tells us about how he started using WebVR.

We take a look at how you can use A-Frame to create your own WebVR experiences. Using our 3D planetarium starter app, “starter-aframe”, we learn about the main components of a WebVR scene and Jake tells us how he goes about planning his own scenes.

We explain how animation works in A-Frame using mix-ins by showing you how we made the planets orbit the Sun in our example app, “starter-aframe-animated”.

We suggest some more advanced things, like using JavaScript in your scenes, that you can try out once you’ve mastered the basics.

To learn more, check out the A-Frame Docs. If you get stuck, just raise your hand.

Get Started with Dataviz Using Chart.js

Chart.js is a JavaScript library for making interactive charts and graphs. It provides tools for creating eight different types of charts with any data you want, each with a bunch of customizations to make them pretty, functional, and informative.

For our Chart.js Starter App, we created a bar chart and a pie chart showing population data by continent (courtesy Wikipedia).

In the next section, we describe how the code in this app works. Feeling comfortable with the app? Skip down to "" section!

How it works #

The code powering this app is in three files: index.html, style.css, and script.js. These three files work together to create the interactive chart experience on the page.

index.html contains the scaffolding of the app — the main structure for the elements on the page. This includes a div element for each chart with an empty canvas element inside of it:

index.html also contains a link to the Chart.js library in the head section of the document. This link must be included in order to use any of the Chart.js functionality in our app.

style.css contains styling information for the page. This is where the purple border around the charts is defined as well as the positioning rules for the div elements that contain the charts.

script.js is where the chart logic lives. The file starts with a data variable that houses an object containing continents and their populations.

While it is common to store data in an object like this (with key-value pairs representing data points), sometimes a JavaScript library will require the data to be structured in a different way in order for it to do its job — in this case, make a chart. Chart.js expects the data to be broken into two arrays, or lists: a list of the "labels" for the data (the keys in the data object) and a list of the "data" associated with those labels (the values in the data object).

If we were to type out these arrays manually, it would look like this:

But instead of copy-pasting these arrays directly into the code, in this app we create them dynamically from the data object. This way, if the data changes in the future, the only thing that has to be updated is the data object and the arrays will automagically contain the correct information.

To create these arrays from the data object, we can use some of JavaScript's built-in functionality. Object.keys will return an array of the keys in an object — in this case, an array of continents names, which is what we want for continents. Then, we run a forEach loop over the continents array and add each continent's population value to a separate array called populations.

Now that the data is in a good format, it's time to make some charts! For the first chart, we create a variable bar (but it could be called anything) and set it to target the HTML element where we want to place the chart. In this case, it's the canvas element with id barChart. Then we create a new Chart and tell it where it's going to live on the page by passing bar as the first parameter.

barChart needs more information than just where it's supposed to go in the HTML to make the chart we want. The second parameter to Chart is an object that contains all of the options we want to be included in our chart. These include:

type -- the type of chart we're making
data -- an object containing the data for drawing the chart
options -- additional options The structure for this object is defined in the Chart.js documentation. Note that the value of an object can itself be another object!

In this chart, we want to specify the data to be visualized. Inside the data object, we set the value of labels to the continents array and define a dataset with populations as the data being charted. We also add styling information, like the color of the bars, the color of the borders, and how wide the borders should be. Lastly, we include options to make sure that the bar chart starts its y-axis at 0.

The last bit of script.js creates a pie chart, which is a similar process to creating a bar chart. Can you spot the differences?

index.html is where we create the skeleton for what's going to appear on the page
style.css includes styling information for the page
script.js is where the data is defined and charts are created

The Challenge #

Like all Glitch apps, you can remix the Chart.js Starter App and customize it to your heart's content. But for those of us who are just learning to code, it can be hard to get started — especially with a library we've never used before! That's where our challenge comes in.

We challenge you to a footrace... around the world!

Just kidding. Our challenge to you is to take the Chart.js starter app and give it your own personal spin. In particular, we are looking to see if you can do any of the following:

Replace the data in the starter app with data you find fun or interesting. (If you don't have a dataset in mind, check out Awesome Public Datasets to get some inspiration!)
Change the chart colors to match your favorite color palette — bonus points if you add a link to your color inspiration in the README!
Use the same data (populations by continent or your own) to create a different type of chart and add it to the page
Add custom chart behavior using Chart.js Configurations After you've made the app your own, submit it using the form below. Please send us a link even if you couldn't get it to work or it's not your favorite thing — we want to see it!

If you have any questions or need help, reach out to us on Twitter @glitch or post your question in the support forums.

Bonus: tips and tricks #

Feeling stuck? Fear not! Here are some tips and tricks to help you get started.

For this exercise, try to find simple data with just a few data points. More than 10 data points on either of these charts will make them hard to read!
You may have to convert your data from CSV to an object. For this project, there should be few enough data points that you can convert it manually by typing your data in the object format. If you want to automate the conversion process, you can do so by finding a CSV-to-JSON converter online.
To find some color inspiration, check out Color Hunt to see thousands of color palettes.

The Web Is 30. Whether That's Young or Old Is up to Us.

The web just turned 30, and it's having a quarter-life crisis. But if it's having a quarter-life crisis at 30, the outlook for our future is bleak: The written word is thousands of years old. The printed word is nearly 600 years old. The web? The web, if it's going to be what we need it to be as a society, is barely a baby.

Since its invention in the bowels of a nuclear research laboratory in 1989, the web has changed dramatically.

It started open, and creative. You literally had to create it! Now we're surrounded by billion-dollar startups that want to do anything but let us actually be a part of the web. Instead, these companies want us to experience the web like we watch TV.

Take a look at the earliest webpage we know still exists, created by the web's creator Tim Berners-Lee:

Notice anything? It's simple. So simple that if you've never looked at the source code of a website before, you probably still have a sense of what's going on. But take a look at the code of your favorite social network now, and you'll see it's very different. It's complex. It's not user-friendly. And that means we're in the dark about our own future, and the future of our web.

If we're going to make sure that the web is for everyone, it helps to take a quick spin through the last 30 years:

Personal websites for everyone #

GeoCities launched in 1994. Millions of people could express themselves online for the first time in an easy way. If you're a certain age, you probably remember it looking a little something like this:

The first "social" media was in full force by the end of the 90's. What was the social web like in 1999? If you don't remember, or just want a little trip down a LiveJournal rabbit hole, we went there:

Ten years later, people were finding each other to share code and ask questions about code. One thing led to another and JavaScript use skyrocketed.

What's next #

At the very same time as the people who made the web were becoming closer, the web was actively becoming harder to make. It was becoming less open and less accessible. App stores and "walled garden" social networks kept users from tinkering or getting messy under the hood.

Here’s where we’re at: The web is 30 years old and it’s in crisis. So what do we do? We’re signing The Web Foundation's Contract for the Web, and we encourage you to do so too. It's a roadmap for building a web that can serve everyone as a public good. But that’s just the first step.

It’s up to us to take things into our own hands, to make sure that the web isn’t a thing that happens us, to make sure that it’s something we create. At Glitch, we’re helping to power it, but the responsibility for creating the web we want is on you, too.

So take back some control of your social networks. Or start a new app yourself, even if you're brand new to coding.

We can’t wait to see what you create.

Make Your Data Work for You With CSV Parsing

d3-dsv is a JavaScript library for parsing and serializing CSV files. In the case of this library, "parsing" means "convert this CSV to JSON format" and serialize means "convert this JSON to CSV." In the case of this app, we are using the parsing portion to turn a CSV into JSON, where we can then transform and analyze the data further.

For the d3-dsv Starter App, we created a tool that will parse an input CSV (a file from the user's machine) and provide a few basic transforms/analyses. The output from the main d3-dsv parsing function is an array of JSON objects, each one representing a row in the CSV. From there, this app can do several things with the input data: it can count the rows in the CSV, it can list the fields in the CSV, and it can sort the resulting JSON by selected field.

In the next section, we describe how the code in this app works. Feeling comfortable with the app? Skip down to "" section!

How it works #

The code powering this app is in index.html, style.css, and script.js.

index.html contains the initial scaffolding of the app -- the main structure for the elements on the page. (Note: other page elements will be added later via JavaScript in script.js, but we can place the elements we know we want to be on the page when it loads directly into index.html.)

The section of index.html imports a few files that will be needed to make the app work: style.css for styling, script.js for the app functionality, and d3-dsv (d3-dsv.v1.min.js) for CSV parsing.

The index.html contains mostly-empty

elements. These are included for styling the data with CSS, which is contained in the style.css file (described below). The one additional thing we add in index.html is an input element for the CSV file upload -- this must be on the page at load time because adding a CSV file is what triggers the rest of the app!

style.css contains styling information for the page. In this app, the CSS includes styling for the JSON output (black background with white text), the "choose file" prompt, the buttons, and every other visible element you see on the page. The @media rule is a "media query" that collects some information and sets style rules based on that information. In this case, it changes the layout of the page based on how wide your browser window is so it looks good on both mobile or desktop.

The JavaScript in this app is -- when an fires on the page, it triggers a certain piece of code. When you check a box on a web page? A "click" event is fired. Pick from a dropdown menu? A "select" event is fired. In this app, where different things are happening to the data depending on what button is pressed, it makes sense to have individual functions that are triggered when an event happens on the page.

At the beginning of the file, we declare two variables: json and output. json does not get assigned a value and output is set to point to the json-output HTML element. These variables exist outside of the scope of of any function, so their values can be updated and/or shared across all of the functions. This is helpful for updating the json value when new files are added and for using output without typing document.getElementById('json-output') every time we want to access that element.

The rest of the file contains a set of functions that are triggered by page events or are called from within other functions. The following table lists the names of the functions in this app, what they do, and what behavior triggers or calls them.

In the very last line in the file, we add an event listener to the element -- on a "change" event, call loadFile(). The "change" event happens when the user selects a CSV file.

When the loadFile() function is called, the "change" event itself (represented by an object) is passed into the function as a parameter. This is especially useful for us, because information about the file that was loaded is included in the event object. Once we have the file, we can make sure it's actually a CSV.

Once the file is good to go, we use the FileReader to read the file in the browser. We define an to be called when our instance of FileReader reads the file, and inside the file we parse the CSV data to JSON with d3-dsv, call printToOutput with that parsed JSON, and call addButtons() to add additional operations to the page (count rows, get fields, sort by).

This function uses d3-dsv via d3.csvParse() to transform the CSV into JSON. d3.csvParse() takes two parameters: the CSV string to be transformed, and an optional function to do something special when transforming. In this case, we use as the second argument. This is a special function provided by d3-dsv that will try to automatically infer the value type for each field and coerce that value in each row. For example, if there is a Year value in the data with values "2017", "2018", and "2019", using d3.autoType will coerce those values to 2017, 2018, 2019.

For more detailed information on each of the callback functions, see the code comments in the project.

The Challenge #

Our challenge to you is to take the d3-dsv starter app and extend it to do a few extra things:

Add a toggle to sort the data by field ascending instead of descending (currently the code only sorts descending)
Add a function to "pivot" an input CSV when the rows and columns are flipped in the data (example "flipped" dataset) – be sure to add a button and an event handler that calls the function!
Update the app to accept kind of delimiter-separated values (semicolons, tabs, etc.) instead of just CSV
Update the app to pull data from an API in addition to adding a local file After you've made the app your own, submit it using the form below. Please send us a link even if you couldn't get it to work or it's not your favorite thing — we want to see it!

To recap:

We can't wait to see what you make. If you have any questions or need help, reach out to us on Twitter @glitch or post your question in the support forums.

Scrape the Data You Need with Cheerio!

We live in the age of the API. Data is (for better or worse) a commodity, and it's big business to offer data as a service via APIs. Even still, some useful data just isn't available online via a developer-friendly API.

Well, sort of!

Let's say there's a website with some useful data on it. Maybe it's the hours of a restaurant, a list of products, or the latest breaking news. This site doesn't have a traditional API, but then again, what is HTTP? We ask for a page, and get an HTML response. That's practically an XML API right there! We may just have a way to get that data with a program after all.

Finding information in HTML is easy when you're in a browser — the contents of an element are one document.querySelector away, and if you're using jQuery, it's as easy as $, with extra tools to boot! We are off to the races.

One more snag awaits us. Because of the web's strict same-origin policy, we (reasonably, yet irritatingly) can't just fetch the contents of another web page from our page without permission. We know that node (or even curl) for that matter would have no problem, so we can code up a little server that fetches the page for us. But node doesn't know how to parse HTML, and even if it did, where's my snazzy jQuery for slicing and dicing the results!

📦 cheerio's npm listing 📖 cheerio documentation

Let's for the moment pretend this site dosn't have an RSS feed (it totally does). I'd love to get a list of the latest posts for display in a widget. Okay, no RSS, but what does the HTML look like?

Clean and easy to read! I see a flat container zine-items, full of zine-item elements. A zine-item looks something like this.

We've got the URL of the post, the title of the post, and some category metadata. Now we know what we're looking for, we can deploy cheerio!

Here's the full working demo. Feel free to click around- we'll break it down below.

The Cheerio Starter App #

We're demoing this library by building a tiny app that grabs posts from the Glitch Culture Zine. The app is based on the basic express starter, with the addition of request to assist with fetching data from a URL, and of course cheerio. We're serving a minimal HTML page, with a script that fetches data from our server at the URL /glitch-culture. I'm not going to go too deep into the client side; after fetching the list of posts, we're just making some list items and populating them with data.

The core of our example is in server.js, specifically the handler for app.get('/glitch-culture'). When the client requests this URL, the following happens:

Fetch the HTML: we use the request library to fetch the HTML from https://glitch.com/culture/, and we receive it in a callback function.
Load the HTML into cheerio: Unlike jQuery in the browser, where $ is just available, on the server we need to tell cheerio what $ is even searching. To do this, the HTML response is fed into cheerio.load, and for familiarity's sake, the loaded document is saved to a variable named $. After this point, we can query the HTML as if it was in a jQuery-enabled page!
Grab the list of zine-items: This is pure classic jQuery-style querying – $('.zine-item') gets us our list.
Extract the information from each item: The title and metadata were text inside an element, so .text() gets us that. The URL comes from the href attribute on the item link, so that calls for .attr('href')
Send the list as JSON: Express provides the handy response.json() method, which we provide with our extracted data: The resulting data looks like this:

Now What? #

The starter app uses cheerio to convert some HTML into JSON, but once you've got the data, the power is yours! Remix the app and build your own page scraper. Why not monitor prices on your favorite online store? Liberate data trapped in HTML tables! Watch for sneaky changes to your senator's Wikipedia page! Scraping is the "first API", and cheerio makes it easy.

One Last Thing #

Screen scraping is super useful, but not all website owners love the idea of people grabbing the information off their pages. It's always a good idea to check a website's terms and conditions before running any automatic scrapers against their content, to be sure you're not getting yourself on someone's naughty list. Also, remember to be polite! If you're requesting data off a website repeatedly, you could be overwhelming ther server or slowing the site down for other visitors.

Happy scraping!

Meet Your GitHub BFF: Probot the Robot

Probot is a framework for building Github Apps. You can have Probot handle GitHub chores - and even help with project management and community-building tasks like polls, sharing, and welcoming new contributors. Check out a list of some of the great Probots people have built on their Featured Page.

But how do you get your very own GitHub Probot? Glitch is the perfect place to make one, and now it's easier than ever. We teamed up with the Probot community to update our "Hello World" Probot app.

Before today, getting started with Probot required some time and attention to detail. You had to go back and forth between Glitch and GitHub over and over again. With the updated Probot Hello World you can do all of the setup with the click of a button. No more copying keys or webhooks, and the "app manifest" (see app.yml) configures permissions for you.

That means more bots to do your bidding! What can they do? We spun up a couple of popular ones on Glitch to give you some ideas:

Probot WIP- makes sure you don't accidentally merge code that's WIP!
Probot Todo- turns todos in your code into new issues so you don't forget about that "@todo" buried in some random file We also created a new one just for Glitch! Open an issue here in this GitHub project and you'll get a special welcome message featuring rainbow text and cats.

OK, maybe rainbow text and cats aren't for every project, but it's a good starting place for a bot that can welcome new users or make images programmatically.

Inspired to make your own Probot on Glitch? Check out some of the community built picks in our Probot Collection. And if you domake a cool Probot, then be sure to share it with us by tweeting us at @Glitch.

When Art Meets Algorithm

At the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “New Order,” art and technology are having a major love-in. The show surveys how the time-honored bond between the two fields has evolved in the new millennium, arraying works that explore and expand the creative possibilities of today’s technologies. There’s a self-playing video game by Ian Cheng, a digital simulation of Jeff Koons’ by Mark Leckey, and Tauba Auerbach’s series of 116 3D-printed geometric objects. In these and more, the digital has been made physical; TIFF and AVI files are given tangible form. They are machine-generated realities.

Of course, it’s not as if art and technology are siloed disciplines. For generations, they have been in collaboration and confrontation, pushing and upending the other’s boundaries. says Michelle Kuo, the exhibition’s organizer and the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture.

Change is already on its way. Where traditional artists would wield a brush, sculpting knife, or camera, the 21st century affords artists tools from artificial intelligence to 3D printing to virtual reality, enabling them to create in innovative and novel ways. Advancing technologies have dared art to take new risks and art has responded in kind. Once, the interaction between art and technology triggered ethical and moral questions. For example, how can a machine be an artist? Lately though, it’s broaching the richer issue of artistry itself. It asks: can a machine be creative?

When Machines Do Art #

It’s an inquiry sparked by the emergence of algorithmic or AI art, the practice of employing code, data, and machine learning systems to generate pieces of art. These Generative Adversarial Networks have been producing such works for a few years now, but it’s only recently that AI art has found itself smack in the middle of the art (and art-buying) world. Last October, an algorithm-generated portrait, “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy,” went under the hammer at Christie’s and sold for a cool $432,500. Created by French collective Obvious, it was the first-ever AI portrait to go on auction, and its sale spawned headlines variously celebrating and worrying about its implications for art-making.

Should artists be worried about their jobs? Not at all, says Obvious’ Gauthier Vernier. he tells me. The products of this union will naturally be curiosities, half-manmade and half-machinemade. After all, in making “Edmond,” the AI model, like the human that built it, acts as producer and creator, significantly blurring the lines between artist and technology. Here and elsewhere, AI doesn’t just facilitate the artist, but also, imitates.

That’s not to say it can create. says Gauthier, What these algorithms and machines do, inventively and unpredictably, is generate.

My Generation #

Generative art is not new: art, music, and poetry created by an independent system has been around long before computers existed. In the 1950s, the likes of Vera Molnár and Ellsworth Kelly were devising strict procedures with rules and instructions that determined how their visual art turned out. The ‘60s ushered in computer art pioneers from Frieder Nake to Manfred Mohr to Roman Verostko, who latterly coined the term algorists, as in algorithm artists. And notably, from the ‘70s, musician Brian Eno began experimenting with generative music—what he called “putting in motion something and letting it make the thing for you”—yielding 1991’s , 2017’s , and apps like Bloom and Trope.

Eno has not only been visionary and perceptive about the field, but is drawn to the questions it raises: “Who actually composes music like this? Can you describe it as composition exactly when you don’t know what it’s going to be?” At the same time, he remains in thrall to generative music’s promise—likening its vast “multi-centered” nature to the internet, and urging a reconsideration of the artist’s function. he’s said,

Making good on that inheritance, today’s generative artists understand how their role is shifting alongside technology. Digital artist Sean Catangui tells me, His generative work, such as Line Tree, C-mum, and Randomized Form, emerged from his desire to enhance his ideas through programming. In the process, they gleaned him an appreciation of code and computer as expressive mediums. These projects, he says, “made me feel like the machine was alive.”

And the machine is alive all over Glitch. You’ll find it in other generative artworks such as Matt DesLauriers’ Retro Album Covers, n–schedé’s algorithmic objects and landscapes, and Anders Hoff’s many interactive forms. With these pieces, the artists may have constructed the machines and models, but as they stir and run, it’s their generative efforts that exceed expectations and hold unending surprises. “I might be just as happy to discover some unexpected behaviour and explore that instead,” writes Hoff. “Overall, this means that the process is continuous, exploratory, and never really complete.”

Art Encoded #

In the lo-fi, early days of computer art, practitioners endeavored to define and describe what exactly it was they were doing. Just observe how the 1976 anthology offers a trove of phrases such as “creative processing” (from Mohr) or “scientific aesthetics” (Hiroshi Kawano). Whatever they were, all pretty much suggested that the alliance between art and science works both ways. If technology is made a part of art, art might also be embedded into technology to realize what Kawano termed “the science of human art.”

Or to arrive at Jenn Schiffer’s . Marrying art and code, the application does as it says on the tin and produces iterations of the painter’s post-Impressionist compositions. (As she also points out, Mondrian’s logical, progression-based pieces are ripe fruit for programming languages.) This is just one part of Schiffer’s broader project, a series of similar generators emulating the works and styles of artists including René Magritte, Henri Matisse, and Mary Cassatt. In doing so, she’s turned material art into intangible Javascript—a process directly opposite of that happening at MoMA’s “New Order”.

That script, then, might itself serve as an art form. Chad Weinard, Mellon Manager of Digital Initiatives at Williams College Museum of Art, dubs it “code as its own form of creative writing.” He arrived at that idea after witnessing poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s adaptation of Allison Knowles’ computer poem “A House of Dust.” Originally built with FORTRAN language, the piece is a constantly shifting entity, its lines randomly generated and connected. Weinard responded with his own iteration, populated with collection data from the museum.

Representing an interaction between data, algorithms, and chance, his quatrains are also woven with a collected history and a history of collecting.

And future humans will find not only art in our code, but art criticism, particularly in Omayeli Arenyeka’s creation, Art Connoisseur. The Twitter bot raids Artsy for images of art, then generates commentary on each with hit-or-miss accuracy and a snarky, knowingly pretentious tone. “Ooh, it’s minimalism without mortality,” is just one brassy example. Though somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the app underscores the abiding gap between art and its interpretation, if not the pitfalls of allowing a machine to evaluate art.

But Is It Art? 🤔 #

So how should we deal with such machine-generated realities? Generative and AI art are awesome to behold, but neither are intended to be measurements of any machine’s creativity. Rather, as Kawano once wrote, their immense potential and varied products offer only an “artificial creativity.” Perhaps computer-generated works do more by simply broaching and challenging notions of creativity and authorship, presenting a tension between artist and tool that resolves nothing, but offers us the opportunity to interrogate everything. Which, really, is the point of art anyway.

Just like the open-ended nature of generative art, the ever-evolving relationship between art and technology can only continue to astonish as it brings forth yet more revelatory artifacts, arguments, and possibilities. says Weinard. That exchange bodes well for the future of both fields. All we have to do is set it in motion.

Make a Web Map with Leaflet

Leaflet is a JavaScript library for making interactive web maps. This library allows you to create a map container, add a base map, and add interactive features on top of the map — plus panning and zooming. The base map is made of tiles, or small images that each represent a specific geographic location. The interactive features, or “data layer,” consists of geospatial vector data — points, lines, and polygons with associated geographic information. Collectively, this kind of map is known as a slippy map.

For the Leaflet Starter App, we created a map showing neighborhood boundaries in Portland, Oregon. In Portland there are neighborhood coalitions as well as neighborhood associations, so the data is styled based on which neighborhood coalition the association belongs to. It also has interactive elements — neighborhood associations are highlighted when hovering over them, and popups show the name of the neighborhood association when clicked.

In the next section, we describe how the code in this app works. Feeling comfortable with the app? Skip down to “” and get started!

How it works #

The code powering this app is in index.html, style.css, script.js, and in the assets directory.

The data for this map comes from the City of Portland as a GeoJSON file. GeoJSON is a specific flavor of JSON that is used to describe geographic vector features (points, lines, and polygons). We downloaded this file and then uploaded it to the assets directory in our Glitch app so we can request the data with JavaScript when creating the map.

index.html contains the main structure of the page as well as any additional files the app needs to run effectively. In the section we add links to the Leaflet JavaScript and CSS files and in the we add an empty

with id="mapid”.

In order for the map to render, the

element housing it must have a height. We can make the height responsive by setting html and body to height:100% and then giving #mapid a percentage value for height.

script.js is where we actually make the map, add layers to it, and add event handlers to make the map interactive. First things first — we have to make a map!

The file starts by creating a L.map object, which takes two parameters: the id of the

where the map should live on the page, and an optional object to specify more options. In this case, we tell the map to put itself in the ”mapid”
and set the map’s initial center point and zoom level to center on Portland.

Now we start adding things to the map, with the base map tiles up first. For this map we are using the Stamen Toner tileset (lite version). We create an L.tileLayer, point it to the URL of the tile server, and add it to the map.

At this point, we have a map that pans and zooms around and a base map to look at while you pan around. Great! But that’s not the point of our map — the point of our map is to show neighborhood associations in Portland. But before we add the data, we have to do a little bit of setup work by defining some event handlers.

Event handlers are functions that respond to events on the page. These are defined before we load in the data so they can be attached to the data layer and triggered on specific events. We create four event handler functions: highlightFeature, resetHighlight, zoomToFeature, and onEachFeature, which attaches the other three functions to specific mouse events as they relate to the data on the map.

Because the neighborhood association data we’re using is in a different file, it must be retrieved asynchronously. This ensures that all of the data has been loaded before trying to use it (in this case, add it to the map). For the most part, you’re going to want to leave this section alone, except to change the URL so it matches your data. The important thing to know here is that once the data is loaded, the doThingsWithData function is called.

(If you're interested to know more about how we're loading the data, you can read more about using Fetch)

doThingsWithData is where we (yup you guessed it) add the data to the map. In this case, we want to style the neighborhood associations based on their neighborhood coalition (a coalition consists of multiple neighborhood associations). To do that, we create a variable colorObj and assign to it the returned value from assignColors — an object assigning each unique coalition to a color.

The second part of doThingsWithData adds the data to the map with L.geoJSON by passing the data as the first parameter. The second parameter is an optional object containing additional specifications — we use it here to set the style for each feature and add the event handlers. We then call two methods on the L.geoJSON layer — bindPopup, which adds a popup to each feature, and addTo(map) which adds the layer to the map.

assets is where we add the GeoJSON data file
index.html contains an empty
with id=“mapid”
style.css gives our ”mapid”
a height
script.js creates the map, adds the base map layer and data layer, and adds interactive elements/event handlers (popups, highlighting, zooming)

The Challenge #

For this challenge, you have several options. Each challenge concerns a different part of the map — if you’re feeling up to it, try all of them!

Make the popups look pretty — add some styling, change the names to title-case, etc.
Some Portland neighborhoods have overlapping boundaries — the dataset used in this map has these areas as separate polygons. Use styling to make it clear that these are overlap areas.
Add a legend to this map.
Change out the GeoJSON file for a file of your choosing, ideally in a different location. Think about what might be different between the two datasets. (Data.gov is a great place to find GeoJSON data!)
Leaflet has some special things you can do when adding markers to a map. Add some point data and do some cool marker stuff. After you’ve made your super radical map, submit it using the form below. We are so looking forward to checking out your amazing work! If you have any questions or need help, reach out on Twitter @glitch or via our support forums.

An Addictive Generator For 'Oh No' Comics? Oh Yes!

Just over a year ago, "Code Monkey" and Ravelry co-founder, Cassidy Forbes created "webcomicname-mashup". An app that enables you to make your own versions of the popular Webcomic Name comic strips.

For those unfamiliar, Webcomic Name parodies the relatable 3-panel comic format. There's the setup, things happen, but they always end with the same little celebration of failure: 'oh no'. But don't let the simple format fool you. The comic's gloomy reflections on life have a self-conscious charm and wit that can be both funny and thought-provoking.

"Webcomicname-mashup" puts Norris' back catalog of comic strips to work. You can generate a random comic, or carefully click through the panels until you settle on your own 'oh no' masterpiece.

Norris remarks. From reflections on our productivity-sapping obsession with gadgets to poignant comments on the state of discussions of identity and gender, the results can be en pointe.

says Forbes,

quips Norris. Adding that

And today, Norris' has something else to be proud of. Webcomic Name is now available in paperback with the release of . Published by Andrews McMeel, it brings together all the series’ greatest hits as well as dozens of never-before-seen comics.

Landing just after April Fools day, the timing of the book's launch is apt as Webcomic Name is the result of an April Fools joke itself. In 2015, Norris faked that 'Dorris McComics', another Norris web comic creation, was becoming a trite relatable comic with 8 updates per day. Norris tells us. And of course the internet loved it. Norris has been creating hilarious, cliche-filled, blob-based works of art ever since.

Inspired to create your own? Norris leaves us these suitably dour words of encouragement: "Anyone can become an internet artist, the bar has never been lower!"

Norris’ book "oh no" is out today.

Master WebVR With a Week of Experiments

With WebVR you can create immersive, interactive 3D worlds right in your browser. In , we combined how-to videos with remixable, working code examples so you could start learning how to build your own WebVR experiences using A-Frame.

Now, in partnership with Mozilla, we're kicking off a week of WebVR experiments that build on that starter kit and showcase what's possible with WebVR. Each of this week's 7 examples, created by VR expert and Glitch creator Andrés Cuervo, is a unique experience that will teach and inspire you to go further with building VR experiences.

Join us every weekday this week to see another incredible VR example.

We started the week on Monday with 3 VR experiments:

Motion Capture Dancing in VR #

Motion capture is used in films all the time. But getting motion capture data into VR scenes has historically been pretty difficult. Thankfully Three.js — the framework that A-Frame is built on — has an example to support BVH, a common motion capture data format. This means we can take free motion capture data — like from the CMU Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database — and all of a sudden we can add a character pirouetting, running, or cartwheeling across the floor! Try clicking around in this scene to switch between a few different motion capture files represented as dancing blue sphere mapped onto the data.

Adding Models and Shaders #

This scene combines an example by Don McCurdy from the A-Frame documentation on shaders with loading 3D models and textures — basically, this project is a tour of a few types of files you'll want to load into your VR scenes! If you haven't encountered shaders before they're programs that tell your computer what color to display on the screen, making them the core of how we create graphics like the deforming sphere in the scene. Using shaders we can create custom programmatic visuals like fire, water, sand, or other complex materials where just a picture of the texture would be insufficient. If we have assets we'd like to use instead of dynamic shaders though we can place those into our VR world as well! A-Frame makes it easy to add 3D models (like the walls of the scene) and 360 images for the sky using only a couple lines of code, like and .

Using 3D Shapes like Winding Knots #

There are some basic 3D shapes I expected A-Frame to come with: boxes, spheres, cones, etc. But I wasn't expecting the intriguing torus knot. These shapes are essentially toruses (the mathematical name for a "doughnut" shape) that have twists in them (making them knots) determined by two parameters we call p and q. You don't need to know any of the math that goes into these shapes in order to start playing around with the shapes in A-Frame though — they're built-in! We use another built-in — the animation component — to animate the winding shapes, creating a corkscrew effect & a swirling/overlapping knot effect.

That said, check out this link from Wolfram MathWorld about torus knots if you're curious about the math going into these shapes!

Animated Torus Knot Rings #

On Tuesday, we built on the Winding Knots example above. We're going to use torus knots but we'll also introduce the template and layout components. While we're not animating the p and q parameters this time, we're animating the scale of our torus knots. The layout component is useful because it can generate rings of torus knots rather than us having to specify the positions of each knot in the ring individually. We use the template component to repeat this in a for-loop, creating concentric circles of torus knots!

Finally, we add an animation delay to our scale animation that's determined by what number ring we're on. This means ring 1 will start animating slightly after ring 0, ring 2 slightly after ring 1, and so on — this ends up with an effect that looks like waves of pulsing torus knots. It's amazing seeing how a little bit of code can generate a whole scene around the viewer!

Generated Patterns #

On Wednesday we took a closer look at generating patterns. This one starts by picking a random number from 0 to 1, if it's less than 0.5 it writes down a ****, otherwise it writes down a /. Now do this 100's more times — or get a computer to do it for you! That's what the original 10PRINT BASIC program did, and out of that simple process you can get some really beautiful patterns that look like mazes, walls, or tapestries. This project recreates the effect using some flat geometry in A-Frame with clever tilting. See the README and the code in the project for more details!

Creating Optical Illusions #

Thursday had us creating optical illusions, like those sidewalk chalk optical illusion paintings. You have to view them from a certain angle in order to get the stretched images to create the illusion of depth. The painting shown in the VR scene below is similar to those, only it was painted in the 1500's! You can watch a video of the real life painting that helped me figure out how to animate the painting in the A-Frame scene. Open up the scene and move around the scene to see it for yourself and then take a look at the code — it's a small amount of code for such a cool effect!

Including Dynamic Content #

The images and assets we've worked with in rest of these projects have all been static, so for this final project I want to show how easy it is to include dynamic content. What does that mean? Well let's say we want to add a random image of a dog onto a bunch of objects we have in A-Frame. We can use an API that serves random images of dogs, like the random image search functionality from Unsplash, to load a new image of a dog and then use that as a texture in our scene. This project demonstrates how to do that by extending our previous torus knot project, and adds some extra animation flair.

So there you have it! 7 projects, each demonstrating an in-depth use of A-Frame. From using motion capture data, to adding in animations and dynamic content, you can use these building blocks to build and extend your own VR experiences.

Delve Into Developer Survey Results Data

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey has become a staple in the developer community. Now in its 9th year, the survey, which garners around 100,000 responses, captures the opinions of folks who code from around the world. It's an important source of insights into the developer community as a whole.

People share their opinions on a wide range of subjects, from their favorite tech to job preferences, how they got into programming, to how much they're paid. Being such a large and rich dataset makes it a powerful predictor of industry trends and allows us to explore our understanding of how developers work and can help companies hire and engage with developers.

While the anonymized survey results will be available publicly later this year, we wanted to make the current aggregated survey results more accessible. We've created two interactive charts on Glitch that focus on the technology section of the 2019 Developer Survey results.

You can use the apps directly to explore the results in more depth. Or, because they're remixable, you can take a closer look at specific technologies you're interested in by creating your own versions of the apps and visualizing the data in different ways.

Most Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted Technologies #

First up, the results for the most loved, dreaded and wanted tech. With this chart, you can see how your favorite technologies stack up against each other by taking a look at the different programming languages, platforms, databases, frameworks, and other tools that developers said they wanted to keep, stop or start using.

Most Popular Technology #

Our second project explores the results of the most popular tech overall. Based on six categories of data - languages, platforms, databases, web frameworks, dev environments, and other tools, take a look at which technologies were the most well used across the developer community.

Delve Into the Data #

Both of these apps are a way for developers to interact with the data more closely. In fact, you can use the remix buttons above to take these apps and create your own versions of them to play around with the data yourself.

Both of these apps use Chart.js, a JavaScript library for making interactive charts and graphs. If you're not already familiar with Chart.js, then don't worry. We have a tutorial that steps through a real, working project, that you can use to get up to speed.

Then, go ahead and remix the apps to get a copy of the code and data yourself. Both apps have a similar structure:

On the front-end:

You can edit public/client.js, public/style.css and views/index.html to change the appearance of the app.
Chart.js is used in client.js to render a chart using data from the app's database.
Reference the Chart.js docs and change the renderChart function in client.js to visualize the data using different types of graphs. On the back-end:
The app starts at server.js and accesses the data in the database through routes (/getLanguages, /getDatabases, etc.) The database:
The apps use SQLite to store the aggregated tech data from the CSV files included in the project.
server.js is where the code lives that creates the database and fills it with the data. As they've done in the last 8 years, Stack Overflow have committed to releasing the full, anonymized survey results data later this year. But until then, we hope these apps have made the current data more accessible and interactive.

If you have any questions or need help, reach out to us on Twitter @glitch or post your question in the support forums.

Mouse, and How Tech Fulfills its Promise

You almost certainly can remember when you first got excited about technology, or about the internet. You discovered that somebody else shared the same eccentric interest as you, or you felt empowered by the idea that you could instantly create things and share them with anyone.

But somewhere along the way, amidst all the great things technology brought us, we started to get a lot more worried about the effect that these apps and devices have on our lives. We started to wonder how trillion-dollar companies would ever consider our needs. And we noticed that, well, a lot of the people creating these technologies hardly come from the same world that the rest of us live in.

As it turns out, these problems are related. And they can be fixed. ** shows us how. **That’s why we need to stand behind Mouse’s work.

To get just a feel for the challenges we’re facing, swipe through the headlines shared in the app below, and see if you can guess which ones are real challenges that tech faces today, and which ones merely seem plausible.

If you’re not familiar with Mouse, it is an organization that’s been fighting to empower young people and educators to create tech for good. And they didn’t just start doing this in the current moment when everyone is wringing their hands about the big tech companies — they’ve been at this for decades. For 20 years, Mouse has been incredibly effective at empowering young people by helping them learn to create technology. It started, as these things always do, with the goal of serving a particular community, but Mouse is now a nationwide force, with a spectacularly impressive track record of helping young people who are most in need. Mouse also thinks about how to change the whole system, which is why they’ve spent just as much effort in working to reach educators, and to give them the support and resources they need to help kids succeed.

Here’s the most impressive part:** It really works.**

Almost 90% of students who participate in Mouse’s programs report improved creativity, better problem solving, higher confidence, and stronger team-building skills. 85% feel that they’re better prepared for college. And 83% believe they can make a difference in the world.

By believing that Mouse can change the world for students, we enable students to believe they can change the world for us all.

Mouse students look more like the future than the halls of Silicon Valley. 37.4% are female. 26.9% are African-American. And 29.5% are Hispanic. That diversity is why they’re going to be the right people to enter the tech industry and address the problems, challenges and dangers that today’s tech too often gets wrong. They see bugs in technology that go far beyond the code and software itself, and that reflect bugs in society overall. Mouse’s mission puts it simply, and perfectly:

Now, it’s your turn. Mouse can only do this critical work if we show up to support them. That’s why I’m hoping you’ll celebrate with me at the Diversity in Tech Awards on May 1 at The Bowery Hotel. It’ll be a special night that illuminates the diversity gap in tech and more importantly, demonstrates that we know how to solve the problem. You should pick up your tickets now, and join us at a night that will leave you feeling optimistic and hopeful that a better technological future lies ahead for all of us. (As long as we do our part!)

Taking Back Social Media

Whether you like it or not, a battle is being waged between the apps on your smartphone. The ultimate prize? Your attention. “Technology is not neutral,” said Tristan Harris, design ethicist and co-founder of Time Well Spent, in his TED Talk, “and it becomes this race to the bottom of the brain stem of who can go lower to get it.” Over the past few years, Harris has been pivotal in highlighting how apps are often perniciously designed to stake bigger and bigger claims on our attention, to get us hooked, to keep us scrolling. Not for nothing did Netflix claim its competitors were “Facebook, YouTube, and sleep.” This brain hacking has largely worked; we’re glued to our devices. Various studies report that average American adults spend anywhere between two to five hours per day on smartphones. And among the many apps elbowing for our attention is a group that fights extra hard: social media.

But social networking sites aren’t all bad. They do connect people, foster collaborations, and fuel civic participation. They’re fun and engaging. It’s why we have flocked to social platforms, which account for 30% of the time we spend online. But there are offline consequences. While internet addictions have grown in numbers and severity, impacting productivity and creativity, social media itself has proven harmful to users’ mental and psychological well-being, and a fritterer of time and energy.

For one, metrics—likes, comments, friend requests—have gamified platforms like Facebook and Instagram, turning social interaction into a numbers and popularity contest. “It’s a system based on social approval, likes, validation, in views, success in followers,” wrote Essena O’Neill, the one-time Instagram star, in 2015. “It’s perfectly orchestrated self-absorbed judgment.” The bottomless feed of news and notifications exist to keep us scrolling, producing in us dopamine spikes, if not hits to our self-worth and pangs of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). The effect is a major time-suck. In a single social media session, we could be spending untold hours in a YouTube video wormhole, pursuing validation through Twitter likes, or hate-watching someone’s Instagram story. As Sherry Turkle summed it up in , “Anxiety is part of the new connectivity.”

Christina Cook can sympathize. In 2012, she wearied of Facebook mediating her relationships. “I was living in a constant state of information overload and a vacuum of joy,” she writes me. She chose to completely disconnect for a month and in doing so, regained time, peace, and JOMO, the Joy of Missing Out. Cook’s unplugging formed the foundation for Experience JOMO, which she describes as “a countermovement to our always-on tech addiction.” Through workshops and email prompts, the platform urges a more considered approach to technology and social media in order to rediscover the pleasures and connections of an unplugged life. “In order to experience the joy of missing out, we need to connect deeply with the things that are truly life-giving for us,” she writes, “and they are almost always away from the screen.”

Cook is not alone in her stand against attention-seeking tech. The digital wellness movement has gained steam recently, enjoining people to be mindful of their digital habits. In response to the groundswell, even tech companies have launched features such as Your Time on Facebook and Google Wellbeing to help people get a grip on their tech usage, though it is vital to note that it is in none of these corporations’ interests to get you to log off. Of course, no one is asking that you disconnect completely forever (though if you wish to, godspeed); rather, the advocacy here is to deploy conscious and mindful strategies in tech consumption.

That’s easier said than done, notes Anastasia Dedyukhina, founder of Consciously Digital, considering how we’ve “outsourced more and more of our functions to tech.” Google memorizes our searches, Facebook archives our Moments. Once a digital marketer, Dedyukhina has, in the last four years, committed to the concept of digital minimalism. Where digital tools were once designed to help us with tasks, freeing us up to accomplish more fulfilling endeavors, she says, “we’ve ended up spending more time managing technology.” Her response was to jettison her smartphone for an old-school Nokia, completely eliminating the temptation of apps.

If digital downsizing is too extreme, try a simple habit fix: being intentional. It’s what Leif Hansen practices. He’s been active in the digital wellness space for more than a decade, early on with his 2009 series of SoulTech workshops and lately, with SlowTech, a Facebook group offering tips and support calls to help participants alleviate tech dependencies. “A lot of us feel like we’ve traded the depth for the breadth of a relationship,” he tells me. Hansen’s intentional use of social media means being specific about what he’s using these platforms for. “If I’m clear that I’m going on Facebook because I want to see if there are any events this weekend, then I’m gonna go on, I’m gonna do that, and I’m gonna get off,” he says.

Failing that, Tommy Sobel, CEO and founder of Brick, suggests an easy daily practice: putting your smartphone on airplane or Brick mode for at least an hour a day. That single adjustment is intended to precipitate a series of other behavioral changes, beginning with engagement with the offline world.

Apps to the Rescue? #

Another approach is to make apps work . There are now a number of apps that help to redress the balance and make social media platforms more user-centric. A quick search on Glitch calls up tools that allow you to export the feeds of everyone you follow on Twitter or re-chronologize your Twitter feed, enabling you to reclaim your accounts and profiles. Here are a few more apps that help limit the clutter and distractions of a social media experience:

The first step toward conscious social media use is, well, being conscious of how much you use social media. Apps such as Moment, Flipd, and Forest help users track and limit the amount of time they spend on their smartphones, but for iOS users, Apple’s Screen Time has got you covered. It provides a statistical breakdown of how long you spend on screen and which apps you’re on, plus its iOS 12 update enables you to restrict the time spent on certain apps and schedule downtime away from your phone.

Applying the Marie Kondo creed to the social media space, this app by Julius Tarng urges a mindful clean-up of the accounts you follow on Twitter. Taking you through your follows, it asks if each account “still sparks joy, intrigue, inspiration,” or remains somewhat important to you. Unfollow, declutter, and watch your Twitter feed grow in significance, but not in size.

Last year, realizing that Twitter has become a platform where free expression can often devolve into abuse and outrage, the company detailed its dedication to “create healthier experiences,” while CEO Jack Dorsey has broached a rethink of its Like button. Perhaps a fix is also due for the site’s retweet feature, which at its worst, overloads users’ feeds and amplifies misinformation. Twitter currently allows users to turn off retweets one profile at a time, but here’s a handy app by Julia Evans that turns off all retweets from everyone you follow.

A great aid in intentional social media use, this Chrome extension eliminates all distractions on Facebook by replacing your endless, attention-diverting news feed with a single inspirational or custom quote.

Facebook’s aggregates—the number of likes, amount of comments, size of your friend base—don’t just quantify social connections, but form an addictive element of the platform. It’s why artist Benjamin Grosser built the Facebook Demetricator, an extension that hides all of the site’s numbers, including friend requests, shares, likes, and those red notification flags. (Also check out Grosser’s Twitter Demetricator)

It’s no longer unusual for old, bad, or out-of-context tweets to resurface to haunt a user’s current life or well-being. If you’d like to unburden your Twitter account of its past and move on ahead, here’s a nifty app by Ryan Giglio that will wipe your entire archive in 20 minutes or less.

Aimed at strengthening awareness of our digital habits and weakening social media’s claim on our attention, these apps, alongside the strategies discussed above, work by shifting control from the platforms back into our palms. Try them out and re-empower the way you approach your news feed—which should be an edifying function, not a time vortex. Social media, after all, is not going anywhere. But it’s time to make it work for us and not against us.

A Permission Slip from Adam Savage

After 40-plus years of making, Adam has solved his fair share of problems. He's also picked up plenty of lessons along the way. Part memoir, part creative toolkit, his book confirms what we've suspected all along: making is messy, and filled with screw-ups. We hope the book will both permit and inspire you to get comfortable, and have some fun on your path to creativity.

At Glitch, we live by those same principles. We don't wait until everything is perfect to begin a project. Like Adam, we use what we have available. And when we need help, we ask our friends. After all, we're creators too.

In fact, earlier this year we collaborated with Adam on the launch of MythBusters Jr., transforming each episode's investigation into its own interactive app. You can find and play all of those apps here. In celebration of his new book, we took the liberty of updating one of our favorites.

Adam Savage's Whoopie Cushion is a app made for fun and remixing. Remixing it will give you your own working copy here on Glitch, which you can edit however you like. It comes pre-loaded with 3 awesome fart sounds, including one just for Adam!

When it comes to creativity, you can't take yourself too seriously. gives you the permission slip to become your creative self by helping you find inspiration and follow through on making your ideas a reality.

Build your own Material Theme on Glitch

Material Design is an adaptable design system backed by open-source code. Google created it so anyone can make high-quality user interfaces.

Material Design comes with a built-in, baseline style that can be used as-is. But with Material Theming, you can customize the UI to reflect your own product's brand.

says Yasmine Evjen, Design Advocate at Google.

This new interactive Glitch project lets you easily experience the power of Material Theming. By remixing and modifying variables in the project, you can play around with theming, preview different styles, and define your theme's colors, typefaces, and shapes. It’s a great way to get a feel for how Material Theming works, and better yet – you can use or download the code right away for your own projects.

How It Works #

Start by remixing "material-theme-builder", then modify the color scheme, shape system and typography scale by tweaking variables in your project's my-theme.scss, my-components.scss, and my-theme.js files. You'll see your custom styles automatically cascade through the Material Components.

— David Allin Reese, Visual Designer, Google

Get started and build a Material theme to create your own custom style for Material Design. Then check out other resources, like templates, buttons, and starter kits on the Material Design page on Glitch.

Discover Insights in Developer Survey Results

Last month, Stack Overflow published the aggregated results from their annual Developer Survey. Capturing the opinions of folks who code from around the world, the survey is an important source of insights into the developer community. This year almost 90,000 developers shared their opinions about the jobs they have, the technologies they use, and where they see the industry going.

Today, Stack Overflow released the full data set. To make it more accessible, we've partnered with them and have created two example apps that you can use to explore the data and discover your own insights.

How the Apps Work #

There are many things we can learn from a large, rich dataset like this - from exploring questions about remote work to those about developer salaries, or how companies can better engage with developers. In our example app, we dig into job and career satisfaction levels and how they differ by demographic factors.

The front-end app takes the form of a question, such as, 'how does [selected demographic group] feel about [selected topic]?' It makes use of Chart.js, a JavaScript library for making interactive charts and graphs. Don't worry if you're not already familiar with Chart.js - we have a tutorial that steps through a real, working project that you can use to get up to speed.

To begin creating your own app, we suggest you start by looking at how the data is organized – look through the results and schema on the back-end app. Then remix the front-end app to create your own data visualizations.

Once you've remixed the front-end app, you can begin to make it your own.

Edit script.js, style.css, and index.html to change the appearance of the app.
Chart.js is used in script.js to render a chart using data from the back-end app's database.
Reference the Chart.js docs and change the drawChart function in script.js to visualize the data using different types of graphs. Try changing a topic in index.html to pull in data from a different question. For example, if you change line 86 from this:

to this:

you'll get results on people's preferred work setting (home vs. office vs. coworking space).

You can reference the set of questions to get some ideas; just get the Column entry related to the question you're interested in, and set it as the value parameter in . You don't need to change the text of the question to fetch the data, but it'll keep things organized if you label it appropriately.

Some suggested questions to explore include:

How much do developers of a given seniority make in country x?
How does organization size relate to use of containers/unit tests/how structured or planned the work is?
Is level of education related to job satisfaction?
How does being an under-represented minority in tech affect work experience?
Are people in tech overworked?
Is there a correlation between having dependents and being structured at work?

Diving into the Data #

Let's explore the survey results using our example app, which takes a deep-dive into job and career satisfaction levels by demographic factors.

In general, we can see that satisfaction levels are high among developers - 2 in 3 are slightly or very satisfied with their current job, and 3 in 4 are slightly or very satisfied with their careers. But if you begin to filter by factors like gender and race you see variations. In particular, those from minority groups express lower job and career satisfaction levels.

Satisfaction levels are highest among cis-gendered men and women. However, for people identifying as non-binary, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming, satisfaction levels are lower. While the majority are still satisfied, results are shifted towards lower satisfaction levels with 13% saying that they're slightly dissatisfied (compared to 11% overall) and 6% very dissatisfied (5% overall) with their career, for example. A similar trend can be seen when comparing career and job satisfaction levels among trans to cis-gendered folks too.

Job and career satisfaction levels differ when breaking results down by race as well. 36% of developers indicating they're White or of European descent respond that they're 'very satisfied' with their current job compared to 32% across all respondents, and have low scores across measures of dissatisfaction. Job satisfaction levels are generally lower for those identifying as Black or of African descent. 24% are very satisfied compared to 32% overall and were also more likely to be dissatisfied in their current job, with 17% choosing slightly dissatisfied (15% overall) and 10% very dissatisfied (7% overall). This trend continues across other racial minority groups, with a larger portion of Hispanic or Latino/Latina developers and Middle Eastern developers, for example, recording lower job and career satisfaction levels.

It's important to understand why satisfaction levels are lower for some groups of people, and results from other parts of the Developer Survey suggest some possible reasons.

Of course, non-demographic factors impact job satisfaction levels. Developers with the lowest job satisfaction by job type, for example, include academic researchers, educators, scientists, and designers, who are all on the lower end of average pay rates too. When it comes to factors impacting productivity, gender minority respondents are more likely to say that toxic work environments are an important factor. And in terms of job priorities, developers who belong to gender minorities in tech rank the office environment and company culture as their highest concern and are more likely to say the diversity of an organization is an important concern for them. Whereas many racial minorities prioritized opportunities for professional development higher than other groups, with 49% of developers of Black or African descent saying it's a priority for them compared to 44% overall, for example.

Feelings of impostor syndrome play a role in lower satisfaction levels too. When asked to evaluate their own competence for the kind of work they do and their years of experience, men, for example, are much more likely to say they are far or a little above average compared to responses from gender minorities, with men typically growing more confident much more quickly.

The Developer Survey results suggest some gradual positive change in things like gender and race representation in tech. But by exploring the data for job satisfaction levels by demographic factors in this example app, it becomes clear that those changes could be short-lived if we as an industry don't tackle lower satisfaction levels among minority groups.

We look forward to seeing what you discover using the public data release of the 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Get started by remixing our example app to make it your own.

If you have any questions or need help, reach out to us on Twitter or post your question in the support forums.

Glitch Now Has More Apps than Apple's App Store - 2.5 Million of Them

We're evolving "developer tools" into a creative and expressive platform that everyone can use to create the web. On Glitch, coding with friends is like working together in Google Docs–multiple people can work on the same project at the same time. There's no setup, and you can see changes live on the web as you type.

By radically lowering the barriers to creating with code, our creative community of millions of people has now made more than 2.5M apps. For context, that’s more than Apple’s App Store, though since people create on Glitch by remixing each other’s work, it’s not exactly an… apples-to-apples comparison. 😇

From useful tools that solve problems at work, to VR experiences, smart bots, and apps for important causes, the community on Glitch is creating the cutting-edge of the web.

Apps you'll only find on Glitch #

Take Julius Tarng's "tokimeki-unfollow," it's the perfect app for tidying up your Twitter timeline. Decide whether each person you follow still sparks joy. If not, hit that unfollow button! As Samantha Cole writes in Vice, "if hell is other people, Twitter is a whole other kind of damnation. But after unfollowing 50 people… I can say that at least the meditative process of considering my connections sparked a little joy."

With "nelson" created by Arielle Vaniderstine, you can tailor the perfect playlist to how you're feeling right now. Specify the genre, tempo, popularity, and several more esoteric attributes from the valence to danceability. As The Verge put it, with Nelson you can "make yourself some half-human, half-algorithm cyborg playlists." Or perhaps you're more worried about your secret love of Enya getting out? Then Eric Lewis' "make-all-spotify-playlists-secret" is the app for you.

There are fun apps too, like "webcomicname-mashup". Created by Ravelry co-founder, Casey Forbes, it's an addictive generator for creating your own versions of Alex Norris' 'Oh No' comics. From reflections on our productivity-sapping obsession with gadgets to poignant comments on the state of discussions of identity and gender, the results can be en pointe.

Or maybe you've always wanted to create your own comic, except there's just one problem–you can't draw? Don't worry, the bots have your back. Monica Dinculescu's "magic-sketchpad" uses machine learning to complete your sketches for you.

While Aaron Z. Best's "FoodHype" food trend generator serves up novelty food titles that Food & Wine quipped "are the stuff of meat-sweat-induced fever dreams." A few clicks in and you'll be questioning whether they are actually fake foods or real clickbait headlines.

Of course, folks have created apps that help advance important causes too. Like "congress-tracker" by Jason Crane, which utilizes ProPublica's Congress API to make keeping up with bills and statements by members of Congress on gun violence easier. And Baratunde Thurston, the Emmy-nominated ex-producer of The Daily Show, created "livingwhileblack." It asks whether you can tell which headlines are real, highlighting the phenomenon of white people calling the police on black people simply living their lives.

Used by the Big Names in Tech #

Glitch's community also includes some of the biggest companies in Tech. Google's Material design team launched "material-theme-builder" on Glitch, which you can use to style and remix themeable components and create your own custom version of Material Design. Slack share template apps and tutorials using Glitch to make building bots easier than ever. While the Twitch dev team routinely live stream using Glitch on Twitch.

We're working with partners across industries, not just tech. Like teaming up with Discovery and MythBusters Jr. to transform their science-based TV episodes into interactive apps. Or working with the likes of Questlove, Adam Savage, and the publisher Andrews McMeel on several book launches.

But ultimately, what we're trying to do is enable everyone to create the web. It's easy to forget in this era of Unicorn startups and billion-dollar IPOs that many people got started on the web by tweaking the HTML of a GeoCities page or perfecting the CSS on their MySpace profile. Back then, people were almost as likely to make a web page as read one. Now though, things have changed. Most modern websites all look the same, and people spend almost all their time using just three apps. So it seems more important than ever to remind ourselves that the web is still a thing we can all make, not just something we consume.

We're proud to be enabling creativity with code like no tool has done before, and to be working alongside the most friendly, and thoughtful community on the internet.

We can't wait to see what you all create next❣️

Glitch Raises $30M Series A Round from Tiger Global

Glitch is three things. It's a simple tool for creating apps and websites that's enabling everyone to create on the web - whether you're a professional developer or just starting out, and even as part of a team. It's also a friendly, creative community comprised of millions of folks, from coders and designers to artists, activists, students, and educators. And it's a different kind of company - one that's setting the bar for thoughtful and ethical practices in tech, showing the industry that we can do better.

It's a big vision, and to do all those things right we need the resources to deliver. So we're announcing today that we've raised $30M in venture capital funding from Tiger Global Management.

Raising funds on our own terms #

We've been bootstrapped for almost 20 years, so the decision to raise funding wasn't one we took lightly. We know that a lot of creative communities online lost their way after taking funding, and we thought a lot about that risk. But we don't intend to repeat such mistakes, so we've raised funds on our own terms.

We're fortunate to have an incredible team, founders that have built multiple successful companies, and experienced leadership, which meant we could take our time and seek out funding in a thoughtful way, finding partners who believed in the long-term vision of what we’re trying to build. (And it’s especially unusual that we went with a single investor for the entire round of funding, to keep things simple and make sure we’re all on the same page.)

We're confident our fund-raising will only be a positive, and here's the proof: we actually closed the funding last year. We didn't announce it right away so we could show you that it's going to be good, rather than just make empty promises.

Investing in a sustainable future #

Since then we've doubled-down on building a friendly and welcoming community that's changing the way the web is made. We've grown our team of talented folks to extend our lead building innovative features that creators and developers love. We've continued to put our values into practice, honoring our core principle of valuing people - whether that's community members or the people on our team. With pay transparency, climate leave, public inclusion stats, and our open-source employee handbook, we're not just trying to say the right things, we're following through on those words by turning them into policies and practices that are unprecedented for a company at our stage.

There's a lot more to do, and we're just a small but growing company that's competing with giants. But if you're looking to take on an incredibly rewarding challenge while working with one of the most thoughtful and creative teams in tech, then take a look at our open roles. We're hiring strong, inclusive, experienced leaders across Engineering, Marketing, Design, and People.

Indie podcast featuring Black designers joins the Smithsonian collection

The same year Revision Path’s 300th episode featured Academy Award winning production designer Hannah Beachler (of , , and fame), it also reached another milestone. A tremendously significant milestone, in fact: it is the first podcast to be included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Yes, that’s right: the first podcast.

Since 2013, the indie podcast has featured the work of Black graphic designers, web designers, software developers, creative and art directors, illustrators, animators and other digital creatives. With its recent inclusion into the NMAAHC permanent collection, it becomes a testament to a few trends: the evolution of design, the continued rise of podcasts as a venue for discussion of arts and culture, and the growing public interest in how the design industry works.

Revision Path’s creator and host Maurice Cherry himself is a wealth of knowledge worthy of inclusion in national archives, so we asked him to answer a few questions to help us understand the cultural impact of design and how podcasting has changed since 2013.

August 2018 — I went with a group of friends (including some former guests on the show). We spent pretty much the whole day in the museum, viewing all the exhibits from the basement up to the top floor. It was great to not only take in all the culture and history, but to also be able to discuss it with other design professionals as well. It was truly a wonderful experience.

They are all professionals in design in their own unique way, and they are all Black — that’s the primary thing they have in common. The truth is that there’s a lot of diversity in the episodes that were chosen. There is gender diversity, age diversity, diversity in discipline, diversity in sexual orientation, and diversity in geographic location. When people listen to the episodes as a set, I guarantee that they will come away with knowledge about a wide array of information. The perspectives shared in these conversations really are a good display of what Revision Path is all about.

That is a great question. I certainly feel that the overall visibility and perception of Black designers in the design community has grown over the past six and a half years. I think Revision Path has played a in that, but I certainly cannot take credit for it all. The guests on the show come from all walks of life from all over the world, and their work spans a wide range of design, tech, and other creative fields. When they are on the show and others listen and learn about them, it just spreads the word about the fact that Black designers are out here working, thriving, and making a difference in the world.

Podcasting has certainly gotten a lot more commercial over the years. I started podcasting in the early 2000s, so I have seen that big first flush of indie podcasting come about, as well as media companies and their podcasts. NPR, for example, created podcasts from several of their shows as far back as the mid-2000s. This second wave of podcasting, which I would say probably could be traced back to around the time of and its big mainstream success in 2014, has brought more indie podcasters into the field, but major media outlets (TV, newspapers, etc.) have also stepped up their production and their output.

The technology (hardware and software) to record, edit, and produce podcasts has become a lot easier and more accessible, but the gap between indie podcasters and big media organizations is widening every day. The big media organizations have the resources to crank out high quality shows, and have a staff to support the marketing and distribution. Indie podcasters are often doing all that work themselves, or through hiring others to handle these services on a contract basis. And as I alluded to earlier, it has gotten a lot more commercial. There are lots of talk about sponsors and making money which might make some think of podcasting as some "get rich quick" scheme. And with dynamic ad insertion and other new tracking technologies, advertisers are getting more savvy about which shows they financially support in order to maximize a return on their investment.

What I think ends up happening then is that shows are created just for the sole purpose of making money, and not about telling stories or sharing information or connecting with a wider audience.

More interviews! Revision Path’s strength is its consistency, so we will continue having new episodes every Monday at 10am ET. Now that we have crossed 300 episodes, I have thought about having more of our past guests come back and talk about what has happened since their last interview. Huny Young, who has been on the show three times now, is a great example of someone who has evolved throughout her creative career, and it is so great to chart her creative journey from 2015 to 2017 to 2019.

I definitely want to do more of those kinds of interviews with past guests. Also, because Revision Path is very much an international show, I want more international guests! We have been fortunate to have guests from North America, the Caribbean, and throughout Europe, Africa, and Australia. I would love to talk to more Black designers in parts of Asia, as well as throughout South America.

I think we can all gain so much perspective from what our brothers and sisters throughout the diaspora are doing in design, and that is something that people don’t learn about in design school.

Glitch Brings Appy Hour to XOXO

Are you intrigued by or curious about how Glitch apps work? Want to meet up with your friends from the internet in a welcoming, creative space? We’re thrilled to announce that Glitch is coming to XOXO, the premiere experimental festival for artists and creators who make stuff online.

Anyone can build the web with Glitch, and we’ve always been inspired by the XOXO community. In 2018, we curated a section of the Art+Code track, hosted by Glitch's Director of Community Engineering Jenn Schiffer. We expanded our support this year by becoming a Community Patron and while we’re in town, we’re throwing a party 🎉 for XOXO attendees.

**Join us for **, a free app showcase and meet-and-greet for the extended Glitch and XOXO communities, 12:00 to 3:00 p.m. on Friday, September 6 at Holocene.

At the top of each hour, we'll swoon together as app creators demo their work on stage. Feast your eyes on some radical Glitch art or code some of your own on the spot. We’ll help you along the way, as much or as little as you like.

Got an app of your own? Send it over to appyhour@glitch.com and it could be featured in the showcase lineup. More details on how to attend and participate are here: https://appy-hour.glitch.me.

There’s no RSVP required, but if you’re excited to share that you’re coming, do tweet us @Glitch. We’d love to send you an early welcome. We can’t wait to see you in Portland!

Video Chat With OpenTok on Glitch

What if you could build your own version of Zoom or Google Hangouts? Using Glitch and OpenTok, the opportunity awaits you! Developer Advocate Garann Means wrote a helpful tutorial in Building a JavaScript Hotline with OpenTok and Node.js. It takes you through all the steps of creating an interactive video chat app on Glitch.

The idea behind this project is straightforward: if you have a question about, say, JavaScript (and don't we all), you can get connected with a JavaScript expert. They can walk you through all your questions in a live video chat. If you're an expert, you can sign up to get notified by text message when someone needs help. The app works in a browser, so there is no need to install any special software.

Best of all, you can remix it, throw in your OpenTok API keys and start coding your own features. We remixed this app and added a Glitch embed next to the video chat so you can code together on Glitch:

Nexmo + OpenTok + Glitch = Making Communication apps easy

Don't worry, you don't need to set up an entire telecommunications system by yourself. That's because OpenTok is doing most of the heavy lifting. Your Glitch app basically says, "hey, get me a video chat," and OpenTok sets it all up. The app itself is only about 200 lines of code, which primarily tell OpenTok what to do.

OpenTok is part of Nexmo, Vonage’s API platform for messaging and voice. OpenTok has screen-sharing and recording capabilities as well. Build a Twitch-like app to show your screen, a video, and a live chat all at once. You can record it all so anyone can watch it later.

Remix To Get Started

Nexmo's Developer Blog has more valuable blog posts that explain how to use OpenTok and other Nexmo APIs on Glitch. Each post tells you how they made it and includes a nifty Glitch app. And, just like any public Glitch app, if you're curious you can view the source code, or remix to build your own versions! Test one out and prototype apps with these amazing communications capabilities.

Here’s some of what the Nexmo API family can do:

Verify: Use SMS for customer login and two factor verification
Number Insight: Data visualization of customer sms/phone usage
Messages API: Reach your customers through SMS, WhatsApp and more! We've collected a few handy posts and apps in our Nexmo Glitch app collection. Have a question or need help? Let us know by tweeting @Glitch, @Nexmo, or posting on our support forums.

Give your iOS Shortcuts a boost with Glitch

One of the most anticipated additions to iOS 13 is Shortcuts, a feature that makes a countless number of more complicated tasks a lot easier. We’re especially excited about Shortcuts because we love making custom apps at Glitch.

The Shortcuts feature is now part of the default suite of apps on every iOS device (it’s also completely integrated with Siri). Using Shortcuts can be as simple as pulling up a map of your commute but Shortcuts can use web services to extend their capabilities. And the best place to roll your own web service is Glitch!

We’ve built a couple of Glitch apps that integrate with Shortcuts – to learn more about our current apps, or to build your own, just keep reading.

Magical mini-apps? Sign us up.

In a few taps, for example, your phone can take five pictures and turn them into a gif. There’s a universe of possibilities out there. Where should you start?

Determine there is an API you want to use or if you want to build your own. If you can think of it, there is (probably) an API for it: nutrition, movies, Reddit. Some APIs allow you to get interesting data, while others allow more advanced functionality like creating or editing content. You can build your own APIs on Glitch, too, if that’s your thing. Last year we showed you a simple Shortcut that used Glitch to work with data about Pokemon types from the Pokemon API. This year, we made a few examples to show how to post data to an API.

The magic is in Shortcuts Actions, which are the building blocks of all Shortcuts. Specifically the "get contents of URL" Action. The name only hints at what it can do: it allows you to send data anywhere on the web, and that’s key for communication with APIs. Along with it comes increased integration with many apps and Siri.

Here’s a quick look at two apps we built with Shortcuts:

Tell Siri what text you’d like on the background and the Glitch Background Maker will create a cute background with the text on it. Cats, dogs, palm trees? You never know what you’ll get. And it’s easy to modify if you want to remix.

Focus Tracker can be used to track your productivity shortcuts. We have an example one that asks you what you want to focus on and sets do not disturb and a timer for 20 minutes. The data gets passed to a Glitch app that stores it and powers a cool data viz!

Once you get the hang of it, the possibilities of Glitch-powered Shortcuts are endless, from Pallet Town to Portofino.

Need help? Our friendly community is ready to help, just ask. With the expanded capabilities, more and more apps will have awesome Shortcuts integrations. That means more things to play within Shortcuts and maybe more data to send to your Glitch APIs.

We can’t wait to see what you make. See you Glitch.com!

How we built an app for crowdsourcing questions for interviews

Have you ever attended a fascinating live interview at a conference or other event and wished there was a way to share great questions with the host?

We built a tool so you could do just that, and Glitch CEO Anil Dash tested it while he interviewed Mindy Kaling at Twilio's SIGNAL conference.

We received 194 questions from the audience and Anil ended up asking Mindy about ten percent during the hour-long keynote interview.

Here’s how we did it and how you can use our free Glitch app to collect questions at your next event, too.

Conceptualizing the app: a brief overview

The interview took place on stage while Anil showcased how the Twilio API works, creating an engaging experience for the audience and for Mindy. We often work with partners to develop apps that help them engage in meaningful conversations with their communities or showcase their APIs.

We wanted to build an interview-style questions and answers app that lets hosts solicit live questions from the audience without compromising user privacy. We baked in a human curation element to control for harassment, et voilà! You have an app that lets you engage with hundreds of people:

The next step: pitching our idea to Twilio.

The Solutions Engineering team often has to move quickly on projects, so we always want to provide enough information to describe the project without getting too mired in technical details to avoid unpleasant surprises and get all questions answered before a single line of code is written.

We agreed on an app that presented a landing page explaining how to send in questions for Mindy, an administrator area where incoming questions could be curated, and a presenter area that Anil would use onstage. We knew that limited time meant only a certain number of questions could be asked, so Glitch and Twilio staff would log in to the admin area, select which questions to feature, and send them to the “presenter” section of the app.

Twilio approved the idea, and off to work we went!

We primarily leveraged Twilio’s Programmable SMS service, but we also included a form on the landing page — some users might not have a roaming plan that includes text messages at a reasonable cost, so we wanted to ensure there was an alternate way of submitting a question.

(Programmable SMS is a paid service by Twilio. Signing up for a new account will get you US $10 in credit. Your phone number will cost $1/month, and each SMS sent or received in the US costs $0.0075 — for our purposes, that $10 will go a long way.)

We had a total of about four days to build and test this project. That’s a short timeline, but by scoping the work the way we had, it was possible!

The app: an(other) overview

The app is a Node.js app that can be broken down into three areas.

Going to the live Glitch app gives users instructions on how to send in questions for the keynote. It’s a basic HTML page with a single-input form to send in questions. In the lead up to the keynote, the FlipDown library was used to generate a countdown.

The form sends the submitted question to the app’s back-end server, which returns a success or error message.

A big ol' text input on the internet for submitting content to a live event can be a little ... scary. Beyond being a vector for abuse, it’s possible someone accidentally submits a password or other sensitive information. We decided against displaying questions live as they came in. Instead, they’re fetched and displayed at a password-protected /admin page. On this page, a teammate can click/tap a question that they’d like to send to the interviewer.

The interviewer accesses this subset of questions at a different /curated page, which is also password-protected.

The back end of the app consists of two files: an Express server in server.js, and the methods for storing, fetching, and manipulating submitted questions in storageController.js. Let’s look at the key features of each:

server.js handles the back-and-forth between the app and your browser. It’s set up to parse incoming questions and to always use secure HTTPS connections, and then it sets up the GET and POST endpoints. GET endpoints fetch data from the server, and POST endpoints provide a place to send data.

We serve the three pages mentioned in the front end description:

the landing page, at /
the admin page, at /admin
the presenter page, at /curated We also set up a /questions endpoint, which is where the admin and presenter pages GET the list of submitted questions. This endpoint is what’s password-protected on those pages.

There are also three POST endpoints for submitting data:

we set up /sms to listen for questions being submitted via Twilio’s Programmable SMS service
we set up /form to listen for questions being submitted via the form on the landing page
we set up /toggleSelection to listen for staff selecting (or un-selecting) a question on the admin page storageController.js, on the other hand, is what handles the back-and-forth between server.js and the data file where the questions are stored, using three methods:
getQuestionList fetches the list of questions from the data file
addQuestion adds a question to the end of the data file
toggleSelection changes the selected property of a given question in the data file So how does all this work together? When you send an SMS or use the form to submit a question, that question gets added to the end of the data file with a selected value of false. When a teammate goes to the admin page, they log in and get the list of all questions in the data file; if they tap or click on a question in the list, it toggles the selected property of that specific question.

On the other hand, when the interviewer goes to the curated page, they log in and get a subset of all the questions in the data file — specifically, they only see the questions where the selected property is true.

Integrating the Twilio API

We built the form-based functionality first so that we could test the back end independently of what the Twilio service might require. However, we also stubbed out what the /sms endpoint would look like, using this excellent guide from Twilio.

The form-based approach pretty much copies this — including returning TwiML (Twilio’s extension of XML) rather than, say, JSON. Eagle-eyed readers will see that the only difference between the /sms and /form endpoints is the twilio.webhook() middleware. This validates incoming requests to make sure that incoming requests are coming from Twilio by checking them against the TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN value in the .env file (which we get from our Twilio developer account). Then it’s just a matter of telling Twilio where to send SMS messages.

As mentioned in Twilio’s guide, this is done by setting up webhooks (in the Twilio Cloud Console’s “Active Numbers” area, choose a phone number and look under ). Under “a message comes in” we set up a webhook pointing to the /sms endpoint (using HTTP POST). And in case that fails, we set another webhook pointing to the /form endpoint (again using HTTP POST). This is why we set up the form handling logic to return TwiML. Our webpage can parse the response as XML, but Twilio can also use this to reply to an incoming text message, too. We’ve already got that endpoint open to the world via the form, so using it here as a fallback is convenient.

Make this interview app your own

By leveraging the Twilio Programmable SMS API, we were able to very quickly build an app that creates an exciting and engaging live experience.

Working on a very short deadline meant that we had to make some design tradeoffs to reduce complexity, but the ease of integration of the API — as well as Glitch’s zero-setup development environment and near-instant feedback loop for rapid iteration — allowed us to go from new project to live app in no time flat.

Are you running a live event and looking to increase audience engagement? Remix the app and make it yours!

Discord Bots Starter Kit: Making your first bot, easy

Our users told us that setting up bots had a bit of a learning curve, so we created a Discord starter bot with an interactive install guide that walks you through every step of the process. Now you can go from idea to bot, faster. It's perfect whether you're a Discord fan who wants to explore the world of bots, an aspiring coder, or both. Through this guide, you'll learn about the tech that makes bots work: APIs, Javascript, Node.js, Botkit, Discord.js and more. But it's only the beginning of your bot journey. This bot was born to remix. Remixing on Glitch means you get your own copy of the bot to customize as you like.

Steph at Glitch remixed our Starter Kit twice to make two new great bots. The first is **Gritty Bot,** and features Gritty, the adorable, scary, hairy Philly Flyers mascot.

Want to bless your Discord server with a Gritty gif? Gritty Bot can do it! NHL stats? Gritty Bot is on it.

Want to start a business? Just ask **Bizbo**t for an idea.

This bot has cool ideas like: “The new hot app is all about fixing the in-law's WiFi. Designed by toddlers for toddlers.” Even if that's not a viable business, the real magic is in the fact that it gets data from a Google Sheet. That means you can add stuff to your bot and nosy people looking at your company will think you're working. And maybe you are.

Bizbot and Gritty Bot are remixable, so you could turn Gritty bot into a Phanatic bot (that's the green muppet-like mascot of the Phillies). More tips for customization are in each bot’s Readme.md file and code comments.

No matter which bot you choose to remix, let us know what awesome bot creations you’ve made by tweeting your app to @Glitch.

Glitch Party Starter Kit

At XOXO Fest this year, we wanted to celebrate our community in a special way, so we built a suite of apps that would let us throw the best party ever. We had so much fun that we thought we’d share how we did it. Here's a collection of apps to plan your next shindig!

Using Glitch: This Is What You Came For #

You can use Glitch apps to host your own party! This Kit includes free, remixable apps to create an invitation page, guestbook, and photobooth. Unlike sites that offer freemium party planning tools but demand your personal data in return, we send no spammy emails and we will never ask you to sign away your private data.

We’ve included simple instructions on how to make these apps your own in the README files of each. If you need help along the way, raise your hand or search for help.

Invitations: This Is How We Do It #

When it comes to party-time prep, homemade beats store-bought, hands down. So why not build your own website to host your party’s details? We made a flexible **Event Page App** template that you can change as much (or as little) as you want. If you’re wondering how different you can make it look, take a peek at a remix of it here.

Guestbook: I Want It That Way #

Depending on how formal your event is, you may want people to sign in. Or maybe, like us, you just want to know everyone’s astrological sign.

Using the **Guestbook Ap**p, you can customize the style, colors and pictures on your guestbook. Hosting an event with guests from all over? Use this app to collect attendee information, like a guest's location, their name and interests. Any information you ask for using the guestbook is organized and stored for your eyes only using Airtable.

Photobooth App: Sure Shot #

The best parties we’ve ever been to have had photobooths. People love a photobooth. The **Photobooth Ap**p will make sure your guests share memories for years to come. And hey, when your event's done, you could even add an album here or update the event invitation page to show off how much fun you had. Our app is proudly inspired by this **Wedding Photoboot**h app made by Glitch user @mortenson.

Even More Apps: Dancing Queen #

Glitch is full of party-approved apps, including apps using Spotify, SoundCloud, and YouTube. Play a game, create some art, it's up to you! When you host a party using Glitch apps, we'd love for you to share a great picture with us, or share your app links with us on Twitter.

Visualizing responses from Data for Progress' Presidential Primary First Debate Survey

As the 2020 Democratic Primary approaches, progressive candidates, engaged voters, and the media are deepening their understanding of how Americans think about the issues currently facing the country and our world. Through research and polling, we are learning that the “way Americans think” as defined by conventional wisdom may no longer reflect our reality, particularly when it comes to issues like climate change, immigration, and economic inequality.

In July of this year, YouGov Blue conducted the Presidential Primary First Debate Survey on behalf of Data for Progress, which opened the door to public opinions on these issues. In order to provide more access to the results, here at Glitch we made a visualization tool to explore responses to each question based on a set of demographic filters. And the best part is that it’s totally customizable!

About the app #

The app allows you to see the results for individual questions in the poll and provides several demographic filters to narrow down the data based on ethnicity, gender, ideology, age, and education level. As an example, here is the data for the question, “What is your party preference?” filtered to only include respondents who identify as Hispanic and Female:

After selecting filters, the app shows the question’s response breakdown for both the selected group and the total responses, as well as the number of responses to that question that match the filter conditions. By drilling down into the data, we can see that based on the respondents of this study, folks who identify as Hispanic and Female are more likely to also identify with the Democratic party than the larger group.

How it works #

The data that powers this project lives in a separate app using a tool called Datasette. Datasette provides data journalists with a web application for exploring and querying large sets of data, and includes convenient tools for converting CSV files into a SQLite database. To start building this app, we put all of the survey response data into Datasette so it could be queried -- you can see that project here.

Having the data in Datasette enables us to query the data using SQL (Structured Query Language), a common language for interacting with databases. This makes the communication between the two apps fairly straightforward: When you create a filter in the visualization tool, the app translates that filter to a SQL query and sends it to the Datasette app. The Datasette app then uses that SQL query to retrieve a subset of the data based on the filters and returns that data to the visualization app, where it is displayed.

Make it your own #

We made this app to show what is possible in terms of exploring survey data, but our example is not a comprehensive report of every response to the Presidential Primary Debate First Survey. If you’re interested in exploring the data beyond what’s in our app, you’re in luck! You can create your own version of this project focused on the questions and demographic information that are most important to you.

Here’s how to do it:

First of all, remix this app! Remixing will create your own copy of the app that is unique to you -- any changes you make will only apply to your version. Make sure you change the description in your version so you remember what the app does when you're looking at it later.

Once you have your own version of the app, you can start making changes.

Changing filters #

To dig into the data you will need to add topics and/or demographic filters. You can make these changes in index.html.

The topics live in index.html starting on line 39. There is an example showing how to add a new topic starting on line 73. For a list of topics, see topic-abbrevs.md.
The demographics live in index.html starting on line 87. There is an example showing how to add a new demographic option on line 154. For a full list of demographic options, see topic-abbrevs.md. NOTE: if you are adding or changing demographic filters, you must also update the list in script.js as shown on line 56.

Other changes #

Here are other ideas for ways to make your own app:

Be the change! #

Making data more accessible is one crucial step to building an informed community. How are you using technology to share information? We’d love to hear more about it! Tweet us @glitch.

When does a celeb apology become fine art? We find out with Apology Hero

“What is art?”

This is a question with many answers, but only one of them is scientifically correct: videos of famous vloggers apologizing. Not only is it an art, but the sheer amount of video apologies and what comes off as insincerity almost makes the output look generative. We love generative art here at Glitch!

For the August show of Internet Explorers, I was invited to present my expertise of the month’s theme, Youtube. As I have been cursed with being an extremely funny and talented web developer, it only made sense to build a game on Glitch to help myself and others learn what it is like to be a famous vlogger who has to apologize for something. Welcome to Apology Hero, the first ever apologizing sim.

In Apology Hero, you’re a vlogger who has to apologize for something. As you read off an apology, karaoke-style, the game shows emotions that you have to express. I’m using Tensorflow.js and face-api.js (cw: Big Bang Theory) to, with players permission, detect the players face and see if the emotion they are expressing matches what the game is telling them to express. If you can keep up with the wide range of emotions of an apology video, you get a high score!

Machine learning is cool, but you know what’s cooler? Writing your own apologies! Apology Hero comes pre-bundled with a couple of apologies written collaboratively by the humans and machines of Botnik Studios, but you can add your own by remixing Apology Hero on Glitch and then updating the apologies in the config/apologies folder in the editor, or adding your own files.

Once you’re settled with your options for apologies, you can do what I did and bring your entire company to a standstill one afternoon to play!

SimCity and “possibility spaces”: reshaping how we build the worlds around us

We may not yet be able to modify our cities at the click of a button. But in the 30 years since SimCity first introduced players to the promise of click-and-create cities, the technology available to urbanists has transformed dramatically. Today, gamers and city officials have access to tools which increasingly resemble the kind of gods-eye view that made SimCity so addictive, in the process influencing physical space in new and unforeseen ways.

SimCity, which celebrates its 30th anniversary release on IBM this month, was the brainchild of Will Wright, who initially developed the game as a level creator. Soon, he discovered that building new spaces was more fun than ‘Raid on Bungeling Bay,’ the point-and-shoot game he was originally developing, in the process spawning a new genre of video games (and countless spinoffs and sequels).

Over their lifetime, SimCity games have become increasingly complex, but they remain rooted in several fundamental goals. In an interview for the game’s 25th anniversary, Wright described his creations as “possibility spaces” that melded entertainment and education, as he argued: “I think SimCity was just a simple example that for a lot of people started to remove the wall between the two.”

As an educational vehicle, the game certainly influenced one obvious audience: today’s city planners. In a Los Angeles Times feature from earlier this year, planners documented the game’s impact on their future careers, helping them recognize the possibility of taking the skills and practices honed virtually and applying them to the real world. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without ‘SimCity,’” one transportation official said.

Cities are, of course, complex systems, with definitions of “success” largely dependent upon the beholder. But the SimCity franchise has largely modeled success in terms of capitalist development through unlimited growth. In its most extreme form, it’s a dystopian nightmare: Even as he used SimCity 3000 to build a city of 6 million without “water pollution, traffic, or crime,” architecture student Vincent Ocasla’s “Magnasanti” project, which took years to plan and execute, nonetheless keeps its virtual population in near-captivity, doomed to die by the age of 55. As The Outline described the project: “It’s a dense and brutal world, perfectly efficient and optimized, with no considerations for the human lives within it.”

Wright was himself inspired by the work of electrical engineer Jay Forrester, whose book Urban Dynamics studied cities as lively systems of interrelated variables shaping and reshaping one another. As Kevin Baker documented in Logic Magazine, the implications of Forrester’s thinking were troubling. With an emphasis on fostering a healthy business climate, and a raft of negative assumptions about low-income residents, Forrester’s predictions influenced the policy of “benign neglect” that pushed the Nixon administration to cut social services to poor city dwellers in the late sixties.

Moreover, Forrester’s simulated city was a complete abstraction: “There were no neighborhoods, no parks, no roads, no suburbs, and no racial or ethnic conflicts.” Yet the model proved useful to Wright’s game design, with its supposed distillation of city change down to “150 equations and 200 parameters” a way of making SimCity possible. Over time, the game has further reflected real-life cities, while still maintaining assumptions about how cities function that now feel outdated.

A 2013 revision introduced homelessness into the game; in response, players flooded forums with questions on how to banish the virtual dispossessed from their cities, in many ways mirroring real-life rhetoric towards the housing-insecure. Even as later editions have sought to more accurately reflect the real world, issues with the game’s approach remain: As argued in a piece called “SimCity and Black Box Simulations,” “the underlying game mechanics of SimCity are founded on baseline assumptions that cannot be changed by the player.” As SimCities games reject things like public transit and mixed-use development, it becomes clear that fresh visions for today’s cities remain lacking within the franchise.

In recent years, independent game developers have responded directly to these faulty assumptions. One such developer is Paolo Pedercini, whose company Molleindustria has produced a series of games which respond to the pressures of the Antrophocene and overdevelopment on city spaces. In a 2017 talk called “SimCities and SimCrises,” Pedercini argued that SimCity “is shaping the way a lot of people understand or misunderstand city planning.” Other projects, such as 2017’s “Block’hood,” aim to give players a different window into contemporary urban planning, centering concerns of “ecology, interdependence and decay” as guiding principles of city design. Despite its flaws, the SimCity remains influential on city planning and how we imagine it.

“I do think city planning games can empower people. I believe they can be integrated in the democratic process,” Pedercini argued in his talk. “But we need to take precautions, we need to adopt strategies that address the problematic aspects of city games.”

If building roads, trains and highways out of nothing remains a power best left to a game that “makes mayors out of middle schoolers,” as Doug Bierend described SimCity, that doesn’t mean that the principles of overarching control aren’t bleeding into contemporary urban planning. Largely thanks to the increasing prevalence of smartphones and other computing devices embedded in our cities, companies are developing programs which increasingly mimic the game itself. While their ability to influence the physical world remains limited, a growth in technologies like self-driving vehicles may herald a future in which cities can redirect traffic from above, all in conformance with the “best” outcomes as determined in the city’s “digital twin.”

The most obvious version of this technology is Replica, developed as part of Sidewalk Labs, a city design project under the Alphabet umbrella. The company describes its technology as “A Virtual World With Real Qualities,” giving planners up-to-date access to detailed information about transit use, traffic patterns, and other mobility questions. The company is able to deliver such detailed data by building a “travel behavior model” drawn from approximately five percent of the population. By using transit searches and GPS data, the company produces a “synthetic” population meant to model the living, breathing humans it’s drawn from, allowing planners to test assumptions and understand city patterns in detail. The result? According to the company, “When you combine travel behavior models with a representative population, you can confidently replicate trip patterns across a city or metro area.”

The implications of such technology are manifold. For urban planners who have begun using Replica in cities like Kansas City, the program introduces a level of complexity and fine-grain analysis previously unavailable. (As one planner told Sidewalk Labs: “The more detail you give me, the more questions I can answer.”) But while Sidewalk promises that people’s information has been de-identified before being placed into its simulation, experts warn that any point-to-point travel data is vulnerable to reidentification, especially with Google unable to confirm the exact source of many of its location data sources.

While Replica gives planners a virtual sandbox to contemplate changes to traffic patterns or transit systems, other advances in mobility technology may soon allow centralized decisionmakers to literally reroute city traffic from afar. In a feature for CityLab, Laura Bliss documented the rise of “digital twin” technology currently being developed by IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others. According to Bliss, officials from 13 major US have convened to discuss the adoption of protocols produced by the Open Mobility Foundation, a new nonprofit building digital infrastructure to follow physical space. The technology “would allow local governments to both trace the movements of individual vehicles, and control them to some extent.”

It’s an outcome which uncannily embodies a tagline for SimCity 2000: “If this game was any more realistic, it’d be illegal to turn it off!”

How data journalism is powered by Glitch

The Congress Tracker app by Jason Crane searches the ProPublica Congress API for bills and statements related to gun violence. At a glance, it shows us how active Congress is on the issue as well as what elected officials are doing and saying. It’s a great starting point for exploring other questions related to the subject and, in fact, most Glitch apps that include public data operate this way. We’ll explain.

Let’s say you want to know the answer to an important policy question: what has Congress done to address gun violence since 2016? You could use this same data to build a data visualization app by plotting the number of related bills and statements over time. Our Developer Advocate Lyzi Diamond has created a data visualization starter using Chart.js that’s perfect for getting a project like this started.

Democratizing data with Glitch apps #

You can use Glitch to build tools to make data more accessible. It’s especially useful to democratize public access to large datasets. For example, we teamed up with Data for Progress to make polling data from their Presidential Primary First Debate Survey searchable across demographics. The app is powered by Datasette, a handy tool for turning any CSV into an API.

Once you’ve built something awesome with your data, you can embed it almost anywhere, including on Medium, Wordpress, and other big publishing platforms. Take The Colorado Sun's Timeline project, for example. A Glitch app displays data from all Colorado death penalty cases since 1979. Curious readers can search and filter the data based on demographics and case status, wherever the app is embedded. And as is the case with all Glitch apps, the code powering the app is completely transparent.

Make it yours #

If you’ve already identified a project you like, you can “remix” it to get your own copy that can run in any web browser. You get to start from a working example when building your own project, for free. And guess what else? The Data for Progress app mentioned earlier is actually a remix of our Stack Overflow Public Data app.

If you're looking to compliment your research and reporting, we recommend starting with our our Chart.js (data visualization), Leaflet (maps), and d3-dsv (data processing) projects. Also check out our Data Collection–a set of some of our favorites.

Tell us what you make, and tweet it to us @Glitch!

Apps to inspire the great artist in you

Are you getting tired of your boring desk job? Do you find yourself falling asleep in meetings that are too dang long? Does the idea of making another spreadsheet make you want to scream? Well then it sounds like it’s the time to finally quit your job, dust off your BFA and become the artist you always wanted to be. There’s no time like the present.

It’s probably been awhile since you’ve picked up a pencil or brush so I’ve collected some apps that’ll help you get back in the groove of creating again.

To transition from your daily office life, why not start by making art of something you’re used to: forms. With Jenn Schiffer’s “makecheckboxart” project, inspired by the fact that forms are the worst, you can let your imagination run wild. You’ll likely never look at another checkbox the same way again.

Here’s the “etch-a-sketch” app from Kate Preston which will give you the truly foundational building blocks that a visual artist needs. For example, first I made this sick castle drawing and now I’m ready to take Picasso himself. No better way to start drawing then with perfectly straight lines. But we’re just getting the creative juices flowing.

Now that you’ve mastered the art of drawing one infinite line, we can get a little more complex. With “magic-sketchpad”, from Monica Dinculescu, you can draw all sorts of things — with multiple lines. And don’t worry, if you’re thinking “wait, but I don’t know how to draw a chair,” that’s where the real magic comes in. Just draw the beginning of your chair and Magic Sketchpad will draw the rest for you.

Speaking of creating cool images with very little work, here’s “orbitalpaint.” Created by José Blanco Perales, Orbital Paint is an “experimental drawing web app that uses particles and attractors” to create cool patterns, and you can get a wide variety of cool images just by adjusting a few settings. If you don’t fully understand what each setting does, that’s fine, no one understands art anyway.

_Play with all of these apps and save them to your My Stuff with this collection_.

How to use Slack and Trello to show gratitude at work

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

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

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

Bravos in Trello #

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bravos in Slack Using Reactji #

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you interested in helping Glitch evolve its culture? [We're hiring](https://Team recognition becomes trickier as startups scale. Here’s how Glitch addresses the challenge.)!

Boo-ray, some spooky apps!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Throwing out the baby GIF with the bathwater GIF

via GIPHY

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

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

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

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

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

Keep the GIFs alive by enjoying more from Glitch:

Host a Party: GIF Party (Glitch app)
Listen: How GIFs Became Embedded in Our Culture (Function Podcast)
Rebel: Create a PNG file (Glitch app)
Listen: GIFs as Blackface (Function Podcast)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Your Remix On with Glitch at Capitol Royale

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

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

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

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

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

See you soon at Hollywood and Vine! 🤩

Veterans Day Spotlight: Vets Who Code

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

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

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

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

When did you first get the bug for coding? #

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bootcamps. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can people help with supporting Vets Who Code? #

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

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

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

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Art of YouTube Criticism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Details of the Glitch outage on November 4th, 2019

Last week, on Monday the 4th of November, 2019, we had a seven hour outage. At 2.14pm UTC we deployed a new release to Glitch. Normally, we do this many times a day, without incident. In this instance the code we released broke our API servers, which resulted in the sitewide outage. During this time you were unable to access the Glitch site (which is a Glitch application) and your own Glitch projects.

As part of our normal process, we reverted the change and re-deployed. This however, did not result in the API servers recovering. After several hours of diagnosis, we identified a combination of issues, principally a crash loop in our API servers and very aggressive retry logic in our API proxies, that prevented the API servers from recovering. We re-deployed a new fleet of API proxies to address the issue, the API servers returned to normal, and the site began serving traffic again at 9.00pm UTC.

We’re deeply sorry this occurred and are grateful for the patience and support shown by the community. To help understand this outage and what we’ve learned from it, we want to share with you what happened and why it took so long to resolve.

What Happened? #

(All times in UTC)

At 2.14pm (UTC) a release was deployed to production. The triggering release was a substantial redesign of our logging module, called ng-logger. This is used by all of our backend services to aggregate and send telemetry to a number of different services. We believe the accidental introduction of a “deep clone” led to a depletion of memory, leaving our API servers unable to process requests.

The release led to an immediate drop in requests being served by our API proxies. Automated alerting via Pingdom and DataDog triggered a page at approximately 2.15pm, 1 minute into the deploy. The page triggers were Pingdom being unable to access the Glitch site, the API and a number of other key sites. After we detected the drop in requests, we began tracking the incident. Our Infrastructure team began to diagnose the problem and our Support team notified users of an issue.

We identified the immediate culprit as the recent deploy. We reverted the deploy and this new deployment was completed by 2.41pm. Unfortunately, rather than resolving the issue as we had hoped, the API servers remained locked.

We then began to diagnose the issue further. Our diagnosis was hindered by some gaps in our telemetry. We have begun to instrument all of our services with distributed traces but the process is not yet complete. This means we have limits in what we can observe outside of our API and API proxy servers.

During our diagnosis we identified several problems that we believe either contributed to the outage, or exacerbated the underlying outage. These included:

We have very aggressive retry logic in the API proxies, and some related systems, resulting in repeated attempts to contact the API servers. This kept the API servers overloaded and locked up.
A possible crash loop in the API service due to how we handle Sequelize timeouts. Once we’d identified these issues, we determined that we needed some way of diverting traffic away from our API proxies to us to spin up a new fleet that wouldn’t become locked down immediately due to the flood of traffic. We made some changes to our load balancing configuration to allow us to create new fleets of API proxies that would start without receiving traffic.

Once these fleets were created, we began to send traffic to them and the API servers began to recover. This recovery began at 8.45pm and full site recovery was achieved at 9.00pm.

We learned a lot during this process. We conducted a blameless retrospective with the involvement of most of the product, design, and engineering teams, as well as a few other folks from across the company. It was our first “at scale” retrospective and we learned a lot about how we will run retrospectives in the future.

We also learned a lot about our incident management process. We’ve grown dramatically in the last year and some people on the team weren’t familiar with the process. Their first exposure to it was during this incident. We’ll be updating and familiarising everyone with the process going forward.

Our existing incident process also didn’t call for a “scribe” role to record the timeline of events concurrently with the incident, meaning we had to reconstruct events and data after the incident. We’ve updated our process to clearly define this role and ensure a timeline is initiated when the incident is declared.

We’re pleased our monitoring identified the issue in a very short period of time and that our (only partially-implemented) observability framework through Honeycomb allowed us to rapidly test and resolve many theories. It’s a priority for us to complete the deployment of this observability framework to additional parts of the platform to remove the current gaps in coverage. This lack of complete coverage resulted in some time as we followed false leads and leading to some frustration as we occasionally ran out of ideas of what to investigate.

We’ve identified we need to work on the retry logic and the timeouts of the API servers and proxies. We’re also going to be looking at our deploy process, which could be more resilient and better designed, especially to allow us to deploy in more staged manner. This might have allowed us to mitigate the issue before it hit the whole fleet.

Conclusion #

This outage was upsetting and stressful for our users and for the team. But we learned a great deal and are correcting the issues that allowed the outage to occur and going deeper on our incident management, deploy and other processes to ensure future incidents are handled more efficiently. Thank you for your patience during the outage and we'll see you on Glitch.com!

Games to Get You Through the Last Hour of Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

_To save these apps to your My Stuff, check out the collection_!

Fun Apps for Long Weekends

The holiday season has officially begun, which means it’s the time of year where you may likely attend one awkward get-together, at the very least, whether that’s a family dinner, a work party or gathering at a friend of a friend’s house. Phew. Whatever situation, is anything a greater challenge than having to come up with small talk for hours on end? Don’t worry because these apps all make for easy conversation starters and will disrupt any unwanted awkwardness.

Do you have that one relative who likes talking about the history of a battle you’ve never heard of over dinner? The “library-of-places” is the perfect app to keep them occupied and educated while everyone else grabs a second slice of pumpkin pie. This project lets you explore the Library of Congress digital archives through an interactive map.

Just click any two spots on the United States and a route will form filled with photos from the archives that were taken in places along the route — scroll down to see the results. The creator, Aidan Nelson, is a New York-based artist and educator who is currently a researcher in residence at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Your cousin is a first-year college student and spends a ton of time on TikTok, but (quick!) you need a way to show that you’re quite aware of what should and should not be acceptable in this economy. Luckily, the “twin-peaks-password-generator” is here for you. Show that you watch prestige television and that you care about cybersecurity with this clever little project from Josh Mock.

This project is easily remixable, so if you don’t like Twin Peaks, create the password app of your dreams using keywords from any of your favorite prestige TV shows: Breaking Bad, The Wire, etc.

Finally, the kids. If you’ve been to any big gathering ever, you know that worrying about keeping the kids entertained is of the most importance. Enter “tenori-off” from Monica Dinculescu, a project inspired by the Tenori-on, a 2007 electronic musical instrument from Yamaha. “I LOVE the Tenori-on,” Monica writes in the project description. “Since they're rare and mad expensive, I've never seen one, so I made a JavaScript version of what I think it looks like.”

To use the instrument, click any one of the blocks to add either a synth or drum sound — the higher on the block, the higher the note. You can also enter a new number into the “Step 100 ms” block to adjust the speed.

_The holidays can be a busy, expensive and exhausting time, but hopefully with a little help from some fun and interesting apps, it can go smoothly. Add these apps to your My Stuff with this collection_.

_We're building a more powerful Glitch, learn more here_.

How to build a “scrollytelling” map using Mapbox and Glitch

Every step to tell a story with the new Interactive Storytelling template #

Mapbox's new Interactive Storytelling template is out and available on Glitch, ready for you to dive in creating guided narratives with a fully interactive map and little to no code. Major media outlets have used this format to tell powerful stories, like the San Francisco Chronicle's deeper look at the origin of the Kincade fire, or the Washington Post's exploration of the 1968 Riots in Washington, DC.

At its core, the template can be used as is, without ever having to style or upload any data to Mapbox Studio. All you need is a **Mapbox accoun**t, an **access toke**n, and Glitch to start building a simple but very effective "scrollytelling" story that showcases different places in a region or a timeline of events with chapters and basic markers on an animated map.

Basic map #

First, navigate to Mapbox's Glitch team page and click on our template collection. All you have to do from here is click on "remix This" on the featured template called "mapbox-storytelling-template."

This will take you to the Glitch code editor. There you will see 3 files:

config.js: This is the file you will be working in.
index.html: This contains the code for the template. You can open it in your browser to see your progress as you build your story.
An asset folder for all your images and other assets.

To get started, open config.js. Below is the configuration file untouched:

First, add your access token (which you can find here after creating an account.) Mapbox Streets is included in the template by default, but if you'd like to use a different base map, just swap in **the style ur**l of your choice.

We're going to the include the default markers by leaving showMarkers value to true.

Now, we're going to start filling in the location information for each chapter. You can use this tool to help you identify the coordinates (map center), zoom level, pitch, and bearing, to dial in the exact map view for each chapter. To do this, open the tool, type in an address in the geocoder in the top right corner, and move the map around to adjust the view. Control+click and tilt and rotates the map if you'd like. And don't forget to take into account the placement of the block of text in the template (default value is left-aligned). Finally, copy the location information code and paste into the configuration file.

Repeat this process until you have all your locations set up. You can then start adding a title, a description, and url or paths to images.

To check out the results, click on "Show" > "In a New Window" and scroll. That's it! You now have a fully functional map with markers. You can view a demo here.

Level up: Styling layers #

Now, we're going to take this template to the next level by styling custom layers in Studio and using the template to control the layers' visibility. The following example uses 2016 Presidential election data from Tony McGovern who scraped the data from Townhall.com and US Census data.

To include custom layers in your story, you first have to upload and style your data using Mapbox Studio.

After uploading and styling your data, you should toggle the layer's opacity (NOT the visibility) based on the layer's desired behavior when scrolling. The rule of thumb is that the opacity of a layer set in Studio will remain the same until it is changed in the template configuration files.

In the example above, I want all my layers to be invisible on my first chapter so I will toggle the layer opacity to 0. You can keep all the layers that won't require any adjustments, such as background, water, etc at opacity 1.

For all layers that you don't want to be visible in the first chapter, turn the opacity down. Those will be adjusted in the configuration file later. Once you're done, you can publish your style and click on the "Share" button to get the style url and your access token.

The url and the token will go at the top of your configuration file. You should also turn off the showMarkers option since we won't be needing the default markers for this story. Pick a theme (dark , light) and an alignment (left, right, center).

Now, we're going to update our chapters and adjust layers based on the story we'd like to tell.

Similar to our basic example, you can update the title, the description, and even add an image. But we're also going to specify the opacity of each layer, which will be triggered as the user scrolls through the different chapters of your story. This means that when a text block enters or exits the screen, the layers' opacity will adjust based on your settings.

Note that a chapter can enter the screen twice: once while the user scrolls down and once while the user scrolls back up. This means that if you want certain layers to return to their initial state, you will want to specify the settings in onChapterEnter.

With onChapterEnter and onChapterExit you can control the opacity of each layer using a number from 0 to 1. Below, I am adjusting winnerto be 0.8 on enter and 0 on exit.

For each chapter, you can repeat those steps, adjusting your layers as needed. The result should be a story that takes the reader through relevant data points, contextualized by location and visualizations. You can experience the full demo here.

Glitch saves your code automatically so all you need to do to view your demo is to go to the url provided. With very little code, you now have a fully functioning interactive live on the web!

Share what you build on twitter with #builtwithmapbox and if you have any questions, reach out at @lobenichou.

How This Accessibility Expert Uses Glitch for Work

In October 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Dominos in which they argued that they and other online stores shouldn’t be held to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Because of a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, online businesses have a legal obligation to make their websites accommodating for people with disabilities. That includes ensuring that users are able to operate your website with assistive technology like text enlargement software or screen readers.

Many Glitch employees are passionate about accessibility but probably none more than Community Health Engineer Cassey Lottman. “In general, we’ve done a lot of work on the community site [to make it more accessible],” Cassey said. “I know there’s been some work done on the editor for accessibility but that’s really our next frontier in terms of making Glitch fully accessible.”

Cassey believes that there’s a lot about Glitch that makes it great for working on accessibility projects. “It’s easy to get a project up and running and have a link you can share with others and test across devices,” she explained. “Also, the ‘view source’ powers are really helpful - especially for apps where you’re using some Javascript library like React to generate your HTML.”

Cassey introduced me to Michael Fairchild, who works in accessibility and uses Glitch for work. Currently, Michael is an Accessibility Consultant at Deque Systems where he works with and teaches software development teams “how to make accessibility a core part of their development process, from design to deployment.” In his spare time he’s also the co-chair for the W3C ARIA-AT community group and works on a11ysupport.io. Michael lives and breathes accessibility and was kind of enough to answer a few questions about his projects on Glitch.

How have you used Glitch in your accessibility work?

In my development and accessibility work, I frequently use Glitch to build and test reduced use-cases. I commonly find myself asking these questions:

In those situations, I will spin up a simple page and write a reduced test case for the specific situation. I'll use only minimal styles, JS, and code to reduce the number of variables and the chance of interference. Then I'll test it on multiple platforms (Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android) for example. This lets me quickly determine if something should work, or give me a hint as to why something is not working.

Is there something that makes Glitch unique when creating accessibility focused project?

I find Glitch very simple and easy to use which makes development a breeze. Additionally, it's easy to add multiple pages, changes are saved automatically, and I can open a full page view with ease. This makes it very easy to test on multiple devices without my test being in something like an iframe and wrapped by another site, which can in theory, interfere with the tests.

What’s different about using Glitch for teaching vs using it to test out an idea for something yourself?

Glitch is great for both tasks, and I think there is a lot of overlap between the two. One thing that sets Glitch apart for teaching is that the memorable URLs make it easy to share projects verbally. For example, I recently gave a talk on Accessibility at a developer conference and wanted to provide an easy way for the audience to keep learning after the talk was over, so I created factual-raven.glitch.me and shared it during the talk.

Additionally, I recently used Glitch to create and deliver a screen reader workshop for a local Accessibility meetup that I help run. It was easy to create different pages for each module and share it with everyone that attended the workshop. Having the instructions in their browsers made it easy for attendees to follow links to more reading and reference the workshop materials in the future.

*You can follow Michael on Twitter and learn more about accessibility with this Glitch app. Plus check out Cassey's Community Health Resources.

Build with Magic Leap on Glitch

We’re obsessed with thinking about the future of the web. Just what will the web look like in ten years? And how will we experience it? Magic Leap feels like a sneak preview of that future.

The Magic Leap 1 is a lightweight, wearable, spatial computing platform, or as we at Glitch like to say: future goggles. It unlocks incredible new experiences and gives digital objects a contextual awareness of your environment. Users can also fire up Helio, the device’s built-in Chromium stack-based web browser, and experience their favorite websites—like Glitch—in a radical new and immersive way.

We’re excited to announce that the spatial computing pros at Magic Leap are bringing a suite of Magic Leap developer tools and resources to Glitch. Now you can create, share, remix, and collaborate on Magic Leap creations on Glitch, either from your computer or from your Magic Leap 1 device.

You may be wondering how this works. The Magic Leap Lumin Web Platform lets you create interactive spatial computing experiences using HTML and JavaScript. With simple HTML tags, some inline attributes, and CSS styling, you can render 3D content that pops off the web page. It allows you to grab content outside of a website and place it into your physical environment. The Lumin Web Platform lets creators use the Lumin APIs for web development. These tools include Prismatic, a JavaScript library that lets you add 3D assets. Once published to the web, folks can view and interact with them using Helio.

The Magic Leap Team page, includes two new Glitch apps: “Hello Prismatic” and “Hello WebXR”. These starter projects give you just what you need to get started with two of Helio’s most powerful and easy to use solutions. In “Hello Prismatic” you’ll learn how to set up a basic Prismatic project, install the library, and display and animate a Robot model. This project is designed to be remixed so you can plug-in and animate your own model. And with “Hello WebXR” you’ll take an even deeper dive into creating AR experiences on Magic Leap. Here you’ll be using WebXR with Three.js to create a giant animated Jellyfish that takes over your entire space. (Watch out!)

This is just the first of many resources to be made available by the team at Magic Leap. In the weeks and months ahead they’ll release more new samples to showcase the new features of the Helio Spatial Web Platform. You can also look forward to seeing detached CSS, page rotation, and more advanced Prismatic and WebXR samples on Glitch, too.

We’re delighted to support the launch of these tools, and can’t wait to see how you make the web a more immersive and more magic place.

**Visit Magic Leap’s Team page now**.

12 Web Apps that Anyone (and Everyone) Can Remix

Often times you might get bitten by the creativity bug and have the urge to make something, but you aren’t sure of where to start. We’ve put together a list of fairly straightforward apps for you to remix. Change around a few colors or add completely new features: this is your playground. Before moving on to your next great achievement, save projects to your My Stuff for easy access later.

🕸 Useful web stuff 🕸 #

The easiest blog in the world, stop worrying about hosting. Just give "Geoglitchies" a remix and maybe change some colors to make it yours. Made by Monica Dinculescu and Jessica Lord.

The holidays are coming up and instead of just inviting everyone to your holiday party on Facebook, you could send them a cool remix of our “appy-hour” app that we made for our Appy Hour party at this year’s XOXO. The site has a lot more personality than your typical event page, all you need to do is remix it and give it your own original flavor.

If you’re looking to make a free link tree for your Instagram bio or just want a place for all your random links, then “link-tree-11ty” is the perfect practical app that you can remix for immediate use. Made by Cassey Lottman.

🎊 End of the year 🎊 #

Given that the 2020 is just around the corner, it’s a great opportunity to spend your Hour of Code remixing something to wrap up 2019! With “music-2019” from Tiff Tseng, you can easily show off all the new albums you picked up this year. It’s as easy as changing the JSON file.

In a similar vein, “year-end-list” from Tiff was made to remember all of the books you read this year, but it could also easily be remixed to be about whatever you want — favorite movies, favorite concerts, favorite places to get croissants, etc.

✨ Sparkles ✨ #

Play around with some of these cute sparkles with a quick remix — try changing the color, speed and size of the particles. You can also copy them over to another project to spice it up! From Edwin Morris.

Similar to the sparkles, “snow-animation” can give any website a nice subtle holiday feel.

🕹 Games, games, games 🕹 #

“Trivia-quiz-starter”, from Anjali Patel, gives you the structure of a quiz app, but makes it so easy to fill in your own questions and answers by editing the JSON file.

We’ve also got “odd-care” from Anjali which is your local Mad Lib starter for all your Mad Lib needs! Just give it a remix and change the text and JSON files to make your own story. Mad Libbing has never been easier, and what a fun thing to send a friend or coworker on a bad day.

🎰 Generators 🎰 #

Generators are a great way to spend an hour if you want something simple to play with. Take this La Croix generator, for example, remix and add onto what Steph Monette started.

Trick your parents into thinking you got a book deal over the holidays with “book-deal-generator” from Margarita Noriega. Add some more book titles or maybe change it altogether with a movie or television deal.

Facebook released a chatbot, called Liam, over Thanksgiving weekend to equip their employees with PR style responses to their families questions. Adrienne Porter Felt made a parody of it to help you with some other family questions. Add your own questions to the bot to help you practice for your next family gathering.

Whatever you do with your creative juices, there are always apps ready for remix. To keep these apps for later, click on **this collectio**n and add to your My Stuff or personal collections.

_We're building a more powerful Glitch, learn more here_.

Glitch Year in Review

You all built over 4 million apps #

For context, that’s more than Apple’s App Store! We mentioned crossing the 2.5 million mark earlier this year, and it’s clear the community on Glitch is creating the cutting edge of the web. We’re proud to enable creativity with code like no tool has done before.

You asked, and we delivered — Glitch for Visual Studio Code #

You can now develop Glitch apps entirely using Visual Studio Code, the most widely used developer environment. Download the extension today on the Visual Studio Marketplace!

You helped us partner with MythBusters Jr. #

Glitch teamed up with Adam Savage for the premiere of MythBusters Jr., a show where six of the nation’s most talented kids tackle a variety of scientific myths. We created companion Glitch apps for each episode, which take the experiments to a whole new level.

You helped us develop three new starter kits #

Since our starter kits for React and website building were such a big hit, we made three new starter kits this year! Learn more about WebVR using A-Frame, build your first Discord bot, and then have some fun with our Glitch Party starter kit!

You came and saw us out in the world #

Anyone can build the web with Glitch, so we put that to the test at some of the Web’s biggest events this year! We brought Appy Hour to XOXO, got our remix on at Capitol Royale, and took questions with Mindy Kaling at this year’s Twilio Signal conference!

You tuned in for season 2 of Function #

Function, our tech podcast hosted by Glitch CEO Anil Dash, returned for season 2 this year with a big question: can we trust the Internet? Anil talked with authors, advocates, and developers to uncover the answer.

You helped us make history with Revision Path #

Revision Path became the first podcast to be included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture -- a tremendously significant milestone!

You helped us reach new heights #

We've been bootstrapped for almost 20 years, so the decision to raise funding wasn't one we took lightly. With this investment, we’re able to turn our words into policies and practices that are unprecedented for a company at our stage.

You kept us honest as we expanded our board member search to the community #

We think we have a chance to make a fundamentally more innovative strategy and a dramatically more inclusive company culture by making our call for board members as open as everything else we do at our organization.

Our team grew to help serve you #

We've more than doubled in size and with that growth, we've learned a lot. There's more to say about what these lessons are, but we're going to be putting those into practice in 2020 with a renewed focus on making Glitch a great place for both users and employees alike.

The Year in Glitches

We published our look back at our year at Glitch, and I’m incredibly proud of what our team and community have accomplished! But we also encountered our share of challenges — some serious — over the course of 2019. The end of the year is a time of reflection, so I want to talk about those bugs we found, both to acknowledge the bugs we’ve found and share what we’re learning as we work on solving them.

All of this is in keeping with the spirit that underlies our company. When we picked the name “Glitch”, we wanted to emphasize the very human reality that things/people/processes are often imperfect - they have bugs or mistakes. But if we commit to working on them together, we can make great things.

Scaling #

The most visible challenge we had in serving our community this year is keeping up with scaling the technical infrastructure that makes all these millions of Glitch apps possible. Glitch uses an unusual system design (every Glitch app is its own, unique Docker container with a full Linux environment in it) that may not be obvious when simply browsing the site, but it does take some real heavy lifting to make it go.

A few times this year, that system didn’t run as smoothly as everyone would expect. Most notably, we had a fairly lengthy outage on November 4th that we documented here. During each of the times we faced technical issues like this over the course of this year, we’ve been really heartened to see the community be so supportive (so much #hugops!) and understanding about the challenges of scaling.

But if we are serious about Glitch becoming a part of every developer’s toolkit (see Connecting to Coders, below), we have to be a platform everyone can trust. We have to meet and exceed our community's expectations for stability and reliability. We've made a big investment on that front, while also focusing more on user-facing features that makes the creation experience on Glitch smoother and even more enjoyable.

People #

2019 was also the year that many of our talented people chose to come work at Glitch—most of our team has been with the company less than 12 months! It’s been incredible to see our team grow by leaps and bounds and to find out everyone’s superpowers as they work together.

But as we rapidly grew our team, we failed to commensurately grow the processes and infrastructure necessary to support everyone properly. The result has been a lot of needless stress and tension and frustration. On its own, this is a significant problem, but when we’ve talked a lot about wanting to build a company that does these things better, a failure here is twice as painful for the people on our team who are affected. As the person who most often talks publicly about the positive ambitions we have here at Glitch, I’m also the person ultimately responsible for the times we haven’t delivered on those promises.

Underinvesting in HR and people infrastructure while a startup goes through a big period of growth is one of the most common, and egregious, mistakes. And no surprise, this has had the biggest negative impact on the areas where we were trying hardest to do something different — salary transparency, benefits, and supporting remote work. We are still deeply committed to getting these things right, and I’ve been working with our whole leadership team to make sure we get this fixed as quickly and completely as possible. Our next steps are bringing in experienced help immediately, reviewing where we’ve fallen short of our documented goals, and talking to every member of our team to gather their explicit feedback about expectations going forward. We’re also making hiring a head of people a top priority and are actively seeking out qualified candidates.

Connecting to Coders #

The third big challenge we’ve faced this year is making it clear and easy for every creator, from professional programmers to brand new coders, to understand how Glitch will fit into their workflow. We have a complicated product, that can be used in many different ways for many different things, and while people love our community and its creations, it’s not always obvious for a new user where to start and how to use Glitch. On top of this, there are so many stresses and distractions in the tech world right now that many people don’t know how a happy web community fits into the problems they’re trying to solve.

We’ll be addressing this by simplifying and sharpening our focus in 2020. None of our capabilities will go away, but we will make it far more obvious how a working coder can take advantage of Glitch’s power and simplicity. We’ll also strengthen Glitch as a platform and as a business by introducing paid services for the features you’ve told us you need most and find most valuable.

You can get an idea of how Glitch will fit into your workflow already with examples like the starter kits for Magic Leap, MapBox, Datasette, and integration into Visual Studio Code. Expect to see more of this in the new year, and if you run an open source project or offer an API to developers, get in touch and we’ll help you make it easier for any coder to get started.

Building Something Better #

As we’ve reflected back on both the biggest successes and the biggest challenges we faced in 2019, there’s something interesting that connects them both together. Everyone on our team at Glitch, and everyone in our community, is unified in believing in the vision of a creative community. Everyone is inspired by seeing what regular people all over the world are creating, and seeing a flourishing of a more human internet filled with things that surprise or delight us, or simply solve a meaningful problem. Even at our most stressed moments, we still believe deeply in the community we’re building on Glitch, and in the importance of enabling people to create a better internet for themselves.

There’s something really powerful about a mission that a community, and a team, can believe in even when the going gets tough. One of the underlying themes for all of Glitch is that we can make really amazing things together, especially if we’re able to fix our bugs in collaboration with others. We’re excited to do exactly that with all of you in 2020.

Code Together On Glitch

There are lots of reasons to code alongside someone else, from debugging an error you can’t quite figure out, to getting feedback on a new prototype you’re working on,

But the how can be a challenge. Do you open up a screenshare with your friend? Comment back and forth on pull requests with coworkers? Glitch makes it easy. Send someone an invite to your project and they’ll be instantly transported into your code, where you can work together (think Google doc, but coding in multi-player mode).

Here’s how to invite someone to collaborate on your Glitch project:

Here are just a few of the great ways people use Glitch to code together:

Debugging, together. #

You’re coding away. It looks good. It runs! You’re really in a flow now. You add something. It breaks.

We’ve all been there before. Working on a project, feeling like we’re in the groove, when we hit a bump and we don’t quite know how to solve it.

Searching for the internet for answers is a tried and true method, but nothing is quite as good as working with someone you know and trust to help debug your code. Glitch makes teaming up to code together a cinch—especially if you’re in different locations.

Prototyping #

You just got access to a brand new API and you’re wondering if it’s a good fit for work. So you code up a working demo. It’s singing! Requests zip back and forth across the internet, console log messages flow like a waterfall down your screen. This is something special.

But now you need to share it - not just the front end, but the code, too. Where do you put it? How do you help your team understand how it works and why it’s a good fit? Time for Glitch. Just invite your coworkers to your project, show them your code, and work together on something you can start to fold into your codebase.

Teaching and learning #

A high school introduction to HTML. A Google workshop on machine learning. Onboarding new team members and helping them understand code. There are dozens of ways that people teach and learn on Glitch, but it all starts with a fundamental idea: Code together. And with nearly every company working remotely these days, we've also compiled a mini remote work guide to get your virtual collaboration skills leveled up.

If you're using Glitch to code and have a great use case or pro tip, we want to hear all about it. Shoot us a note so we can share it with the community!

When Tech Calls the Biggest Shots, Even in Soccer

By far the most contentious technical issue in global soccer is the use of VAR, or video assistant referees. VAR sounds simple because the idea behind it is straightforward: Instant video replay to quickly and seamlessly adjust soccer referee decisions on the fly. Less straightforward has been the buggy rollout.

“My favorite VAR moment?” Maxi Rodriguez, a soccer consultant and writer asks, before quickly launching into a retelling of the Liga MX playoff game between Leon and Morelia. It’s into the eighth minute of stoppage time (out of an alloted seven). With a goal, Leon would go through. As it is, they will be eliminated.

“Then literally at the moment where you’re like, this is the last play of the game, a hail mary cross—the referee should have called the game—somehow someone gets on the end of the header,” Rodriguez says.

Goal! “Leon are going through to the next round of the playoffs. Fucking stadium is going wild! Fans are going wild! And then for some reason, the referee calls for a VAR review.”

The referee jogs to the edge of the field, flips the cover off a TV screen in what looks like a voting booth, and watches some replays. A couple confusing minutes later, he trots into the field and makes a rectangle with his hands.

You know the motion–at least Will Farrell does:

The goal is disallowed. “The TV broadcasters couldn’t even explain why the goal was called off,” Rodriguez says. Just like that, the game is over. Leon lost, and Morelia advanced.

A brief, chaotic presence in the world of sports #

VAR was first used at the Club World Cup, a short one-off competition, in December 2016. The Italian and German leagues rolled it out in 2017, and most of the other major leagues and tournaments have added it since. The governing body that determines the official laws of the game for global soccer is called the International Football Association Board (IFAB). As recently reported, IFAB plan on giving a “routine update to stakeholders” in 2020 on how “simple” VAR usage is supposed to be.

As with any technology rolled out with broad implications, VAR is the latest example of what goes wrong when the tech doesn’t match the end goal.

Here’s how it works. VAR has purview over four areas: goals, penalty kicks, straight red cards, and mistaken identity. A team of three people wearing full referee outfits gather in what looks like a surveillance room to review any plays. At the most recent men’s World Cup, VAR had access to all of the same cameras used for broadcast, plus two dedicated offside cameras.

There’s the video assistant referee (a qualified referee), an assistant (to watch live action while the other guy is looking at replays), and a replay operator. The replay operator gets to wear civilian clothes sometimes, as you can see in this video of the VAR team in Greece getting a food delivery mid-game.

The video assistant referee will talk directly into the referee’s earpiece to either confirm that it was the correct decision (at which point, nothing happens, and life just keeps on unfolding) or that it wasn’t. If that’s the case, the referee has a few options. They can reverse their decision. They can stick with the original call. Some leagues, like Mexico, can allow the referee view a sideline television to double check the play (England, the world’s most popular league, doesn’t.)

Soccer is still decades behind other sports to officially sanction instant video replay. The NFL first experimented with it in 1978 (and incorporated it by the mid-’80s). The NHL (1991) and NBA (2001-02) have followed since.

Offside by an armpit, offside by a toe #

In one of the best examples of VAR-bungling, a game in the African Champions League had to be replayed when one team walked off in protest of VAR malfunctioning. But the main gripe fans have is how long reviews take.

“Soccer is this pretty seamless game that takes place over 90 to 98 minutes in a day,” Rodriguez says. “And then you add this weird process that is not seamless in any way, takes like 5 to 10 minutes, doesn’t involve the players, the players are just sitting on the field for 10 minutes. It’s such an antithesis of what soccer has typically been.”

For a sport without ad breaks to wait several minutes before learning if you can celebrate a goal or not is jarring. Before the Premier League in England implemented VAR, it did a live trial in 68 games. It claimed that incidents took an average review time of 29 seconds, and that 95 percent were done before play restarted in the game.

Tell that to David McGoldrick. His first goal for Sheffield United was ruled out after three minutes and 47 seconds of deliberation because of an offside toe.

In the first 10 games of the most recent Copa America, play was stopped for a total of 33 minutes. The longest pause was four minutes. Apparently, the average time for a VAR check is 33 seconds. (An average overturned decision takes 75 seconds.)

Referees point out that decisions are more reliable now; in England they estimate that they’re at 91 percent accuracy, up from 82 percent pre-VAR. But a fan is only going to remember the four minutes of sitting on her couch, confused about if her team is winning or not.

“Those mistakes stick out far more often than proper implementation,” Rodriguez says.

Take the David McGoldrick’s disallowed goal. The offside rule was created to prevent cherry picking—basically so you couldn’t just leave a forward near the goal and boot it up to her. Now we’re to the point where half a centimeter of toe can make a goal illegitimate. The same weekend, Liverpool forward Roberto Firmino was offside by an armpit.

Every weekend since in the Premier League has come with obligatory VAR controversy to dominate the coverage. Even if Firmino and McGoldrick are fully versed on the rules and aware of their surroundings, how are they supposed to account for those margins?

Aleksander Ceferin, the president of Europe’s soccer governing body, recently said they’re looking into adjusting the rules to make VAR “clearer, faster, less invasive.” He pointed out that players with long noses have a disadvantage currently, and floated the idea of a 10-20 centimeter buffer in the offside rule.

All that VAR has done, Rory Smith summarizes, is highlight the limits of the law. The laws of the game are going to have to evolve quickly to take the existence of VAR into account. Instead, VAR has became its own entity. It’s a character. It’s a verb: VARed. It’s a pundit polemic. It’s a meme. It’s a K-Pop dance move.

For better or worse, it’s VAR.

*Original illustration by Aaron Fernande*z

New Year, New Me: Five Apps for Starting Fresh in 2020

Welcome to a new decade! Although the ritual around New Year’s is just a cultural construction, it’s the perfect time for creating new resolutions, picking up forgotten hobbies and letting things go for a fresh start. You have to ask yourself what you want out of 2020 and what you definitely want to leave in 2019. To help as best as we can, here’s a few apps that’ll help you sort through life’s nonsense and put you in a better position to take on the year.

😭 In your feelings 😭 #

The very first thing you’ll need to do is detox from last year. Unfortunately midnight on January 1st is not a genuine restart, you might have a lot of baggage or drama that you’re still dealing with. The best thing you can do is to forgive and forget — which is where “Thought Detox” from Angelo Stavrow comes in. Just write down whatever you are trying to let go of in the new year and press “Release This Thought.”

One of the most valuable things you can gift yourself in 2020 is keep tracking all of the good things in your life, even the little one. With Desi Rottman’s “Three Good Things". If you’re having a bad day, it can be hard to remember the good stuff that’s happened recently, so let this project do the work for you. As Desi writes in the app “They can be things that happened the day before, things I’m looking forward to, good experiences I had, or even things as trivial as coffee. Some days it’s harder than others, and on those days, it feels like the most important thing to do.” Also, the app is locally stored which means all of your thoughts are safe and not being backed up to a server.

Committing to daily journaling can sometimes be overwhelming, so here’s a cute and efficient way to log your feelings without the messy details. With “Year in Pixels” from Alejandro AR you can keep track of your daily mood with little color blocks and it’ll create a helpful visualization that’ll show the range over time.

👾 Digital detox 👾 #

In addition to an emotional detox, a digital detox might be part of the way you set yourself up for wellness in the new year — and what has the tendency to cause the most unhappiness, but Twitter. “Tokimeki Unfollow” from Julius Tarng helps you go through your Twitter timeline with the Konmari method, if a tweet doesn’t spark joy, unfollow. Stop following the person you met at a networking thing 3 years ago, their tweets are bad and in 2020, you don’t have time for that.

Finally, maybe you don’t want to unfollow someone but you’re annoyed by how often they retweet things, there’s a solution for that as well: “Turn Off Retweets” by Julia Evans. Twitter already lets you turn off retweets for people, but unfortunately you have to go one by one, this will help you get it done faster and give you the peace of mind you so badly crave for the next year.

*As always feel free to add any of these apps to your My Stuff via this collection*.

*We're building a more powerful Glitch, learn more here*.

Using a Glitch App to Write Stories with Friends

There’s a conceptual game that surrealists came up with called the Exquisite Corpse. The premise of an Exquisite Corpse drawing is that one person starts to draw. Then the next person can only see the bottom edge of the drawing, and has to complete it.

I wanted to take the concept of continuing off of another person’s work, and turn it into an online game. With a Glitch app that I made, a group of long-distance friends and I took turns writing a story together. We each started with the last 150 characters of the previous writer’s contribution and had to add our piece to it. We created a calendar so we each had an equal number of writing days, then had a call where we came up with some story basics. This included 4 main characters, and a time and place for the story to happen in — the week before New Year’s Eve 2999.

I was inspired to make a game like this after the same friends participated in Inktober and would share their art every day of the month. We all got so excited to see each other’s work that it motivated us to stay on top of our drawings and complete the whole month. I’ve tried to do Inktober alone for the past three years and usually only quit halfway. After our month of sharing art, we were looking for ways to work on something together and I thought it would be fun to make our own collaborative story.

This app is built on Glitch, using the Hello Express template, and Airtable as an easy database. When our story was complete, I had a page where all the text is displayed and we can read the story in its entirety (Coming to the Kindle Store, and NYT Bestsellers list soon). Then on New Year's Eve we all got a glass of bubbly and did a dramatic reading over Google Hangouts. The story was completely bonkers! Sometimes it had a bit of a flow, then there complete tangents that were never resolved. It was hilarious and made pretty much no sense — more sense than Cats, but not much more.

This experience is what really excited me about building an app that exists outside the screen. The reading and writing happens in the app, but there’s a fun social component that goes far beyond it.

*If you want to give this a try with your friends, I made an Exquisite Story Starter app for you. All you need is an Airtable account, and a Glitch account.

“A Different Way to Tell Stories”: Mentoring the Next Generation of Writers

Girls Write Now wants every young woman to have a voice, regardless of where they come from. As the first organization of its kind, GWN offers writing mentorship and education for young women and gender-nonconforming youth. Across the core programs, the organization serves more than 600 mentees annually — the bulk of which is a year long intensive where a participant is matched with a mentor.

“Over 90% high-need girls of color, over 70% immigrant, first generation,” Founder and Executive Director Maya Nussbaum said in a phone interview. “We're matching all of these girls with women professional writers as their personal mentors, and they have an intensive relationship throughout the course of the year.”

Embracing Technology #

The organization has worked hard to stay up-to-date in its education and consequently started experimenting with more digital-focused programs in 2009. “The writers in our community were having a bit of a crisis because the publishing and the magazine landscape, it was changing rapidly,” Nussbaum explained. “I felt like we had an obligation to talk about and start teaching the way that writing is going to work in the future at that point…the curriculum is multi-genre, multimedia, multi-platform. The way that writing works today in the real world.”

Those experiments led to partnerships with organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Parsons The New School for Design in its Design and Technology department, all of which led to a stand alone digital media mentoring program which “culminates in a multimedia anthology at the end of the year and a multimedia presentation.” Now, the 150 mentees that participate in Girls Write Now annually, leave with multimedia skills and portfolio of their work. “There's a lot of videos, design, animation. In the past we've done interactive narrative game design.”

In the 2019 edition of the multimedia anthology, titled “Ctrl+B”, there were 52 published projects from the participants that covered all sorts of mediums. Nora Knoepflmacher, a junior, produced a podcast interview with her brother talking about his experience as a male gymnast, Laila Stevens, a senior, made a personal video essay about her family home and Maisha Nabila created a website for her writing to reflect on her personal possessions and the stories behind them. Each project is unique and personal.

To make the creation of portfolios easier, Girls Write Now has recently started experimenting with Glitch. With a template app that the girls can simply remix and edit as needed, they can have their own site in just a couple of minutes. “In my experience, the girls are the most excited about having a portfolio that's really public facing and so easy for them to share,” Anjali Misra, Community Fellow, said. “That’s really exciting to them if they do go through all the steps and the effort to update their name and their photo and write a description about themselves and then put their pieces on there.”

In the coming year, Girls Write Now is looking forward to bringing the writing and digital media work together. “Every month, the girls are learning about a different platform, a different way to tell their story, and it's through a mixture of analog and digital.”

*To learn more about Girls Write Now check out their website and the most recent edition of *their annual multimedia anthology.

Run Audience Polls, Presentations, and Contests on Glitch

At Chrome Dev Summit we like to do something interactive with the audience between talks, basically as a kind-of content palette cleanser, and 2019 was no exception.Throughout the course of the day, we presented 16 web features that appeared in Chrome that year, and got the audience to vote for their favourite in a knockout-style contest. We called it "Big Web Quiz", which, as a name, doesn't entirely make sense, but we already had the domain name, and we're lazy. At Chrome Dev Summit we like to do something interactive with the audience between talks, basically as a kind-of content palette cleanser, and 2019 was no exception. Throughout the course of the day, we presented 16 web features that appeared in Chrome that year, and got the audience to vote for their favourite in a knockout-style contest. We called it "Big Web Quiz", which, as a name, doesn't entirely make sense, but we already had the domain name, and we're lazy.

Some folks asked us for the source so they can run their own votes and contests. We thought about releasing it on GitHub, but pfft, who can be bothered setting up their own server just to try a silly thing like this? So instead, we put it on Glitch so it can be easily remixed, meaning you can have your own instance running in no time.

Important note: We threw this project together really quickly, and given I've been ranting about code readability lately, there's code in there that will make me look like a big stinky hypocrite. Don't @ me. I mean, look at this.

During the initial review of this article, folks pointed out that it was a bit text heavy. They're totally right. However, I couldn't think of a meaningful way to break it up, so I've just shoved in a few photos I've taken recently. Enjoy!

Getting it running #

Take a look at the readme for instructions on getting your own instance running, and a tour of all the features.

Anyway, for the rest of this article I want to dive into some of the things I learned while building the app. If all you want is to play with the app and set up your own instance, you've really gotten all you need from this article. We should part company now, as friends.

Everyone else...let's go.

Persisting data on Glitch #

Glitch likes to nap, which is totally relatable. Specifically, Glitch projects sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity, and boot up again next time someone visits. This is what makes Glitch work at scale, and there are a few things you can do to reduce the impact of this.

Your application can create a .data directory in your project root. This directory is special to Glitch: it's persisted, isn't accessible to others, and isn't copied when folks remix your project.

You can access .data via your app's console (Tools > full page console) if you need to snoop around for debugging.

For Big Web Quiz, I used a single JSON file for storage. This is kinda inefficient, because the whole file needs to be rewritten if anything changes, but I only write a subset of app state that updates infrequently.

All of the data about an active vote is held in memory, which means it'd be lost if there's no activity for 5 minutes. That was totally fine for us, but if you're looking to run votes for multiple days, you'll have to make some changes.

If you're changing persistent data frequently, it's probably best to use a smarter file-based data store, such as Lowdb, NeDB, or SQLite. Luckily, there are example projects for all of these.

For what it's worth, here's where I handle the reading and writing of the JSON file.

Session data #

In server-driven apps, you often want to associate data to a particular visitor, such as log-in state. express-session makes this easy, but by default it stores everything in memory, meaning it all vanishes after 5 minutes of inactivity.

Thankfully, session-file-store solves this, by writing session data to disk, and the best place to write to is the .data directory. Here's where I set that up. If you're using one of the smarter storage systems mentioned above, you'll be able to find a plugin for express-session that will use it.

Handling larger build scripts #

Glitch is best-suited to things that have a tiny build script, or no build script at all, but nahhhh. I want bundling, I want TypeScript, I want CSS nesting, minifying, compression... I want it all!

Again, the .data directory is a great build destination, but there are a few things to bear in mind…

Keep rebuilds to a minimum

Glitch projects probably don't have as much CPU power as your local machine, so try to avoid doing more work than you need to. If any of your build tools have an incremental mode, use it. Just make sure any build metadata goes into .data.

I'm using Rollup to manage the build, but I couldn't find a TypeScript plugin I liked, so I wrote my own. It shells out to the official tsc compiler, meaning I can use newer features like incremental builds.

Avoid unnecessary rebuilds

Glitch will run npm run start whenever project files change. However, Glitch will do exactly the same thing when your project wakes up.

This is a problem. You need to rebuild when files change, but if your project is simply waking up, a rebuild is unnecessary – it just makes your project much slower to start.

To work around this, I wrote a little script that writes the last modified time of relevant project files to a JSON file in .data (have I mentioned how useful .data is?). Then, next time npm run start is called, it only calls the build script if some of the files have changed.

This makes project start-up really fast. Pain in the arse though, isn't it? Boy, it sure would be nice if we didn't have to do this. I'll just leave this here and see what happens.

Developing locally might be faster #

If your project gets big enough, it might be better to develop locally and push to Glitch later. Thankfully Glitch makes this really easy! In your project, go to Tools > Git > Import from GitHub. Give Glitch the name of your repo, and it'll replace your current files with those from your GitHub project's master branch!

If your repo isn't on GitHub, you can push directly to it using your projects git URL, also found in Tools > Git. Unfortunately you can't push directly to master, so you need to:

I love Rollup! #

I used this project to experiment with build patterns, and it turned out a lot better than most of my experiments.

The main part of the build is driven by Rollup and mostly transpiles the server-side TypeScript files to JavaScript so NodeJS can run them. Every page is defined by a JSX component which is rendered to HTML by the server.

This means the server script can 'import' scripts intended for the client. This works by creating another Rollup instance within the main Rollup build, which exclusively handles client-side JavaScript, and returns the hashed URL of the final asset, along URLs of its dependencies.

Here's the plugin I wrote to do that. It started as an experiment, but I'm really happy with it. It feels less 'magic' than other build scripts I've used in the past.

I'm not sure the creators of Rollup intended it to be used like this, but Rollup's simple, extensible, and well-documented plugin system made it really nice to play with.

Other 'interesting' things #

Please have a poke around the code, and if you make changes that you think will be useful to others, please make a PR. Here are a few additional tidbits that may be of interest:

Websockets just work on Glitch! I used them for time sensitive bits of communication that didn't fall into a request-response pattern. The ws library makes it a lot easier. Here's where we integrated it.
Glitch's CDN will gzip assets – it just works. However, it won't gzip things you serve yourself. I wrote a little plugin to brotli-compress assets at build-time, and used express-static-gzip to serve them.
Some of the visuals on the big-screen view synchronise to the music. I used a small Preact component to retain the previous view until the music was ready to change. In terms of synchronising the music itself, here's a guide (please give that a sympathy-click. It's the most effort I put into a blog post, no one really cared).
I wrote another little component to allow programmatic transitions between components. This was particularly handy for the 'slam' animations, which involve randomisation, and can't easily be expressed with CSS.

And that's it! #

I had a lot of fun throwing this project together. The quick-turnaround means some of the project is a bit rough-and-ready (especially the admin UI, sorry about that), but I hope you have fun playing around with it!

Sorting Through That Complicated, Awesome Side Project

Side projects and side hustles are an increasingly significant part of how many people spend their working hours, especially in the tech and creative industries. They're often encouraged as a way of gaining and demonstrating new skills, but they also often create a foundation for new beginnings elsewhere. Successful companies including Trello, Craigslist and Twitter started out as projects.

Based on a 2017 survey, an estimated percent of employees are working on a side project. They can be a fun way of learning a new skill or software, but that positive motivation can sometimes become a toxic cultural expectation tied to career advancement. Given that we work at a tech company, I wanted to talk to some of my coworkers about their feelings and experiences with side projects.

Steph has mixed feelings. Because of the pressure to do extra work after hours, it “feels like a trap, and a recipe for burnout. After a long day of work usually the last thing I want to do is look at a screen anymore,” Steph said. “So most of my side projects are more physical: cross-stitch, crochet, stamp carving, drawing, baking and pasta making. Sometimes engineering work just feels so abstract and intangible that it’s really satisfying to use my hands and make a thing.”

For Steph, the best motivation is a more social project, rather than working on something only for herself. In 2019 her friends all participated in Inktober together, and “the anticipation of seeing what they all did was exciting and kept [her] on task.” Similarly, Steph worked on a creative writing Exquisite Corpse app so her and her friends could collaborate on a connected short story. They split up the days in December so they would each get designated time to contribute, and on New Year’s Day they read their Frankenstein story over video chat. You can actually read about Steph’s project in her personal post about it.

For Johnicholas, it can be difficult to keep motivation or focus on a project for an extended period of time. “I have trouble focusing on only one project for longer than a few days or weeks,” He said. “So most of my effort has been about learning to work within those limitations.” One solution he has found is to work on projects that build upon each other. “[It’s easier] to get excited, not about a large months-long project, but about a tiny project that just coincidentally happens to be similar to, and build upon, several other tiny projects that I have previously attempted or completed.”

Johnicholas also participates in Ludum Dare, a biannual “accelerated video game development competition”, at least once a year. In reflecting on one of his games, Glyphwitches, Johnicholas explained, “We did not succeed at making a good game, and since there are no sounds or music, nor any level design nor narrative, it’s really not even a complete game.” But that, in his mind, is one of the benefits of Ludum Dare — he gets freedom in game development that is more difficult in software. “By embracing and affirming “what I am making is a game”, I can challenge myself to get as far up the slope of game-ness or polish as I want while still ‘succeeding.’”

Similarly, Sarah feels joy from initial creating more than polishing. “If I can hack together a proof of concept quickly, no matter how ugly the code or design of the app is if it just mostly works, I tend to get pretty giddy about it,” Sarah explained. “It gives me a cool feeling of joy, like the world is made of play-doh and it’s just waiting for cool creators to sculpt fun things.”

Sarah also describes the bad parts of creating side projects: the shame. The dark side of any good idea is the guilt that you haven’t worked on it. Sarah has worked to make sure this guilt doesn’t impact her long term. “I take [not finishing] as a sign that the idea has run its course. Often I’ll stop because the idea just wasn’t compelling enough for the amount of work required to bring it into existence.”

One project that Sarah has worked on is Turn Around, a browser extension that could support people trying to boycott sites. For example, when Vox employees were on strike, she found it so easy to accidentally click on some of their content — Vox owns a few different sites, so it could be difficult for one person to keep track, even if they want to support the boycott. “A community organizer who is an expert in their field, who has strategically crafted a list of demands, could very easily input all the websites folks should avoid into an app,” Sarah said. “As a person who installed the extension, I could just install it with a click of a button and never really have to do more work than that.”

What Sarah shares with Edwin is that learning new tech isn’t motivating, unless it comes from a need to make an idea possible. “I can’t tell you how many times I opened the React documentation “Getting Started” guide only to lose interest and push it off,” Edwin said. “What made me finally dive into React was coming up with a project idea that React made easier.” Edwin also learned Adobe After Effects, Origami, Rails and more through different projects.

“When I finish a project, I usually push through because I’m excited to share it — I’m interested in seeing a reaction,” he explained. “When I created buy.edwin.pizza, for example, my interest in using the Stripe API was not the only thing I was thinking about.” The aptly named project, Buy Edwin Pizza, is… exactly what it sounds like. You can send Edwin money and he will make a video, at some point, of him eating the pizza he ordered with the money you contributed.

“I’m actually still working on and maintaining that project, so I think social motivation has a lot more longevity than interest alone. This is true for utilitarian projects as well, like chrome extensions or productivity apps — if you can see that people are using them, and benefiting, it can be really gratifying to make updates and improvements over a long period.”

*Ready to start a new side project with Glitch? Visit our Create page.

What Does it Take to Make Generative Art Every Week? We Asked Luke Patton.

Luke Patton was never good at traditional art classes in school but, as he wrote on his blog, he “internalized the lessons they taught [him] about practice and improvement.” These lessons didn’t go to waste, however, because eventually, Luke discovered generative art. After taking some coding classes and discovering #plottertwitter, Luke was inspired to create his own generative art — he went through Matt DesLauriers’ course on Creative Coding with Canvas & WebGL which “was a nitro boost to [his] coding abilities” and read Sher Minn’s History of Computer Art which “sent [him] on a deep Wikipedia journey to read about early computer artists.”

“At some point I read Inconvergent’s essay on generative algorithms and it crystallized for me that I needed a structured way to practice,” Luke wrote. That’s when he started his Canvas Cards projects, where he produced 52 cards (one a week) for the entirety of 2019 and posted them into a Glitch project. Luke was also nice enough to talk to me about the project and his process.

Have you ever done a year-long project before this? What was challenging about being that consistent?

I wasn’t really thinking about it at the time, but my in senior year of college I presented a final project based on data I had collected about my life, everything that happened each day in 2013. I guess that feels a little different because I was just collecting info in 2013 and all the design and work was compressed into the first couple months of 2014.

To me, the consistency [of the Canvas Cards] was more of a comfort than a challenge cause it distributed the pressure across a known time scale. If I had tried to make 52 cards just in vague bounds of 2019, I think I either would have burned out quickly or procrastinated till the end. Establishing one card per week gave me a good rhythm and let me know how much runway I had to approach any given idea.

Did this project change the way you think about art or change the way you think about your ability to create art?

I think the most accurate way to put it would be that this project happened because of a change in the way I thought about art. Once I was introduced to generative art, it felt like a whole new world was opened up. I drank up a lot of history and theory before I ever really put together any code myself. I think this project definitely matured my understanding of the medium though, in the way that direct experience tends to.

I thought your feelings about personal projects and money were interesting. Can you tell me how you arrived at this perspective? You mention that you "would no longer be doing a project for [yourself] and for a community, [you] would be someone with something to sell." What difference do you think that makes with a personal project?

I can’t remember where I originally heard it but early in my design education the difference between free and $1 was impressed upon me. The introduction of money into any creative process is a multiplier for complexity, and the last thing I was looking for was more complexity.

Almost all the knowledge and resources I used in this project came to me freely, from people who were sharing out of passion and kindness. That’s the spirit that I conceived of the project in, so it felt that remaining non-commercial was important. I really value the non-commercial web as a sort of haven against hustle culture and that’s where I wanted this project to live. I understand the necessity of artists to sell their work and be compensated (I’ve purchased prints and outputs before) but it just didn’t seem right for what I was doing.

When was the first time in your life you remember feeling good about something you created? Could be a doodle, a Lego project, a story you wrote, etc.

I was a little young for the GeoCities boom that I know a lot of internet creators experienced, but I was really involved on a GFX forum. We weren’t like a car, game or fandom dedicated forum but we would create forum signatures for people on those sites. That’s where I really cut my teeth on Photoshop and I would occasionally win our little internal “Sig of the Week” competitions. I think that was the first time I was really involved in a community of creative people and felt good and proud about creating something.

Has programming made you feel like a more creative person?

Absolutely. I think there’s a pretty stereotypical view of programming and people who program as very rigid and strict, which can be true, but the flexibility and potential packed into even a relatively simple library like Processing is unfathomable. I think the ideas I’m able to express with code are as strong as any I’ve put together with traditional design or art tools. And like any good tool, code can be a playground that lets you stretch creative muscles. I believe creativity is a muscle, any exercise you can get makes it stronger.

*Check out Luke's complete Canvas Cards project here and read his really insightf*ul retrospective while you're at it.

Building Your Own Website, Once and For All

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they ask themselves, “should I start a blog?” and the answer is, unequivocally, yes. Blogs are a flexible way to communicate or document just about anything. Write reviews for all the blueberry muffins you eat, keep a fictional diary from the perspective of your pet, or other useful things.

The hardest part of blogging, like any hobby, is getting started and being consistent, so it’s important to find an easy way to begin. Luckily there are a handful of Glitch apps that we’ve found so you can just remix and jumpstart your new site.

For someone learning how to code, there’s nothing more efficient than TIL Blog by Cassey Lottman which gives you a skeleton of a blog with all the basic tools you’ll need for jotting down your thoughts including recent posts, archives, and tagging. Also, take a look at Cassey’s blog made with the same structure to give yourself a demo on how it looks in action. If you’re feeling adventurous, maybe change the colors or your font.

Next, you can try Geoglitchies, a simple but sleek looking blog from Jess Lord and Monica Dinculescu, ready for your remix. Who wants to worry about hosting or frameworks, Geoglitchies aims to bring back early blogging like Geocities or LiveJournal where you can make a site for any of your obscure interests. “Remember making a website about dolphins or being able to look at 100 websites about dolphins in a row? This is kind of like that.” Even if you’re new to programming, everything you need to get started is in the “How to configure your site” blog post.

Another option for your writing needs is write.as which is a minimalist, distraction-free tool for publishing—so distraction-free that just like Glitch, you can try it out without signing up! The write.as also has a lot of tools on their Glitch team page so you can work in a way that’s comfortable for you. Remix their README CMS app and use Glitch’s markdown editor to write a post without even opening a new tab.

If you’re looking for something more specific, like just to document your life, then Nice Reads by Tessa Thornton could be a good fit. Originally designed for reviewing books, you can actually just login to Nice Reads with your Twitter account and have your own profile right in Tessa’s app. But why stop there? Maybe you want a place to review local chili cheese fries—or any kind of fry—remix the app and add your own spin to it.

_To keep any of these apps, save the collection for later or add one of them to your My Stuff!

***We're building a more powerful Glitch, learn more he*re**.

Will YouTube’s New Privacy Rules Actually Protect Children?

Someone finally thought of the children.

By deciding to treat all viewers of videos classified as “made for kids” as children under the age of 13, YouTube should certainly stop some illegal tracking of under-13 viewers by advertisers. But the shift, which Google’s video-hosting subsidiary announced was underway January 6, may also upend the business models of many YouTube creators, even those who say they aren’t trying to appeal to kids.

The risk isn't just the shame-by-proximity of having clips appear next to Barney & Friends. They will also be cut off from targeted advertisements, the most profitable sort, as well as basic YouTube community-cultivation features.

And in case creators don’t correctly tag their content, YouTube will backstop this new rule with machine-learning video-sorting algorithms.

“The issue here is what ‘child directed’ really means,” emailed Daisy Soderberg-Rivkin, a resident fellow on children and technology at the R Street Institute, a free-market-minded think tank in Washington, D.C. “Animated clips, crafting content, videos about antique toys, there's a lot of stuff that kids might watch that was not necessarily created for them.”

But YouTube didn’t take this step all on its own, even if its September post previewing these changes might suggest that nobody else had a hand in them. In September, YouTube agreed to pay a $170 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission and New York’s attorney general for illegally collecting personal data from children without their parents’ consent. As part of that settlement, YouTube committed to stepping up its enforcement of a rule called COPPA, short for Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

The 1998 statute essentially creates a parallel privacy universe for kids under 13 #

Instead of the general absence of rules about the collection and use of everybody else’s data, COPPA requires sites and online services to refrain from collecting those kids’ data without parental permission. (HBO’s comedy series “Silicon Valley” provided an excellent recap of COPPA in the season 4 episode “Terms of Service,” when a video-chat startup blew off this law and found itself facing a potential $21 billion fine.)

Back in the late 1990s, the primary fear driving COPPA was not that kids would get targeted by ads but that their personal info would be scooped up by unscrupulous if not predatory sites.

A contemporary story by Larry Magid in the *Los Angeles Times *emphasizes that safety angle and doesn’t even mention advertising. But in 2012, the FTC revised its regulations to, among other things, ban sites from tracking children using “persistent identifiers that can recognize users over time and across different websites or online services, such as IP addresses and mobile device IDs.”

YouTube violating that persistent-identifiers rule led to the FTC action and settlement in September, and then the crackdown #

"If content creators have child-directed channels on YouTube, they must comply with COPPA,” said FTC commissioner Christine Wilson at the Family Online Safety Institute’s annual conference in Washington in November. But, she added: "I am aware that there is a lot of consternation on this topic." The immediate concern among YouTube videographers is that they’ll see their incomes shrivel.

“We asked creators to go into Creator Studio and disable personalized ads (called ‘Interest-Based Ads’, under the ‘Advanced’ tab) for a few days,” Jonathan Katz and Victoria Fener wrote on TubeFilter in November. “Based on our initial testing, a video not running personalized ads sees a loss in revenue somewhere between 60% to 90%.”

A study released in 2019 of the economic effects of disabling ad tracking at news sites found a much smaller shortfall—only 4% when browsers such as Apple’s Safari blocked ad tracking and left sites confined to matching ads with their context instead of behavioral data. But YouTube is a different market than news sites, and its own widely-used apps don’t block ad tracking.

Jeremy Johnston, co-host of the YouTube channel J House Vlogs, said in an email that this potential shortfall represents his primary concern for his channel, in which he and his wife Kendra broadcast episodes of their life in Puerto Rico with their five kids to 1.99 million subscribers. “I love that viewers enjoy our content for free on YouTube, and we're able to make a living creating the content,” he said. “YouTube's use of personalized ads have been the mechanism that makes this transaction possible.”

But he’s also worried about being locked out of YouTube’s community features. Yes, even the comments.

“Losing comments is a big deal,” Johnston wrote. “We have spent hours responding to comments and engaging with viewers.”

YouTube’s new rules for content that appears to be made for kids will also cancel recommendation tools and polls on Johnston’s channel. Google publicist Ivy Choi pointed to a video YouTube posted Dec. 17, 2019 to answer creators’ questions, in which YouTube head of family partnerships Lauren Glaubach explained that the site had to deactivate those options on made-for-kids videos because “these features rely on user data.” Johnston added that he doesn’t know how many of his viewers might be under 13, because YouTube analytics only cover users above that age.

At a January event in Washington hosted by the libertarian group TechFreedom, multiple YouTube creators complained about being held accountable for the collection of children’s data when it’s Google that scoops up that data and then shares only vague outlines with them.

“We're practically just getting pie charts,” said Jackie NerdEcrafter, who hosts a YouTube channel about crafts projects from Quebec. “We don't have any deep-dive information or personal information on anyone at all.” She also complained about the vagueness of YouTube’s criteria for what makes a video kid-directed. In an email afterward, she added that YouTube’s algorithm had erred in classifying her own output. “YouTube had designated 2 of my videos as ‘directed to kids’ even though both of these videos were reviews for parents/people with buying power to make informed decisions,” she wrote. “The reason these videos were flagged, I believe, is probably due to the brand name Crayola being the focus of the review.”

As NerdEcrafter put it: “As creators, we are not told WHY a video is flagged, so we are left guessing.”

Google’s clearest guidance may be in a video posted Nov. 12, in which Glaubach outlines a list of factors that could make a video “made for kids” (for example, “it uses language that is meant for children to understand” and “it includes activities that appeal to children”) and suggests that creators in doubt should “talk to a lawyer.” Glaubach also notes that YouTube’s machine-learning classification systems may override creators’ designations of videos as not made for kids “if we detect error or abuse,” in which case creators should avail themselves of YouTube’s send-feedback button.

That challenge may only get tougher if COPPA’s age limit gets raised from 13 to 16—a key provision of a bill introduced Jan. 9, and a move that Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D.-Ill.) defended at the State of the Net policy conference in Washington Jan. 28, saying “I want to shift the burden from the consumer.” Soderberg-Rivkin and Johnston argued that the more effective remedy for this problem of kids being tracked as adults is Google’s YouTube Kids app, which blocks that surveillance and only features family-safe content (although its human and machine filters have had problems with the latter).

Johnston said he also pays for YouTube Premium, an ad-free option, “for convenience and time saving”—not out of concerns with ad tracking, which he said he accepts as part of getting free entertainment online. “We don't ever let our kids just watch YouTube unsupervised or without a specific purpose,” he said.

The head of a Washington kids-advocacy non-profit that backs the FTC’s actions and YouTube’s crackdown made the same point.

"The fact that there's no longer the comments or the chats or some of the other things that can really veer kids in the wrong direction is a positive step,” said James Steyer, founder, and CEO of Common Sense, in an email sent by a publicist.

“But parents should still monitor their kids' usage of YouTube, both the amount of time they spend on it and also what they watch on it.”

The FTC, however, can’t mandate that parents stop letting their kids browse YouTube at random. It can’t issue orders to customers, only to companies. So that’s what it’s doing.

This Developer is Spreading Road Safety Awareness, One City at a Time

More than a century after the first car was sold, road traffic injuries and deaths remain one of the most dangerous problems in the world. The CDC estimates about 3700 people may die every day around the world in car, truck, bus, motorcycle, bicycle, or pedestrian-related traffic accidents. Half of those killed are cyclists or pedestrians.

To confront this issue, Vision Zero, a road traffic safety initiative, started in Sweden in 1997 with the goal of reducing the road traffic-related fatalities and injuries. The project has had great success in Sweden, which now has one of the lowest annual road death rates in the world—despite an increase in overall traffic—and has inspired countries and cities all over the world to adopt Vision Zero initiatives.

One Washington, DC-based Glitch user, Daniel Schep, has taken action on this issue in his community.

“I've been coding since I was in middle school and biking longer than I can remember. Both are integral parts of who I am,” Daniel said in an interview with Glitch. “But unsurprisingly, coding has proven to be much more lucrative.”

An idea occurred to him “when Carlos Sanchez-Martin [an e-scooter rider] and Tom Hollowell [a cyclist] were killed within days of each other.” The idea was to take the classic “X days since last accident” sign and use it to show the frequency of traffic-related deaths. Zero Vision DC Clock keeps count of how recently a pedestrian or cyclist was fatally struck by a vehicle in DC. The counter increases on its own and when an accident occurs, Daniel updates the app with the deceased’s name and moves the counter back to zero.

One of the reasons that Daniel chose Glitch to host this project was because he wanted to let others make their own versions of his app.

“Remixability was 100% a goal...having as simple a code base as possible (no frameworks, just vanilla Javascript) and hosting on Glitch made it very easy for people to make their own versions for their cities,” Daniel explained. “The first remix was from a transportation planning student in Montgomery County right across the Maryland/DC line. The Boston remix came after the death of Dave Salovesh, a vocal bike [and] pedestrian safety advocate. This has led to lots of coverage and global calls to action.”

While Daniel finds it compelling that something simple he created something could be used by activists in different communities, to him “it’s mostly really sad that it's necessary.”

Why Non-Binary Tech Workers Remain Skeptical of the Online Adoption of Gender-Neutral Pronouns

“There's not a man I meet but doth salute me, As if I were their well-acquainted friend,” William Shakespeare wrote, over 400 years ago in A Comedy of Errors.

Grammarians will note Shakespeare’s use of the singular “they.” It’s the type of “they” that doesn’t specifically refer to a man or woman, but instead replaces “he” or “she” with irrelevance. While this “they” has origins as early as the late 1300s, the pronoun was named Merriam Webster’s Word of the Year in 2019, defined as “a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary” or “a single person whose gender is intentionally not revealed.”

Why and how did “they” collect currency in 2019? #

According to Merriam-Webster, searches for the word “they” increased by 313% over the previous year. The pronoun also gained momentum among policymakers as nonbinary teenagers pushed for driver’s licenses that reflect more gender identities. But the wave of proposed gender-neutral legislation is slow-moving, held up by a bureaucratic binary system, generational divides, and partisan lines.

On a more fundamental level, the surge in popularity around “they” is a response to changing times. According to Pew Research Center, one-in-five U.S. adults personally know someone who goes by a gender-neutral pronoun. Survey data also suggests that more and more Americans will become more gender literate within the coming years.

Certain politicians are already endorsing this attitude—a number of Democratic presidential candidates list their gender pronouns in their Twitter bios. While this could be perceived as an overt exertion of political correctness, which it is, it’s also a sentiment echoed throughout user profiles on Twitter en masse.

Folks of all gender identities have taken to Twitter to share their pronouns in their bios, a trend that took off with little to no initiative from Twitter itself. Twitter is a gathering place for public discourse, and people simply want to normalize the idea that everyone should lay bare their pronouns out of respect for those who use non-standard pronouns.

“It’s a social phenomenon amongst people,” said Rowan Rosenthal, a product designer who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. “When straight, cis-gender people started doing that, I thought that was really cool because it was a show of allyship in a lot of cases. I know that it’s also controversial because some people view it as virtue signaling in some ways, but I think it’s nice [for nonbinary and transgender people] because you’re not outing yourself by having your pronouns in your bio.”

Rosenthal used to work at OkCupid, where they created the feature that lets users define their own pronouns. It was the first project of its kind from a mainstream dating app; historically, users would just include their pronouns in their bios on dating apps and social media sites due to a lack of better options.

More tech companies followed OkCupid’s suit in attempts to become more gender-inclusive #

In 2019, Bumble rolled out an extensive list of gender options and the ability to choose whether or not you want to show your gender identity to potential matches. Instagram added a custom field to its gender options, which previously only included male, female and “not specified.” Slack now lets workspace owners and admins add a custom profile field for people to select their preferred pronouns, but employees still need to ask their admins to do this if it’s not prioritized. Lyft also added gender-neutral pronouns to its app, where drivers can see rider’s preferred pronoun but not vice versa.

In introducing these new features, many companies partner with LGBTQ+ organizations to better understand the needs of different people across the gender spectrum. For example, Tinder teamed up with multiple LGBTQ+ organization to roll out “More Genders” in 2016. Since then, 80 million matches have been made among those that have activated the feature, but the company has consciously been slow to release the functionality on a global scale. “More Genders” is only available in eight countries today, whereas Tinder’s app is available in over 190 countries.

“We want to make sure we’re rolling it out ‘on the ground’ and typically with an LGBTQ-focused organization because, ultimately, we aren't the local experts on culture or gender,” Tinder’s Director of Communications, Evan Bonnstetter, told me. "I live in Los Angeles and the diversity of this city is reflected on Tinder. But in other cities, you may not be exposed to the same diversity. As an app for everyone — that's used everywhere — we definitely take this into account."

Tinder** **hasn’t tackled gender pronouns yet, which Bonnstetter told me was because it’s not particularly relevant to the one on one interactions that you have on Tinder. However, addressing non-standard pronouns more directly is definitely not off the table for Tinder. I thought back to my conversation with Rosenthal, where they told me about all the misgendered “hey girl” DMs they receive on dating apps.

It’s worth noting that more than half of Tinder’s users are between 18 and 25, an age group representative of the more open-minded and gender fluid Generation Z. According to Pew, 59 percent of Generation Z say that “forms or online profiles that ask about a person’s gender should include options other than ‘man’ or ‘woman’” and about half of both Generation Z and millennials agreed that “society isn’t accepting enough for people who don’t identify as a man or a woman.”

When tech moves faster than the law #

A continuous theme that came up in my conversations with nonbinary people for this story was the idea that online efforts to make the world more inclusive don’t necessarily translate to the lived experience offline.

“I feel so cynical about pronouns being added to rideshare and social media apps because I always customize them, and no one ever uses them anyway,” says Isabel Lee, a product designer and software engineer who uses they/them pronouns. “I’ve never had people use my gender and pronouns unless I verbally tell them.”

Most often, this comes up for Lee on dating apps, where they said they either have to hide their gender in order to not “freak people out” or be explicit about gender on the apps to avoid explaining their gender in person.

Rosenthal also experienced this online to offline disconnect when they used the medical booking service ZocDoc to schedule a hormone appointment with an Endocrinologist. At the actual appointment, the doctor’s office addressed them by their legal name because there wasn’t a form field for any other option.

“It was such cognitive dissonance — this was a trans appointment and they were calling me by my legal name,” said Rosenthal. “It was so frustrating to deal with that in person.” Today, Rosenthal advises other startups on how to address gender identity and pronouns. Typically, they advise companies to not collect gender at all. If the company does decide to collect gender information from users, a safe route includes options for males, females, nonbinary people, as well as a fill in the blank option.

Deep-rooted, societal barriers that affect the lived experience of nonbinary people also extend to how old technological systems were set up. As Meredith Broussard wrote in her *Slat*e piece on the subject, binary code — meaning the system that powers computers — won’t accommodate nonbinary people. What does this look like in practice? Facebook’s software seems to allow users to self-identify, but the way the system actually records the data (which is ultimately sold to advertisers) names each user as male, female or null.

Both Rosenthal and Lee speculated, given their experience working at startups, that the time and investment it takes to overhaul a backend may not necessarily be prioritized in the name of gender inclusivity.

“You would have to rebuild and re-architect a lot of what’s already there,” said Rosenthal. “That’s obviously a huge investment. It’s hard to say we should rebuild this whole thing for this small demographic of people, even though it’s obviously really important. From a business standpoint, the impact is small.”

From Tinder’s perspective, the effort and resources are worth it, if not crucial to growing the business.

"For us, it’s more about doing the right thing than a bottom line for the business,” said Bonnstetter. “The majority of are members are Gen Z, so our membership grows naturally because people turn to us when they start to explore dating. But at the end of the day, that’s not the main reason we’re doing this. Our ultimate goal is that people like being on Tinder and feel welcome.”

As the tech industry has proven time and time again, it moves faster than the law. It shapes and changes culture before regulators can blink. But when it comes to the mass adoption of gender-neutral pronouns, the tech industry seems to be treading at a slow, cognizant clip.

This might be because culture is self-regulating in this case; widespread acceptance of the gender spectrum is going mainstream independent of the relatively modest efforts made by Big Tech. But the way online experiences shape the offline experiences for those who use non-standard pronouns bears room for improvement, possibly because the majority of people shaping the decisions around these online experiences go by “he” or “she.”

Glitch, Glimmer, and the Web We Need

As we’re fond of saying, Glitch is the friendly community where everyone can build the web.

We’re also the friendly community to share stories about the people who build—the coders and creators who are making technology and who are making technology better. To share those stories, we’ve launched the new magazine you see before you: Glimmer.

We are a little company that’s also investing in creating so much media because it’s essential we tell better stories about tech. Long before we were Glitch, our company was started 20 years ago as Fog Creek Software. Our founder Joel Spolsky kind of wrote the company into existence on his seminal blog Joel on Software. And while, yes, some of his posts were about how to name the variables in your code, a lot of them were just human stories, about the world, that he then used to help encourage technology to be more thoughtful and more intentionally designed.

Glitch has moved past the voice of any single person, but we still believe in the power of voices and untold stories to encourage technology to be a force for good in the world. That’s even more important at a time when so much of technology is causing doubt, anxiety, and stress.

But leaving the human stories out of tech is how we got in this mess in the first place. By being only focused on technology as a story of code, we abstracted away the real, meaningful concerns and problems that we should have been solving. If Glitch has a mission of enabling everyone on the web to create the web, then we have to reach people who will discover this new web through culture before they discover it through code.

There are countless, important stories about technology and culture that still haven’t been told. #

Whether the format is in essays, web apps, podcasts, illustrations, video or anything else—we want to challenge people to think of the impact that tech can have on our lives. Most publications that wrangle with these issues talk about which companies get funded, or which giant platforms are leaking our data.

But there’s a deeper, more profound, story that couldn’t be told anywhere else, especially when informed by a community that’s created millions of apps that couldn’t be built anywhere else.

We invite you to join us and share your story, too. If you’re a reader, dig in. If you’re a writer, illustrator, data journalist, storyteller, send us your pitch. If you’re a company that wants to reach an inclusive community of the smartest, most creative, creators on the web, let’s partner.

And if you’re someone who makes the web, we’d love to feature your work. We can’t wait to see what you create.

Women of Color are Redefining the Culture of Remote Work

Waking at 6 a.m., Aundréa Murray meditates every morning before touching any technology. Living in the depths of her email inbox is a reality of the past, and setting the day's tone is a must before tackling her to-do list. Some afternoons she joins expats and digital nomads working from laptops at a local cafe and on others, she’s adventuring to a waterfall hike or a bustling Balinese market.

Murray is one of the millions of Americans who’ve left an office job and claimed their freedom by becoming location independent. Since leaving Hartford, Connecticut in 2016 she has studied, worked abroad and spent the past year working remotely as a marketing campaign manager while traveling throughout six southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, picking up new clients, new friends, and new inspiration during her travels.

“Being able to work outside of an office has been critical to my mental health and the success of my work - without it, I lose momentum, motivation and passion for what I am doing,” says Murray.

“The sooner employers understand that their employees thrive from having this freedom, the sooner they can see the growth in their companies.”

The remote work lifestyle has been steadily pushing the boundaries and redefining work culture in the U.S. for more than a decade now. From 2005 to 2017, the number of people telecommuting in the U.S. increased by 159%, according to U.S. Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data collected by Global Workplace Analytics.

As professionals continue to pull away from traditional routines and conventional office spaces, remote working will maintain its upward trend as individuals are more intentional about prioritizing a work-life balance, improved health, and well-being. In a collective report published by Buffer last year, 2,500 remote workers of all ages shared their individual experiences and 99% said they would work remotely for the rest of their careers.

The rise in remote work coupled with a desire to travel birthed the ‘digital nomad’, which has now become an international subculture for many professionals uprooting their lives to explore foreign countries and cities around the world, tethered only to their laptops and a strong WiFi connection. In 2019, 7.3 million Americans describe themselves as digital nomads, according to MBO partners, a provider of back-office services to independent workers that studies the freelance economy.

More often than not, we’ve seen the digital nomad experience and its narratives shared in the media from a privileged white lens, but professionals from a variety of backgrounds and races have been just as present in shifting work culture, including many women of color like Murray. In some cases, remote work has even helped to decrease gender and racial gaps in work industries, especially tech. And through social media and blogs, women of color are building community and influencing their peers to join the movement.

“Nomadism is different for everybody, and for me, it’s been an interesting ride,” says Murray about her experience traveling as a Black woman. “The downside has been not seeing too many women of color in certain countries and feeling isolated and lonely, but checking Facebook and Instagram to see who’s in your city can remind you you’re not at all alone.”

For San Francisco native Yosh Han, a clairvoyant and scent artist running her own perfume company remotely, digital nomadism looks like a constant exploration of culture, collaboration, and building community.

“I love working with talented people and broadening my work, whether it be with local artisans or entrepreneurs,” she says.

After complete burnout and back-to-back heartbreak left her craving a big life change, Han left San Francisco in December 2016 to join a 78-person travel group on Remote Year, a company that organizes international travel for professionals from different backgrounds and industries. As a Tawainese-American woman, Han says she has had to constantly clarify her heritage during her travels.

“Sometimes being a woman of color helped me fit in and gave me some advantages in countries where brown skin is the norm, and other times, especially in Europe, people would insist I am from China,” she says. Her advice to other women of color who are navigating the day-to-day of digital nomadism is to make local friends and really get involved in the communities.

“It’s so expanding to learn about other cultures, even dating in other countries is a huge eye-opener.”

Work travel programs and companies, including Remote Year, are now becoming more intentional about inclusivity for both their employees and their program groups. Akua Sencherey, a Black woman digital nomad and former Remote Year program consultant, says that she noticed a change in the racial and ethnic makeup of the groups during 2018 when she worked for the company, including more African Americans.

“I believe the biggest driver of this was the pioneering members of the early Remote Year groups being honest with their experiences and sharing that perspective with prospective travelers.”

Sencherey also shared her experiences as a Black woman abroad, describing a range of experiences in Brazil, Montenegro, South Africa and other countries where she faced blatantly racist acts.

“One thing that I now know for sure is that the world doesn’t really know who women of color are, especially those from the U.S. They have a stereotypical view of us from the media and Hollywood – I’ve often been referred to as Serena Williams, Beyonce, Obama Family. Our international identity is also mixed within the context of each country’s own history with people of color and, more recently, those who have landed in their country for various reasons from Africa.”

But she says she refuses to let the ignorance of others stop her from journeying, and others shouldn't let it stop them either. Her advice to other women of color travelers is to set an intention for the life path they want to go after, even if it means putting all eggs in one basket, and see what doors will open if you step into that path with your truest self.

“Discrimination and prejudice are everywhere and in different contexts, and they act out differently, but each race or gender challenge that I’m faced with brings me to closer to my true identity—it teaches me to maintain my light and my smile and the fullness of myself regardless of how someone responds to me or what I think anyone else’s expectations of me are,” says Sencherey. “There’s no place on earth I will not travel because of the color of my skin or because I am a woman.”

Why You're Getting So Many Texts from Political Campaigns

This piece is co-published with Protego Press, a new publication exploring the relationships between technology, human rights, and public policy.

In recent weeks you may have received text messages from an unknown number, often times out of state. They are not selling anything or trying to steal your identity, they are trying to get you to participate in the political process and, more often than not, vote for a particular candidate. Unlike traditional robocalls, these text messages aren’t being sent from some automated device, but instead from a campaign volunteer.

In recent years, this practice, known as peer-to-peer texting, has only continued to expand as examples of its effectiveness grow. As peer-to-peer texting has continued to grow, so have consumer questions about its legality. These questions have resulted in lawsuits and complaints to state and federal regulators alike.

How Peer to Peer Texting Currently Works #

Presently, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission makes clear that political campaign-related autodialed or prerecorded voice calls (including autodialed live calls, prerecorded voice messages, and text messages) are:

Not allowed to cell phones, pagers, or other mobile devices without the called party's prior express consent.
Not allowed to protected phone lines such as emergency or toll-free lines, or lines serving hospitals or similar facilities, unless made with the called party's prior express consent. Allowed when made to landline telephones, even without prior express consent. These specified prohibitions stem from the regulatory framework found in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA” found at 47 U.S.C. §227 et seq.). This Act generally restricts certain behaviors, outside emergency situations, such as, but not limited to:
making any call using any automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice to any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call, unless such call is made solely to collect a debt owed to or guaranteed by the United States;
initiating any telephone call to any residential telephone line using an artificial or prerecorded voice to deliver a message without the prior express consent of the called party; or
using any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send, to a telephone facsimile machine, an unsolicited advertisement (exceptions noted); or
using an automatic telephone dialing system in such a way that two or more telephone lines of a multi-line business are engaged simultaneously.

Privacy and Peer to Peer Texting #

The legality under the TCPA is only one area of voter concern, however. Another, and perhaps more prevalent concern, rests in privacy considerations and a campaign’s willingness to give strangers access to your name and contact information.

In this vein, it is important to note that, while every state is slightly different, most states make much of your voting registration information publicly available (name, address, phone number) to political campaigns and, often, individuals alike. While many states limit the use of this information to non-commercial purposes, few pair the misuse of such information with a criminal-felony penalty. As candidates and consultants expand their methods of information gathering to various forms of data mining, the voter file remains the first step in most campaigns.

As innovation begets new technology, political campaigns will continue to alter the methods of voter contact. Whether it is paid tweeters, misinformation bots, or peer-to-peer texting, today’s political landscape is something we could have hardly imagined even 5 or 10 years ago. With the exponential changes to how we communicate, we are equally as likely to have a new medium for voter contact before regulators weigh in on changes to peer-to-peer texting. Nevertheless, peer-to-peer texting is the norm for the foreseeable future.

So, with the Super Tuesday primaries around the corner, you may find yourself a popular target for political campaigns. Whether it’s texting, online advertisements, television advertisements, direct mail, or young campaign staffers knocking on your door, campaigns may not know who you are, but they will find you, and they will attempt to persuade you.

While peer-to-peer texting from campaigns may be surprising, or even unwanted, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Be nice to the volunteer texting and be happy another person is participating in the democratic process.

*The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice; instead, all information, content, and materials are for general informational purposes only. *

Lead image: A woman holds a smartphone at a restaurant. Photo by Sunyu Kim from Pexels.

Using a Glitch App to Support a Movement

If you’re online often enough, chances are you’ll see news about workers unionizing or boycotts against large corporations. As Glitch software engineer Sarah Zinger writes, it can be difficult to remember all the movements, let alone support them. So instead of having to keep track yourself, why not let technology do the heavy lifting?

Not that long ago I was thinking about how I should probably be more selective in where I give my dollars on the internet. But turning every single routine website visit into an ethical question is sort of exhausting and probably not that effective so I made an app on Glitch to help.

I go through a few phases: I hear about the latest atrocity happening at Big Tech Company, how they are supporting ICE, or refusing to recognize a labor union, or are poisoning our air and water, or whatever, and I feel the urge to do something about it. So I will stop using their services for at least a time.

The trouble with this approach is that I’m something of a cynic and a bit lazy, and have historically relied on Twitter as my news source. Which leads to questions in my brain like: Does it really matter if I don’t visit Amazon.com today if I rely on their AWS services? Yes, I wanted to support the Vox Unionizing efforts—congrats by the way—but they run like... a lot of websites. Am I supposed to just like remember not to click on all of them? That seems hard. Did I mention I’m lazy?

And in truth boycotts work best when they’re run by an organized effort that has strategically identified an opportunity for change, not just the random half-hearted-fact-finding of an individual who has (surprise!) discovered a less than savory outcome from a capitalist organization. So I decided to prototype a boycotting browser extension on glitch to see if that would be a good idea.

Here’s how it works:

I like it for a few reasons. For starters, it turns out this kind of thing takes very little time to build a small version of, which is immensely satisfying to me. It also gives power to organizers to know how many people are participating in a boycott, rather than little old me who is channeling my inner Chidi from The Good Place wondering if buying Almond Milk today could land me a ticket to the Bad Place tomorrow.

Plus, it's empowering if I know I’m part of a whole bunch of people doing the same boycott. I like the idea that we could move away from “Is this company evil?” (I’ve heard there may not be any kind of ethical consumption under capitalism?) and towards: “Hey, we won’t support this specific business practice so stop it or else.”

I reached out to one of my favorite community organizing groups here in the city and they weren’t particularly interested in working on it with me, so I suspect this like all of my side projects will continue to fizzle out before it really takes off. But just building out the prototype has been a lot of fun and a great reminder that we all have control over our own browsers to some degree. If you want to build your own extension feel free to remix it and see where it (doesn’t) take you!

Bundle Up: How Music Charts in the Streaming Era

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the Internet has changed the music industry forever.

A Twitter account called @chartdata has become extraordinarily popular in recent years. Its premise as an account which tweets out factoids about artist sales and streams has given it an air of reputable reliability that fan accounts, in the space we know as Stan Twitter, flock to in droves for updates on their faves. A tweet about Taylor Swift’s “Fearless” reaching 800 million Spotify streams is greeted with Swiftie boasts.

Fans are deeply in touch with the numbers that dictate the success of artists. These numbers (as tweeted by @chartdata, citing the Recording Industry Association of America) are not at all composed the way they used to be. At the start of the 2010s, physical sales made up 52% of the market, and digital downloads made up 38%—combined for 90% of the market. But by the end of the decade, physical sales and digital downloads combined for 18% of the market—a fifth of what it had been nine years prior. Streaming, on the other hand, made up 80%.

The past decade has been filled with discourse about how the music industry should respond. Streams are notoriously low-paying for artists; and when considering how much record labels are subject to take from even those small royalties, it’s apparent that artists must figure out new ways to make a profit for themselves.

This is one of many reasons artists have advocated largely for independence, years after Prince’s notorious struggles for independence beginning in the 90s. In today’s landscape, Prince wouldn’t have to bounce from label to label and go through his much-maligned name changes. Artists have more feasible resources than ever, thanks to numerous Internet tools: social media networking, content creation with unlimited potential for virality, and services like DistroKid that give artists distribution on every relevant streaming service and music-buying site.

“Starting off independent, you see more money from the music you make via streaming,” says TRACE, a Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter. “But signing to a label, you get monetary assistance and that allows you to essentially have music as your career consistently.”

In the past, assistance from record labels often did not extend far past distribution and, in theory, some form of marketing and touring assistance. Now, record labels are finding new resources to offer—and, most importantly, ways to make bank. In come the bundles.

On November 26, after months on end of pleas from fans and numerous controversies, including public DJ Khaled breakdowns and Nicki Minaj beefs, Billboard finally released new rules regarding “bundles,” a term referring to the pairing of album sales with artist merchandise and concert tickets with the effect of hiking sales numbers while also offering fans additional, more vaunted items.

Bundling and Streaming Increasingly Dictate How Songs Reach Number One #

“Moving forward, in order for an album sale to be counted as part of a merchandise/album bundle, all the items in the bundle must also be available for purchase concurrently and individually on the same website,” the Billboard rules state. “In addition, the merchandise item sold on its own will have to be priced lower than the bundle which includes both the merchandise and the album.”

Discourse about the need for new Billboard rules raged throughout 2019, with notable coverage including a piece by Ben Sisario for The New York Times. In the article, where he describes Billboard’s charts as being “widely accepted as the last word in measuring the popularity of songs and albums,” Sisario recounts bundle instances from Travis Scott (whose status as a streetwear influencer helped him secure a Billboard No. 1 by bundling "Astroworld" with keychains and hats, among other things) to Taylor Swift (who began selling advance orders for her eventual album release as bundles with new hoodies, t-shirts, and smartphone stands).

The tactic is hardly new. Prince set a prototype of it in motion in 2004, when dealing copies of his new record "Musicology"* *to every ticket purchaser attending his subsequent tour. As outlined in Sisario’s piece, Swift had previously bundled her 2012 album "Red" with sales of Papa John’s pizzas. Jay-Z, himself a business magnate as much as an artist, sold 1 million copies of his 2013 album "Magna Carta Holy Grail"—to Samsung, as part of a deal in which Samsung Galaxy users would receive the album for free. The savvy marketing deal was lauded by the RIAA, who certified the album platinum for its million first-day Samsung sales, but said sales did not count for Billboard—which saw the album reach No. 1 anyway through pure sales.

The commonality of the bundle, as well as the bitterness with which they leave fans and artists competing for charting, reached an all-time high this past year. In early October, American R&B upstart Summer Walker found her debut record "Over It" at the number 2 spot behind K-pop supergroup SuperM’s self-titled debut EP. "SuperM - The 1st EP" reached 164,000 “album-equivalent units” (a term referring to the reality that album sales numbers are now an amalgam of numerous different types of sales and streams) as opposed to "Over It’s" 134,000.

"Over It" was the highest-streamed R&B album by a female artist since Beyoncé’s "Lemonade"* *including a megahit single in “Girls Need Love,” which brought it to over 150 million streams after its release—a stark contrast from SuperM’s 4.9 million streams in the same period.

The difference was made by bundles; SuperM, backed by bigshot Korean label SM Entertainment, released over 60 different types of bundles for their EP, including eight different physical packaging variations for each member of the group which stans were explicitly implored to collect, repeatedly, often via text message. Summer Walker responded publicly with more bundles of her own; the notably anxious and industry-jaded singer tweeted a video of herself signing merch, paired with a rallying caption.

“It was a bundle competition,” says one pop stan who will henceforth be referred to as “N.” N wishes to remain anonymous to protect from potential harassment. “Her streams were way stronger, but in the end, the bundles beat her. It makes you wonder if we should call this ‘the streaming era.’”

The advantage gained by bundles is in the marketing of chart position; while Travis Scott can already rake in cash simply by selling merch independently, as can other artists who have utilized social media to become active influencers outside of their art, the buzz and visibility of having a top album is undeniable. It impacts radio play, TV spots and press coverage in general; it’s an accolade that officially signifies one’s arrival. Despite any controversy, SM and SuperM’s loyal fans celebrated their achievement proudly; after all, a number one is a number one.

Even with these new rules, perception of this vaunted accolade may fade over time. The chart which had been the most reliable indicator of “sales” no longer charts sales; it charts based on “album-equivalent units,” which are subjective measurements for Billboard to determine and for fans to scrutinize.

“Tour bundles are okay in my eyes, because at the end of the day, it remains about the music, and someone who wants to go to a concert supports the music,” says N. “But bundling merch items is already ridiculous and then continuously releasing new ones proves the artist is selling merch at that point, not music.”

One artist that remains selling music is BTS, who charted their comeback single, “ON,” at number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 thanks 86,000 pure sales—and practically zero radio play or bundles. Otherwise—where fans aren’t mobilized to fight the Western music industry establishment—songs and albums themselves are seemingly no longer feasible products. Why pay for a song when you can listen to it on YouTube, where it counts as a stream anyway?

Instead, music is a branding tool that builds a relationship with potential consumers to spend money on feasible products. Music is content much the same as a YouTuber’s videos build them an audience which they can monetize through more feasible products like sponsorships and merch.

These products are targeted towards young people’s interests; and as always, but especially now through social media, young people are interested in sharing experiences, opinions, and perhaps most of all, things that make them cooler than other people. It’s not to say kids don’t care about music, but anyone can stream a song for free. A limited edition Kids See Ghosts hoodie, however? That can be flexed.

The streaming market allows for consumers to listen to just about every song they want, while only paying for the service; the bundle market incentivizes consumers to buy merchandise and tickets and get a free album on the side. The music industry is ostensibly based on selling music; but in 2020, most everything is selling around the music.

**Computer Blue: Prince's Online Legacy** (Function Podcast)
**When Art Meets Algorithm** (Glimmer)
**Spotify Team Pag**e (Glitch) *Lead image: An illustration of a woman listening to music on headphones while floating between a broken record. Credit: Bfl*y

With Music Tech, DJs Once Changed the Dancefloor. Now the Dancefloor Changes the DJ.

A dimly lit, yellow-like room of upward steps followed the red noise and smoke sneaking from the door at the top left of the stairs. Looking to your right side, a wall horizontally mirrored the reflection of your pre-gamed face; you weren’t yet drunk, and *you looked totally hot. We were ready to dance to Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX songs that ignited the neon pink and green dance floor of Heaven on Earth, *before recently a monthly party in Downtown Manhattan.

The music’s sound got louder as you passed another table with one single rose plopped in a vase next to a tattoo artist. A random hand with rainbow-colored nails scratched the leather of the person wearing it and walking in front of you. And finally, there it was—the infamous, corridor-ed back room, where the songs vibrated in your brain and the air was a one-night love filled with cigarettes. An initial, tiny square of celebration suddenly became so much more than anyone imagined.

A queer space that’s also dominated by queer-identifying DJs isn’t as private or underground as it used to be. It’s an atmosphere that welcomes its community, providing a home to the night owls of tomorrow—a chosen home they feel accepted to return to. DJing, plus a number of its specific technicalities: Trends, playlist curation, gig hosting and nightlife in general—especially regarding the LGBTQ+ crowd that it so often serves—has evolved. And it all starts with the flickering-wrist of the artist watching from behind the scenes.

“Playing house—[a genre of electronic music]—and disco has been very important to my identity as a 40-something queer person [now],” said disk jockey Jd Samson. “I was born in the age of disco; I heard it on the radio. My parents listened to it, and it was that rhythm that seeped into my consciousness as a kid. I grew to learn the roots of disco and house—being relative to the queer movements of their time—and [I] spend a lot of time appreciating, and in some ways reigniting that energy of being in a room together. Safe and sweaty, we share that space and we share it with joy.”

But even today—in a music world filled with more playlists, variety and originality—Jd’s entire library still is almost completely house or disco. “I don't play much new music at all,” Samson says. “I [might] play re-edits or sample-based tracks that have been made more recently. I started to lose touch with the present trends and gave up on wanting to follow them. I stopped wanting to be cool or keep up.”

Every DJ has their own practice, though—according to Samson, being a DJ now can mean a million things: “Some people may think it has moved from song selector that knows what they are doing on the equipment, to an artist who is playing their own material.” Yet, each DJ’s technique and come-up is also their own.

Enter: Ty Sunderland—popular for DJing his own iconically produced and hosted, New York-originated parties: *Heaven on Earth, Love Prism, Gayflower*. As a queer-identifying DJ, his set’s resources have expanded by the likes of rising, LGBTQ+ pop stars.

“There’s so many queer artists out there that we’re finding on Spotify, or on the internet,” Sunderland says. “You play Kim Petras for a queer crowd and most of the room knows all the words. It’s amazing having pop stars part of the LGBTQ+ community.” He contrasts his technical craft from playing for a queer crowd versus one that’s not: “I can play much deeper cuts—[basically, a less-commercialized or radio-played song] for queer crowds. When I’m a gay DJ playing for a straight crowd, I can pretty much only play Top 40—no B-sides or lesser-known singles.”

In terms of a DJ’s tools to rave, Sunderland says, for him, it all depends on the gig. For pop gigs and open format, he uses Traktor—a *Native Instrument *software for DJs—on his laptop, aided with a Traktor controller. If it’s a house music set, he just uses a Compact Disc Jockey, or CDJ, that a club provides. CDJs are blueprinted to be able to play files of music digitally compacted via a USB flash drive or SD card.

“I learned on a controller and I still use one half the time,” Sunderland continues. “There’s so many software you can easily download and learn the basics [of DJing] on.” Ty’s mission when actually curating and readying a playlist for before a set revolves around ideas of nostalgia and escapism pop; he exclaims Dua Lipa as an example artist who is putting out “uplifting, disco pop music.” He also points to the future of queer DJing and socializing itself, highlighting the return of destination parties.

“There’s a new wave of what I guess circuit parties started out as, but not circuit music,” Sunderland says. He uses next month’s Backdoor XL for instance, a queer music festival happening in Mexico City in February. “The lineup isn’t circuit music, but the concept of going to a foreign country to party is very circuit-y. I’d love to see more of those big parties that donate proceeds to nonprofits give to smaller organizations; there’s a lot of orgs helping those in our community who could really use the funds and exposure.”

Alex Chapman has DJ’d for Charli XCX and Kim Petras, among other pop-queen legends. LA-based, he’s also more-recently noted for his SoundCloud “THAT’S SO GAY” mix for Billboard, which he made in June of 2019—featuring tracks like Cher’s “Believe” and Destiny’s Child, “Lose My Breath” (Yung Death Ray Remix). Chapman first started DJing in New York during college: “[I was] just using Virtual DJ in my friends’ dorm rooms,” he said.

“I worked for a promoter/DJ for a bit—he’d pay me to bring friends to the club. I asked if I could DJ before him one night and he let me; I started getting gigs because venues knew I could bring people.”

Alex Chapman started his own weekly party, and started producing events, too—both of which he would DJ at—and it personified the modernized idea of what being a DJ today has become. Ty Sunderland told me that as a disc jockey in this age, you have to not only be a DJ: “To make it and maintain your bookings, you’re also an influencer, a music producer and/or an event producer,” Sunderland says.

“I think the secret is out, in the sense that [DJing] has been demystified a bit,” Chapman says. “You can DJ from an app on your phone and it’ll sound like you’re using CDJs and Serato: [self-dubbed the “world’s best DJ software”]. You don't need to follow the old rules as far as format and presentation.” Plus, he says, everything about a queer DJ’s space is operating at a greater volume.

“Queer artists are not just niche artists anymore—a lot of them are reaching mainstream. That success points attention to emerging queer artists. So now, what I'm doing isn't as specific.”

The similar goes for Amber Valentine, a DJ who says forecasting the future of queer nightlife is pretty impossible—but within its evolution, will always be a space that can continue to improve in inclusion.

“I love seeing DJ lineups that are not only more inclusive of but more driven & led by womyn, queers & QTPOC,” Valentine said. “I would love to see more underground spots open up with wildly diverse lineups and crowds.” Drawing inspiration from gems of the past—and nightclubs like Paradise Garage, The Loft, and Studio 54—Valentine says that her identity and its part in her DJ career is to not only create, but also add to a queer space.

“Queer [DJ] space to me is synonymous with "dance space" at this point,” Valentine says. “I remember being a kid in church and finding real comfort in the thought that I would see all of these people week after week and that we had that space to connect and share. Music was my favorite part of church. Though it’s not the same thing, queer nightlife spaces kind of occupy a similar space to me—we see people week after week and connect and share through the music.”

Valentine describes DJing and nightlife—especially queer—as one with its own language, aided with a way of expression and cultural reference. She says the outside world’s idea of what is sexy, beautiful, interesting or exciting is often super incongruous to what is set up both individually and collectively in these spaces. And for her, the most important thing DJing has brought her is friendship, as well as connection in and around queer spaces.

“Sometimes after I’m done with a gig, I will stop in at a different party across town in the middle of the night, just for like 15 minutes,” she says. “[I’ll] check in and connect with friends, share a few hugs, get into the music and have a quick twirl on the dancefloor before I go home! These spaces are invaluable to us as queer people in the world; we need them.”

Of the DJs I talked to, it’s clear that being a DJ in 2020 is not like what it used to be—nightlife has evolved, queer club scenes are way more mainstream, and beginning a DJ career—a queer one, at that—comes with an accessibility that once didn’t easily exist. Technology has made it so that one person can spark a crowded room with a simple sync to Bluetooth and a catchy Spotify or SoundCloud playlist. Yet, that’s the one question remaining: *What is the perfect, queer party’s playlist? *

According to Amber Valentine, such an immaculate group of songs might include “Catch The Beat”, by Honey Dijon and featuring Cakes Da Killa. Ty Sunderland undeniably mentions Britney Spears or Rihanna, and Jd Samson stans Cajmere, Kenny Dope, and Patrice Rushen among others. It’s the combination of old-school and new music—and a mixture of pop idols with a newer generation of singers we listen to today—that all help bring to life the energy that these DJs and more work hard to exhume. Their dedication, concentrated passion and skill in mixing, judging a room and being able to tell what will or won’t work—and then, being quick to adapt to a said crowd that isn’t vibing—takes a lot of patience, time and commitment. And this isn’t without fact that the queer parties we so eagerly wait to buy tickets for—for example, Ladyfag’s once-a-year, Brooklyn-based Pride party called LadyLand Festival—would not be what they are, or have become, without the DJs and producers that have inhabited their sets since the beginning.

“Things have changed,” Jd Samson says. “We have grown. Spaces have grown. But for the most part, we have splintered into so many sub-demographics within 'Queer', that each community has its own experience of nightlife and DJing, and the shifting of each. As a white cis genderqueer lesbian, I moved from playing whatever I wanted on vinyl to being a total codependent crowd-pleaser with mainstream hits—then, to refining my own purpose as a DJ as I looked deeper at my intention.”

For Samson, she has maintained a steady and popular club night for seven years—one that’s free and allows DJs to play whatever they want. It’s this power of creative control and in-exclusivity that she hopes to give to anyone that attends and plays her parties; Jd Samson says it encompasses what the queer community deserves: “Freedom.”

Lead image: An illustration of a DJ playing a rainbow-branded turntable. Credit: Aaron Fernandez.

Organizing in Your Community: Easy Tech for Civic Engagement

Presidential elections are not the only time to get involved in politics or government. In fact, it’s the very events around and decisions by your local government that can also have a dramatic impact on your immediate community. There are plenty of ways that tech projects can make civic participation easier through mapping or just displaying information in an accessible way. Here’s a collection of projects that can serve as inspiration or blueprints in your neighborhood .

If you want to participate in your local government, the first thing you’ll want to do is keep track of the activities of a city council or other elected officials. Jenn Schiffer made a simple app that documents some of that for Jersey City using a Google Spreadsheet. She also provides instructions on how to make your own version of the app for your city. What’s extra helpful is that Glitch apps can be easily embeddable, so you could theoretically send what you make to your local government to on their websites, too.

One annoying part of living in a metropolitan area is that it can be difficult to get rid of specific kinds of waste, like electronics or furniture. You may not know where to drop it off, and you may not have access to a car. “London Waste”, a project created by the Mayor of London’s office, alleviates some of this problem with a map that shows all of the different locations for waste disposal in the city of London. By 2026, London is seeking to have no biodegradable or recyclable waste will be sent to landfill, a project that pairs nicely with this app.

Unfortunately information about your city can be difficult to obtain. Even for the digitally literate, local governments have not been known for having easy-to-navigate web pages. One useful solution to that is another project from Beckley, “SF Restaurant Scores” which shows a map of San Francisco with their health inspection scores and the ability to access more detailed information. Look how convenient it is to have that data at the touch of your fingers.

Speaking of maps, getting involved in political efforts may mean knowing activist campaigns in your area, too. “Campaign Locator” created by cartographer Victoria Beckley displays the various rent control campaigns happening in California housing activist groups and tenant unions.

*If you want to save any of these apps, check out our collection here. If you’re interested in another story about creating technology for civic engagement, check out this post from a Glitch engineer who made a simple extension that would help people support online protests.

***We’re building a more powerful Glitch, click to learn mo*re**.

How Melody Loveless Makes Computer Code Sing

Melody Loveless, a 30-year-old Brooklynite, is on stage. She stands at a table with her hands resting on the keyboard of her MacBook. Digital drones and bleeps begin to sound from the speakers, as a metallic drum beat settles into a downtempo trip-hop rhythm; it has the tone of someone striking a tuning fork against the chassis of a robot. Loveless hums in a high register into a microphone and begins to loop her voice.

As the music builds, a stream of her laptop screen is projected behind her. The text begins to move. Loveless types new lines, chopping and manipulating her vocal sample. The code cascades, changing as musical elements are introduced or discarded—a new drum machine beat, a new phrase from her synth library.

Loveless is a live coder—part of a movement of digital artists who write music and visuals on the fly, with their programming displayed as part of the performance.

Nearly all pop music is now a digital endeavor: recorded, edited, tuned up and mixed using software. #

For livecoders, the computer is more than a tool. It is a collaborator. Artists type lines of code that lay out the structure and boundaries of a song—tempo, tonality, rhythm. Algorithms then leave their mark, drawing melody out of the digital void, or processing vocal lines nearly beyond recognition. Livecoding dance parties, known as Algoraves, were first held in London in 2011 and have since gone global, drawing crowds in cities from Bogota to New York to Mumbai.

Livecoding also has an ethos, Loveless says. The software is free; the code is open-source; the gatherings where coders trade tips are accessible to newcomers. It is a scene that is proudly unowned.

“Electronic music doesn't have a reputation for being cheap,” Loveless says. “And here we have this huge community that's about sharing free software and showing our code in screens and we're all secretly socialists, probably. It makes me happy to be part of a livecoding scene within all these awful things happening in tech. Cause here we are showing our codes, being super transparent with what we're doing, using free stuff."

Loveless grew up all over, she says. She was born in San Diego; her mother, a nurse, was the first in her family to immigrate from the Philippines to the United States. Loveless’ parents split up when she was a toddler, and her mother preferred not to stay in one place for long. Loveless has lived in Hawaii, Florida, a sequence of Las Vegas neighborhoods and New York. The itinerant childhood left Loveless with a love of travel and few long-term friends.

"I'm still figuring out my relationship to home. There are some people who don't leave their home their whole life, and the idea of even going to Disney World is a big idea—you know what I mean? Something so fucking lame.”

Like countless other teens of her generation, Loveless had her first encounters with computer coding on MySpace—the mid-2000s, lamented social network that launched a thousand emo bands. Users could use HTML, the basic language of web design, to paint their pages with garish colors and autoplay their favorite songs. Loveless was motivated by a loathing for the “top 8,” a notorious Myspace feature that fostered endless high school social dramatics by encouraging users to rank their favorite friends.

"Before they were flexible with the top 8, I went in and made these tiny icons for all of my friends,” Loveless says. “I had like a top 30 that I made with HTML."

She majored in classical percussion performance at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and then moved across the country to earn a master’s in music composition at New York University. To pay the rent, she took a job handling returns at the newly opened Whole Foods in Gowanus. It did not go well. She played shows when she could, but felt pulled aside from her art, dealing instead with the retail crises of Brooklyn’s stressed-out kale moms and yoga dads. Loveless sought work in tech, but found it difficult to get hired without a degree in computer science. She enrolled in the Integrated Digital Media program at NYU’s engineering school, studying coding, art and where the two meet.

"I would describe it to my friends as future school,” Loveless says. “It's all about emerging technologies."

I ask her to show me how livecoding works—how she takes the syntax and makes it sing. She powers up her Macbook, which is plugged into a small red mixer on her kitchen table, and opens Sonic Pi, a coding environment used frequently by livecoders since its release in 2012. She types strings of text into a terminal—the file names of instrument samples to pull into the track and the commands that speed them up or slow them down, sharpen them or cushion them in reverb.

"Is this working?" she says under her breath. "Fuck yeah it is."

Loveless says she does not often speak to her computer, but she's tired. She has a concert tonight, and she's spent the day writing up a curriculum for a class she will be teaching in the spring.

"Ok, please don't break," she says as the bass sets in. #

Loveless loops her voice into a tonal hum and enters a string of numbers telling her synth which notes it is allowed to play. She sets out a tempo and rhythm, and the program begins playing an algorithmically generated melody that starts simple, then accelerates and changes. A synth rises and flares, like a raygun in a 50s sci-fi serial, as Loveless begins cooing dreamy wordless vocals over the beat. She types hash marks in front of lines of code—what programmers call “commenting out”— and those loops fall silent in real time.

It is a style of composition that suits her, she says. Transparent and honest; improvisational, yet deliberate; concerned more with process and experimentation than personal virtuosity.

"I'm very inaccurate, so I'm not really the best classical performer,” Loveless says. “Being able to play around in an environment where I can have more time to make my decisions and have the tech help me out is far more appealing."

Loveless was introduced to livecoding by Kate Sicchio, one of her professors at NYU. Sicchio, who now teaches livecoding at Virginia Commonwealth University, is a trained choreographer. In 2011, she was living in Sheffield, England, and experimenting with ways to blend her art with her interest in programming. She translated her dances into a “pseudolanguage,” creating choreography scores that functioned like computer code—her steps translated into text, to be executed by dancers like a computer executes a program. A colleague recommended she meet with Alex McLean, a pioneer in the U.K’s nascent livecoding scene who had recently coined the term “algorave.”

“He was like ‘Oh, you’re doing this thing called livecoding.’ I was like ‘Oh, cool,’ ” Sicchio says. “That’s how I discovered livecoding—I was already doing it, and somebody put a name to it for me.”

When Sicchio moved to New York in 2014, she brought livecoding with her. She began meeting with the coders Jason Levine, Ramsey Nasser and Tom Murphy, and the four of them launched Livecode NYC—the first group in the city dedicated to their new art form. She got hired as a professor at NYU, where Loveless was studying digital media. In 2017, Sicchio brought Loveless to the Source Festival, a livecoding showcase on NYU’s campus. Loveless was not immediately sold.

“At first she was like. ‘I don’t really get this kind of thing,’ ” Sicchio says. “She had this moment where she had this epiphany—it’s process music. It’s this idea of actually seeing music unfold.”

Loveless has since established herself as a mainstay in the city’s livecoding scene. She joined Codie, Sicchio and Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo's electronic music group, and plays solo shows at galleries, clubs and art spaces. In the spring she began teaching creative coding at Hunter College and livecoding at the New School. She hopes the art world might soon consider coding an artistic medium as versatile and essential as any other; that art students might be taught to think of Python or Ruby in the same way they think of oil paints or charcoal.

"I really like that idea that like, hey, this might be a foundational class for someone just being an artist because of how important tech is,” Loveless says.

At 9 p.m. in late November, a chill settled across an outwardly desolate stretch of Thames Avenue in Bushwick. A woman in a bicycle helmet peers at the graffiti-tagged brick building that, supposedly, is home to Synesthesia—a gallery and art space where Loveless is scheduled to perform.

Synesthesia, it turns out, is a third-floor loft apartment, laid out with a large projector screen covering sheet glass windows. I’m buzzed inside and met inside the doorway by the space’s curator Mio Nakai, who recently turned her home into a venue for experimental music, dance and audio-visual performances. An audience of about 30 young people sit in rows of mismatched chairs or perch on the loft’s landing.

About half an hour into the event, Loveless begins her set. She stands hunched over her laptop at a wooden table and with a few keystrokes launches a spare, echoey drumbeat. She begins to loop her voice, rising in a diffuse all-vowel hum. Languorous synth notes build in cascading phrases. A line of code is highlighted and changed on the screen behind her, and a watery melody line grows and intensifies.

Loveless types numbers, and the rhythm of the drum beat changes; another few keystrokes and her voice is chopped and transformed into a fractured plaintive cry.

She counts off to eight and begins chopping and layering her vocals over a sample of an insistent syncopated hi-hat. In the front row, a girl in a dark baseball cap nods her head and bops her right leg, crossed over her knee. In the rear, up on the loft stairs, feet and heads increasingly move in rhythm. A quick copy-paste and the synth doubles on itself, falling over its own feet. An edit and the notes extend another octave, into a bell-like glissando. The right side of the screen is now a blur of file names in blocky magenta type, jumping downward as each phrase plays and repeats. Loveless remains bent over at the mic, her eyes fixed on the MacBook screen: she looks up only at the end and smiles.

Loveless says she has a plan whenever she goes on stage—when to sing, when to loop, the structure of her composition. But livecoding has a way of making plans change. A song might become hazy and dreamy if she’s tired, or pulse with energy if her mind is racing. When she’s performing, she tells herself to be calm. To focus on the music as though it is the only thing that matters.

"There's definitely an emotional part. I still get that performer high, euphoria,” Loveless says. "That's a really nice feeling.”

There is a livecode manifesto that is kept fittingly in draft form, forever subject to change like the music it speaks for. It warns against obscurantism and urges artists to think of algorithms as extensions of their thoughts, rather than tools. Sicchio says the movement’s vision for computing runs contrary to how Silicon Valley has molded the American image of coding— commercialized, precise, proprietary and bluntly utilitarian.

“It’s much more about error and fragility and seeing where algorithms take you,” she says. “Here, software development is about a product and solving a problem. Livecoding isn’t about that. Livecoding is ephemeral.”

Loveless music lives in a space between high-concept art and dreamy electro-pop. She loves the deliberately pretty songwriting of the Postal Service and the eclectic minimalism of experimental electronic musician Carl Stone. When I ask what drew her to livecoding, she says it’s like a sensory puzzle; you can hear it, and see how it’s made. It shows the audience a magic trick while revealing how to do it; it inverts the ideas of coder as an isolated architect and musician as an unapproachable genius into something more democratic and free.

"It challenges the idea of what a performer should be. Or what should be portrayed as the most important part of a performance,” Loveless says. "I think I just like the idea of options."

*Editor's Note (3/11/2020): This story has been updated to include mention of Codie band member Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo, whose name was previously omitted. *

An Ode to Unfinished Projects: Learning to Love “Bad Code”

Focus Timer is an amazing timer that helps you focus when it’s toughest. Unlike most focus timers, it learns how you’re doing and adjusts based on it. If you’ve had a bad day it might ask you to focus for five minutes increments, then gently encourage you to focus more over time. At least, that was the plan. Instead, after working on it for a bit, I have one big unfinished mess that I somehow still use every day, and I've learned to love it.

I’ve been using timers to help focus for many years. Some call it the Pomodoro Technique, but that’s trademarked. The standard is to set a timer for 20 minutes and work. Then set a timer for 10 minutes and take a break. The problem for me is I sometimes couldn’t focus for 20 minutes because it was Monday or something.

I was always fiddling with the time. I thought I’d build a timer app that would have adjusting the time as a core feature. After each focus interval it would ask how you felt and then adjust the time based on it. If you were having trouble focusing it would lower the time. If you seemed to be doing OK it would slowly raise the time. It would also warn you if you focused too much because I have ADHD and hyperfocus is a real danger. I opened my fave design tool, Assembly, and designed a flow and user interface. It had circus animals because, um, Assembly has a cool circus sticker pack. I was so excited!

It went well at first. I showcased it at Glitch Appy Hour, a weekly Glitch event where we talk about cool apps we’re building. Then I hit a major slog, I made a key mistake which was I made the code total garbage. I thought more about what circus animals would be in the timer than how to organize my code. I’d wanted to experiment with writing plain "Vanilla" Javascript rather than a framework. I hit upon a key reason people use frameworks: they encourage you to organize code and use design patterns.

Faced with the prospect of rewriting from scratch or fixing a bug in unreadable code, I suddenly realized I had other interests. Like researching the best cat litter. Or playing “Fire Emblem: Three Houses” five times. I was afraid of opening the code because it would force me to think about what I’d done.

In tech, there is a stigma against “bad code.” It goes way back to popular 2000s blogs like “Coding Horror.” The idea is that some people write bad code, and by and large they should just give up. Job interviews are very focused on finding out if the candidate writes the dreaded “bad code.”

The problem is if you code, bad code is inevitable. But the stigma makes it hard to admit or even ask about. I remember asking about something on Stack Overflow once and getting “why would you even do that” as an answer. One time I wrote an article some dude didn't like and he went through my code to prove I wasn't even a "real coder."

I used to feel bad about all my unfinished code projects and “bad code” on Glitch and Github, to the point where I've thought about hiding or deleting it. Over the past year, I’ve realized that living with and learning from unfinished code is a valuable experience. Stigma against “bad code” is bad for coding culture, and I should extend that compassion to myself. April Wensel of Compassionate Coding says "Burnout, anxiety, and depression are real problems facing our industry, and negative self-talk contributes to these problems."

What I’d built still worked even with bugs galore. It was better than what I’d been using before. About a year later, I’m still using it every day. When I’m learning new things at work I think how they might apply to improving it. Maybe I’ll never finish it, but I learned a valuable lesson.

I’m still pretty ashamed to post this app. Just warning you it’s not really clear how to use it and it breaks nearly every day. The code will probably give you a headache, but maybe you can learn from it too, and reframe unfinished projects or less than optimal code as “bad” and think of them as just part of the process.

The Boldest American Consumer Privacy Statute in a Generation is in Flux

The most important part of a privacy law are the definitions. Get them wrong and the rest of the statute doesn't mean much. Over the last month, a quiet drama with major stakes (and a hopeful ending) unfolded around the definition of "personal information."

It's a drama worth understanding because it will play out again and again as new privacy laws make their way through local, state, and national legislatures. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect on January 1st, giving consumers far more control over the data that companies collect about them. But while CCPA's language hasn't changed since the fall, the regulations implementing CCPA are still in flux.

What is "personal information"? #

Our story begins on February 7th, when CA's Attorney General added to the draft regulations Section 999.302, "Guidance Regarding the Interpretation of CCPA Definitions." The new guidance would have crippled the CCPA. For example, suppose a free adult video site, IPporn, logs every video watched along with the associated IP address. It stores no other session or user information. Under the most obvious reading of Section 999.302, the log would not constitute personal information. IPporn could, for example, tweet out every IP+video record publicly. Any other website could easily learn a user's kinks by simply searching Twitter. Clearly, this is not the intent of CCPA.

CCPA governs the use of "personal information." Let's look at the definition (1798.140(o)(1): *"'Personal information' means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.' *Under this definition, personal information definitely includes information that "could reasonably be linked" with a particular household, no question about it. The earliest draft regulations didn't elaborate on the meaning of "personal information," but on February 7th, the Attorney General added new "Guidance Regarding the Interpretation of CCPA Definitions":

999.302(a) Whether information is “personal information,” as that term is defined in Civil Code section 1798.140, subdivision (o), depends on whether the business maintains information in a manner that “identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could be reasonably linked [sic], directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.” For example, if a business collects the IP addresses of visitors to its website but does not link the IP address to any particular consumer or household, and could not reasonably link the IP address with a particular consumer or household, then the IP address would not be “personal information.”

The latest guidance presents serious contradictions to the original intent of CCPA #

First, the new guidance distinguishes between what a specific business can do with data and what can be done with data more generally. The original definition demands protection of information if it can be reasonably linked with a particular household by anybody. In contrast, the draft regulation only requires the protection of information if it can be reasonably linked by the business. It suggests that to free personal information from CCPA protection, a business doesn't have to make the information less identifiable, but to handicap its own identification capabilities.

This is something industry critics of CCPA (who want to weaken the law) have been begging for. Their argument is that you can't expect every mom-and-pop data company that peddles in the personal information of 50,000 people annually to be able to figure out what leet MIT hackers can do with data. That argument makes some sense, and it's clear that a lot is riding on the meaning of "reasonable" in CCPA's definition of personal information.

However, this distinction yields a nonsensical policy. For example, CCPA makes it illegal for a business to publicly tweet its users' personal information. But if the business can't reasonably link it to a household, then it's not personal information. And if it's not personal information, CCPA doesn't apply. Tweet away. Of course, what should matter from a policy perspective is what the recipients of that information—anybody on the internet—can do with it. Maybe I'm reading it wrong. That can't be what they mean, right? Wrong!

Second, it is, in fact, wrong, because they illustrate their point with the worst possible example: IP addresses. A typical household's IP address (say, on a family desktop) stays the same for months or years at a time. During that period, every webpage they visit sees the IP. If anything "could reasonably be linked to a specific household," it's an IP address. CCPA mentions IP address explicitly twice, but the draft regulation would make it possible for IP addresses to not be personal information. If the business doesn't keep around other information needed to link the IP address to the household (it's hard for me to write that phrase it's so vacuous), then the data is free from CCPA.

Third, under 999.302, personal information no longer includes all information that could reasonably be linked with a particular household. It only includes information that is "maintained in a manner that could be reasonably linked" with a particular household. Compare with the statute's language. The guidance focuses the definition of personal data on the form of the data: how it's maintained. It sidelines the power of the data: what can be done with it. For a data privacy regulation, this is backwards: the power of data, not its form, is what matters. I've made this point before in a piece on ambiguities in the law's definition of "probabilistic identifiers" and calling for regulatory clarification.

The latest guidance, if enacted, could enshrine the worst interpretation as the main definition of "personal information" #

Let's go back to our adult video site IPporn. If the IP+video log doesn't fall under the new exception established in the draft regulation, I don't know what does. According to the regulation, it's not personal information and IPporn can do whatever they want with it, like tweet, making people's porn habits all but public. Like I said, this is astonishing. Section 999.302 has no place in the final regulations. By distinguishing what a specific business can do with data and what can be done with data more generally, the draft regulation would gut the boldest American privacy statute in a generation.

The Attorney General accepts public comments after every revision of the regulations. About 100 were submitted, only a handful mentioning Section 999.302. Most comments applauded the new language—not because they didn't appreciate its significance but because they appreciate its significance. Undoubtedly the most important comment, however, came from Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee: "One specific area that I find sacrosanct is what is considered 'personal information' for purposes of the CCPA . . . . I believe that Section 999.302 of your modified proposed regulations weakens the very definition we have been fervently protecting."

When one of CCPA's key senators expresses "deep concern" over your regulation, you listen. On March 11th, the Attorney General published the third draft of the CCPA regulations, striking Section 999.302 altogether and opening a round of public comments. The regulations are still in flux, and you can be sure that the industry groups that applauded Section 999.302 will pressure the Attorney General to re-introduce similar language. Comments can be submitted about this issue through March 27, 2020.

_This is an abridged version of a piece originally published by Protego Press_.

Games, Gizmos and Other Stress Relievers

Sometimes, you might spend the whole weekend at home. Maybe you need a break from going out, maybe you need rest after a long week at work or perhaps the world feels like it’s ending. Who knows, could be any of those.

Whatever the case, watching movies or playing games can get old after a while. You might need something unique to keep yourself (or maybe children) busy. Here are some projects that you can use when you’re feeling bored or anxious and need a distraction.

⚾️ New Favorite Pastimes ⏰ #

First up is Too Many DVDs from Neal Agarwal, which I imagine would be perfect for occupying your kids while you take a power nap. Neal also made The Deep Sea which is a web app that explores and explains the strange things in the deepest parts of the ocean—super educational and enticing.

Next up is Magic Sketchpad, from the master of distraction, Monica Dinculescu. Just choose an item from the list and just draw the beginning of it, then with the pure magic of machine learning with magenta.js, Magic Sketchpad will finish the drawing for you. This one can keep you occupied forever.

More of a music person? Monica has also made Coconet, which uses machine learning to harmonize notes that you input. I personally love apps that try to make my messes look or sound better so it’s a big 10/10.

If you want something to play with friends, either in person or online, Chess But Harder is a clever game from Byron Hulcher. Like the name implies, it’s basically a normal of Chess, but with the key difference that you can’t see the entire board. A simple change, but one that makes it feel like a whole new game.

🧘‍♀️ Finding Your Calm 🧘‍♂️ #

During any stressful time, especially one when you’re stuck at home, there’s bound to be a period of adjustment. Maybe days one and two were really bad, but day five might be pretty good. Go easy on yourself, it’s a weird time to be alive.

I don’t remember the first time I saw the Your Moment of Zen from Minerva Archer, but I remember thinking it was really sweet, though not an app I would use a lot. But after the last week or so, I could easily see myself using it daily. I didn’t know deep breaths actually worked so well.

Another thing that’s helped me over the last week was rearranging the furniture of my room. Every time I’ve rearranged furniture or done a deep cleaning of my room, I’m more eager to spend time in it. The simple act of moving one shelf and getting rid of another has made me genuinely enjoy my room, which is great, because it could be a while.

Luckily I used to be a freelancer so I’m very used to working from home. If it’s your first time, the best tip anyone can give you is to set a routine for yourself. Doesn’t matter what it is or for how long, consistency is the key. Plus, if you’re having a lot of video calls with your work, add some levity to the meetings with Conference Call Bingo from Glitch’s own CEO, Anil Dash. It randomly generates some extremely accurate quotes or scenarios from most video meetings, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone got Bingo in the first call.

_To save any of these projects for later, check out the collection here and create an account to add them to your My Stuff.

Fandoms and Fundraising: How BTS Fans Created a Global Charity

Seldom do we say nice things about fandoms in 2020. The “stan” is now equated to the cultist: detached from larger culture, infatuated with the unimportant, incapable of critical thinking; rowdy, shallow, toxic.

The prevalence of pop music fandoms on Twitter, particularly K-pop fandoms, has been greeted with disdain by all manner of cultural analysts. The incessant and off-topic usage by some of “fancams”—clips of artists’ performances, often paired with recruitment-minded captions—do little to quell this resistance.

Yet, particularly as we recognize the power of youth-led, female-skewing, LGBT-friendly subcultures as spaces of sociopolitical development and solidarity, we will do well to also acknowledge the power fandom has for good. Because more and more, we see that this power is not always lost on fans. See: One in an ARMY, the charity organization led by fans of Korean music group BTS.

“It’s not in any way an official organization,” says Erika, an American representative I speak to via phone who handles press and social media work. “It is completely volunteer-led. It’s just ARMYs that decided to come together and do it.”

Since 2013, South Korea’s BTS has grown in popularity exponentially, reaching a point of success so great in the past few years that it has left media, fans and detractors alike in a state of utter confusion. Their release of Map of the Soul: Persona became the highest-selling album in South Korean history months after its release despite its seven-track length. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 (their third album to do so) and has remained on the chart, alongside previous release Love Yourself: Answer which became the first K-pop album to ever remain on the chart for longer than a year. Then, they dropped Map of the Soul: 7 in February, which has already broken the record for the highest-selling Korean album of all time, having sold more than 4.1 million copies just nine days after its release.

The BTS fanbase, ARMY, has been the catalyst for this success #

Their Twitter account boasts 24.5 million followers and several tweets with over 1 million retweets. It is ARMY's activity on social media that not only spreads awareness for the group but disseminates information & organizes chart pushes. When it comes to fandoms investing time and money into empowering their favorite artists, one would be hard-pressed to find one of ARMY’s calibur.

“Around March 2018, we were seeing the fandom’s growth was getting so immense,” Erika tells me. “There was a video for Yoongi’s birthday, and he had a little cat rug in front of his studio when they went to knock on his door, and people found the cat rug and sold it out on the site within minutes. A lot of funny things like that were happening that showed how huge and dedicated to everything BTS the fandom was.”

An astute fan from Brazil named Ana came up with an idea.

“At that time, the news here in Brazil and probably all around the world was about the Syrian civil war,” she tells me via DM. “I didn’t know what I could do since I was just a 15 year-old girl living far away from the conflict. I asked my parents if we could donate and everything but that wasn’t enough.”

Ana sent out a tweet noting ARMY’s power and calling for it to be manifested into helping refugees in Syria. “A lot of people responded—I did,” says Erika. “We started trying to put together some thoughts, collate our thoughts, put in some rules for ourselves—how do we wanna go about this, how can we do it in a way that’s going to be meaningful or impactful?”

The result became One In An ARMY, an ARMY-led, unofficial charity organization that would make use of the frequent engagement in the ARMY Twitter space to lend attention to important causes. While focused on Twitter, the group has created social media accounts on everything from Facebook to Curious Cat.

Through a Discord channel, members of One In An ARMY communicate with each other to establish what will be necessary for each initiative. Then, each month, One In An ARMY partners with a charity organization they select through an intensive vetting process, tweeting out a donation link with each post.

Erika’s job has become to handle social media and PR; others handle functions from graphic design to charity research. Like many other members—the likes of whom hail from nearly every continent—Erika was not actively involved in charity work prior to taking part in the organization, but had long had a desire to give what she could to those less fortunate. Figuring out how to get the process right without any experience was a scary task for the young assemblage.

Their first project was with Medical Teams International.

“I spoke to a lovely lady named Tracy Holland,” says Erika. “I called her and said ‘We don’t really know what we’re doing, but we’re trying to do this… thing.’ And she was really, really great. We actually sent her flowers as a team for being with our first organization and helping us through it. She called me one day and said ‘Oh my God, I made the report this week that our engagement online has gone up 7000%, and I got a standing ovation!’ So that worked out really well.”

Since then, One In An ARMY has conducted one successful campaign after another, as visible on their archive. For their October campaign, a collaboration with an Athenian organization that provides shelter for marginalized refugees, they raised over $6000 USD. A month before, they’d raised nearly $8000 for an organization constructing eco-friendly educational spaces in Guatemala.

“We did thirst relief last year and by the end of the campaign, we had provided water filters to 30 families in Tanzania,” says Erika. “The water filters for each household, they can provide water for up to ten people and they last for 25 years. So now, 30 families for 25 years will have clean drinking water, that won’t have any parasites; they can go to school, they can go to work and not lose their jobs because they’re sick from contaminated water, and ARMY did that.”

One In An ARMY is not the first instance of a fandom pulling together to make a difference #

#

Fans of Joss Whedon and his collective works have held conventions for years, of which percentages of proceeds have been donated to charities. Misha Collins, star of the much-stanned TV series Supernatural, has on numerous occasions rallied his supporters to donate to different causes.

Something about One In An ARMY’s story is uniquely harrowing; perhaps it is the group’s starkly visible, tangible positivity within a Twitter landscape (Stan or otherwise) plagued by trauma and discordance. Perhaps it’s the group’s utilization of modern, otherwise derided social media networks to create said tangible change. Perhaps it’s the reality that, without any prompt, fans within a social media environment decided to use their platform for good despite the amount of uncompensated time and energy it would require.

Then again, said ARMYs might argue to you that, in a way, they’d been prompted by their faves after all—if indirectly. Erika, who has never taken part in a fandom before BTS, fell for the group in part for their selfless messages. “Seeing what BTS had said about, ‘if they can improve the life of someone else just a tiny bit, it’s enough,’ that makes it worthwhile,” she says.

Indeed, BTS’ messages and efforts have long been focused on improving the lives of others. Their *Love Yourself *album series was devoted to showcasing the journey in which a person can love others most powerfully through first loving themselves. Through songs and interviews, they often speak out against oppressive sociopolitical forces. Their partnership with UNICEF, and their leader RM’s speech at the United Nations, showcased their initiative to prevent bullying and engender self-love globally.

“It really boils down to the fact that BTS have inspired so many,” says Erika. “From what people tell us, they tell us they’ve never seen a fandom do this before.”

Perhaps these ARMYs will inspire other fandoms to do the same; to utilize these spaces and platforms for good. And if that chain reaction is set in motion, at some point the general public may rewire how we think of fandoms online. But all of these changes start with an action—something that was not prompted, not even considered necessary—by people with the ability to reach others.

With the Internet’s capacity for connecting strangers, this ability is easier to come by than ever. With this power at our fingertips, how can each of us, all users, respond in kind?

Leading illustration by [Bfly](https://www.instagram.com/bfly.art/).

In Poland, VR is Teaching People How to Bake Bread

It looks like a familiar and timeless sight: in a pristine kitchen, two hands stretch out towards a tray of freshly made bread rolls, ready for the oven. In the background, the word ‘Piekarnia’ – Polish for ‘bakery’ – is lit up, besides which a cheery ladybug smiles: the logo for Polish supermarket giant, Biedronka. But this isn’t just any kitchen.

With a turn to the digital in almost every walk of life, even the way workers are trained to make bread is becoming high-tech. Biedronka—Poland’s largest retail chain—has rolled out a new method of training for baking, which solely uses virtual reality.

The VR baking system, which has so far been launched in eight stores around the country, is fully interactive and guides trainee workers through the process of making bread in a virtual store, from fulfilling health and safety practices to loading up the oven and distributing products. Biedronka explained in a press release that the VR sets covered “all those activities that the employees of the shops do on a daily basis ‘in real life.’”

The move to virtual reality has been cooking up for a while #

Biedronka is one of many stores in Poland facing an acute shortage of workers—an issue that has been attributed to difficulties in securing long-term work contracts for immigrants to the country. The VR headsets were introduced to streamline training, helping Biedronka teach new employees quickly and conveniently. Milena Bałon, junior e-learning manager at Jeronimo Martins Polska, the group which owns Biedronka, said that VR meant the company could “quickly and fully safely teach our employees skills that are difficult to be taught in real life.”

And one of the most demanding tasks workers must learn is how to make bread, a staple of Biedronka stores. The chain launched in-store bakeries in 2012, stacking shelves with bread, golden stacks of baguettes, tumbling rolls, glistening cakes, and croissants, all under the slogan: ‘fresh baked goods at any time’. Now, they need enough workers to meet demands from hungry Polish shoppers—baking is a Polish institution.

“Additionally,” says Bałon, “VR technology in baking training helps us to reduce food waste—while learning in a traditional form, the bread used for baking would not go on sale, which means it would be a waste.”

Jan Jaszczyński, who runs PureVR, a virtual reality entertainment salon in the central Polish town of Płock, sees an “immense growth of VR technology” in recent years. He thinks the technology is “an inevitable solution to many innovative applications,” including in technical and engineering – but also in more traditional areas like baking. “We will for sure see more of that in the future,” he explains. “VR as a means in training and AR as a means of live service advice is gaining ground every day in new fields.”

“And most of all the learning outcomes are as good or even better than in traditional ways.”

However, Jaszczyński adds that life is on hold at the moment. After the coronavirus outbreak hit Poland, the company initially took extra precautions, including regularly using anti-bacterial cleaners. But on March 11, the Polish government ordered the closure of all schools, museums and cultural institutions. Jaszczyński says some of his employees—who are mainly students—have been forced to move out of their student accommodation, and have returned to their family homes.

In response to the government’s order, Biedronka has also shortened its working hours and is limiting the number of customers in stores. Employees have been split into teams that work in rotation, with any workers over 60 allowed to be exempt from shifts.

But that’s not to say VR development has also been interrupted. Jaszczyński believes the technology could “theoretically” step into the breach for companies during the coronavirus outbreak, as “it’s becoming more and more affordable.”

“Big companies could buy and send their employees cardboard VR headsets and an application,” he explains. But he emphasizes that the quality of content available on cardboard or plastic headsets would be limited compared to the technology available on more advanced models.

Coronavirus aside, Poland has been developing its virtual reality technology fast – in business and in culture #

Away from the workplace, VR headsets have also been adopted by museums to launch innovative, immersive exhibitions. In 2018, a film entitled ‘Kartka z Powstania’ (‘Postcard from the Uprising’) was produced, a 15-minute account of experiences during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the largest military operation by resistance forces in German-occupied Europe. ‘Kartka z Powstania’ was the first-ever fictionalized historical VR show in Poland. There are also VR games covering Soviet repression in the pipeline.

And VR is also making headway in Polish society: PureVR is just one of many virtual reality studios set up across the country, helping to introduce the technology to a wider audience. And another Polish VR company is Immersion.pl, which implements AR and VR in business and entertainment.

Bartosz Rosłoński, from Immersion, also thinks that the use of VR is becoming more widespread in Poland. “With the development of VR headsets and with all the upgrades and easiness of usage, I can see that companies are starting to use VR more as a day to day tool to increase effectiveness and to decrease costs,” he says.

And he agrees that this particularly applies to the workplace. “VR in training is one of the top promising directions of this technology.”

"People in VR are learning more efficiently and companies can reduce costs of complicated training all over the world.”

Similar concerns also inspired Biedronka’s decision for VR training: Kozyra explains that “the advantage of VR goggles is that they allow multiple exercises, but also to make mistakes in a safe environment.”

With the sets, workers have the time to learn hygiene standards, as well as how to safely operate the chiller, oven, and even complete any logistics tasks, like essential paperwork for the bakery. Employees using the Biedronka VR sets are trained three times to ensure the techniques are fully developed: first, they participate in a step-by-step baking process; then they bake independently, with running feedback from the device; and finally, they complete a skill check.

The final stage, however, is in real life—a test observed by a store supervisor.

Aleksandra Kamińska, a deputy store manager in Warsaw, explained in a press release that the goggles were first “a real novelty, but after the first moment of uncertainty and getting used to operating the joysticks I entered the virtual world of the shop quite quickly.”

To help employees adapt to the world of the supermarket, Biedronka has also developed an internal chatbot, available 24/7, which provides answers to any questions they may have. According to Rosłoński, VR is at the forefront of a global technology boom, and recent successes prove Poland is leading the way.

“Poland has a great pool of talented developers who are able to create very complex applications for VR headsets. Poland is also growing really fast which is reflected in new technologies and investments.”

Jaszczyński however, feels that despite the advancing technology of the headset, the only limitation is in the mindset. “People consider VR as a child’s play,” he explains. “The Polish market will greatly benefit from the widespread use of VR as soon as we in Poland will all recognize it as a useful and handy tool.”

One supermarket is already taking a slice of the action.

Neal Agarwal is Keeping the Weird Web Alive

One of the most exciting parts about learning to code is seeing the variety of projects that are already there that show you what’s possible with tech. There are apps that exist to be visually stunning and apps that demo a cool library or tool. Then there are the Weird™ apps, the kinds of projects that remind people what creating the web can be like when they think beyond practicality.

Neal Agarwal is a Glitch creator and creative coder that really knows what it takes to make a weird app. We asked him about some of his quirkier games as well as the larger web endeavors he’s taken on.

Inspiration can come from many places! I follow a lot of talented people on Twitter, and they’re an endless source of inspiration. I’ve also kept a list of ideas for the past 5 years, and whenever I have a new idea I write it down immediately. Most of the ideas I write down are half-baked, but I usually figure out the rest later. I think the best way to come up with ideas is to read a lot and experiment often.

For some reason, even at an early age I’ve always expressed myself through creative coding. I’ve tried painting, playing an instrument, animating and countless other mediums - but expressing myself through creative coding has always felt the most natural and fulfilling to me. I have lots of ideas and stories I want to tell, and learning to show them through this relatively new medium has been really fun.

I think the feeling of being on the frontier is one of the big factors. People have tried countless different painting styles and techniques over the past centuries, and so that medium has largely been explored. I’m sure people will continue to discover new styles/techniques, but it’s definitely an uphill battle. With creative coding it feels like we’re just at the very beginning. With every new creative tool comes opportunities to make and discover something new, and I feel lucky to have a chance at that.

There’s also an aspect of self-improvement - every creative wants to master their medium. It’s especially true with creative coding since the skill ceiling is so high. I think I can do this for the rest of my life and still not reach that ceiling, there’s just so much to learn and that’s what makes it exciting.

I’ve always been fascinated with data visualizations, I think it’s because it’s where code, art and math meet each other. The goal with a lot of projects on neal.fun is to visualize the world in new ways. What’s so exciting is that the web enables countless new types of data visualizations that are not possible in print media. Endless scrolling, unlimited scale and animations/music are some examples of the things that are not feasible in print media.

For my process I try to get a minimal version of the idea working early on. The goal is to validate or invalidate the idea before committing too much time. From then on it’s basically just experimentation and alchemy. There’s all kinds of roadblocks that come when making these projects, like design and technical challenges. For instance, a common problem is that an idea works on large screens, but not on mobile or vice-versa. I have to keep an open mind when working on these projects and pivot constantly. The idea I start out with is rarely the idea I finish with.

The reception to these projects has also been so rewarding. For instance, The Deep Sea has been viewed over 10 million times and it’s even appearing in some aquariums! It just makes me want to improve and make even better content.

My first dive into creative coding was when I was 10 and created a site to show off my favorite flash games. It was basically a mini game-portal but only the games I liked. I used a WYSIWYG editor to make it, but the editor also allowed you to view the underlying code. Eventually I ended up learning basic HTML and CSS so I could add more complex features to my site.

A year later I found Scratch and that was when I started learning broader programming concepts. I would make small games and publish them - each one slightly more complicated than the last. My initial goal was to just learn how to make games, but eventually I realized I loved coding in general. Later when I started to learn Javascript, I was surprised at how much I already knew because Scratch gave me a solid foundation.

Unfortunately, creative coding was never part of my formal tech education. In many ways getting a computer science degree is the opposite of creative coding, which is probably why I didn’t enjoy it. I’ve always used coding to express myself, and so when it was suddenly about coding assignments and computational theory I sorta tuned out. I actually created neal.fun because I was getting frustrated with coding for school instead of for fun.

I have a lot of projects that are in various stages! I try to pick projects that will force me to learn something new. I have a few “dream” projects that I’ve thought about for a long time but they’re still not quite there. Stay tuned!

Check out Neal's Glitch projects on his profile and all his other cool web projects over at neal.fun.

***We're building a more powerful Glitch, learn more he*re**.

The Open Source Solution to Supporting Creators You Love

Over the last decade, we’ve seen huge shifts in the ways that individual creators are able to make a living out of their work. YouTuber and Instagram influencer weren’t really titles, Kickstarter was just getting started, and Patreon didn’t even exist yet.

Although in some ways it’s easier for individuals to make money on their creative work, the current ecosystem makes it so creators are stuck and dependent on larger platforms to do right by them, which isn’t always what happens.

This is why Jesse von Doom and Anthony Batt created Substation, an open-source, DIY project that creators can use to set up subscriptions with a process to receive recurring payments and messaging to talk to all of their subscribers. We got to ask Jesse and Anthony more about this unique project.

This has been a space Anthony and I have been thinking about for over a decade at this point. I used to run a small nonprofit called CASH Music and Anthony was a key member of the board. The idea behind CASH was to use technology to find sustainable models for artists, and it all started in 2007 with a subscription/membership effort for Kristin Hersh (of Throwing Muses) and Donita Sparks (of L7.)

At CASH we learned a lot about community and the intersection of art and commerce — a theme that was present in all of the work we did. It was obvious in those early days but even helping artists like Run The Jewels and De La Soul figure out direct release strategy and tech meant thinking about the bonds between creator and audience. At the core it’s all about connecting people to each other and to the things they love — which is true for all creators, artists, writers, makers — everyone who does something [that] someone else loves and wants to support.

I’ll start with the caveat that we weren’t exactly planning to release stuff so early — the DIY/open core was always planned as the centerpiece. Creators deserve agency, not platform lock-in, so we’re trying to build an ecosystem that can work for anyone. Substation’s DIY release is as easy as we could make it but we know there’s a turn-key offering needed too, and that’s in the works. Nutshell? People should be able to really own their membership programs. That means owning the data, the code, all of it. So starting with an open DIY solution feels right. Every community is different and we want to empower people to start community business models on their own sites, on a fully turn-key hosted service — or some hybrid in between.

So I guess the emphasis on the open web and moving away from silos is a part of it. That just feels like a healthier way to build things on the web to me. That same idea of health extends to building better communities in these memberships and finding more sustainable business models for creators. We aim to build software that rewards inclusivity and unity — moving away from status tiers and towards strength in numbers and special offers that make people feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Memberships are long-term community businesses that need to be grown carefully.

Most of my friends work outside traditional full-time jobs and the (albeit limited) safety nets they bring. There’s been a rapid evolution of new ideas like digital music/video, streaming, ebooks, and a shift to a 24/7 online journalism. Those are just a couple examples, but they all end at the same spot: a need to explore new business models for the web that can directly support artists, writers, creators, and even newsrooms. Making sure those people have the tools they need to survive and continue making the things they make is a critical issue.

Our world has been informed by artists and creative people at all levels. If you are out there making art or creating things there is no safety net. It is raw entrepreneurship and it is passion without necessarily a business model. So we have always wanted our projects and software to become reliable systems and business models for artists and creative people. We want them to see we are not selling them something, but we are providing wings to help them fly creatively and financially. So having spent so much time with creative professionals and witnessed the struggle, opportunities missed and scamming vendors’ grip, we know what isn’t working and how to solve problems.

Bluntly? Yeah. We’d been planning on releasing the DIY version alongside a hosted service a little easier for people to just jump into. But so many people are just trying to figure out how they’ll pay for rent and groceries and we had this working thing — already with instructions and open licenses — just sitting in a Glitch project. We could stick to our plan in un-plan-for-able times, or just release it with an offer to help whoever needs helping. It was an easy decision. If we can help even a handful of people it’s worth it. We’ll figure the rest of it out as we go.

If you put code in a GitHub repo you make it easy for developers to use, but there are still issues around setting up a server, configuring, etc. That’s not going to work for most people. So we actually built it in Glitch from the start. GitHub is the backup, not the source. Every line of code was written in the Glitch editor, and now anyone can remix it. All that server setup is gone and no matter who you are you’re just a button click away from having your own copy of Substation. Just add API keys and go. Open source is great, but accessible, easy, and (still open) DIY projects that come fully hosted in an adorable server container are even better.

Check out the README on Substation to learn more about the tech and remix your own.

Conference Tools Weren't Designed to Be Social Networks

No matter where you are, you are probably (somewhat or greatly) affected by COVID19. I’m an American in Berlin, and navigating around COVID19 has entirely changed my life, including my social life. Social distancing physically has pushed people back into the digital and onto the internet.

I’ve been invited to live Instagram streams, Zoom karaoke, Zoom dance parties, Zoom drinking parties, Zoom brunches, to numerous Facetime video calls, Google Hangouts, Skype digital coffees, Netflix Party video streams, the list goes on. Video conferencing and seeing the reactions of my friends and loved ones makes this time slightly easier.

This has brought me, and many others, to a new reliance and shift to video conferencing during the time of quarantining in COVID19. This reliance and shift to video conferencing makes sense—schools are doing it to make sure classes go online, and video conferencing has been a staple of remote work environments. But what’s new here is how video conference tools are being used out of business and school environments to fill in the gap of social intimacy and events created in social distancing. Zoom was never intended to be used for multi-person dance parties, and while I’m sure Zoom loves how popular it’s become, this does raise some concerns. Does Zoom actually have the right tools to let people communicate in these new ways? Does any video conferencing tool have that?

Video conferencing tools are not without their problems #

Zoom has had a slew of reported privacy and security issues, such as VICE uncovering that Zoom’s iOS app was sending information to Facebook about when users logged in, or earlier in 2020, Zoom reported having a security flaw that could allow hackers to take over users’ microphones, and with human rights and technology advocacy group, Access Now, requesting transparency reports from Zoom (which Zoom hasn’t delivered yet).

These are just some of the issues with Zoom; the other big problem is video-conferencing harassment. Zoom has a specific form of harassment occurring, called Zoombombing. Zoombombing is when a troll takes control of the Zoom room by sharing a video or their screen, and disrupting the Zoom hangouts with inappropriate and offensive content, and generally causing havoc. NBC News reported Princeton professor and noted author, Ruja Benjamin, and her husband getting Zoombombed when reading books to children. Their harasser was a white man in a thong and kept repeating the n-word. Benjamin and her husband eventually ended the Zoom call and canceled the reading. Casey Newton, a technology journalist, had his work from home happy hour Zoombombed.

What’s important to note here is that relatively technology-savvy people are getting Zoombombed, and it’s not a few people: it’s becoming a more common occurrence. Researcher and disinformation expert Joan Donovan has tweeted out ways to mitigate Zoombombing, but it still doesn’t completely stop it. Product designer Amélie Lamont summarizes the sentiment best: it seems clear big technology companies are not designing with harassment in mind. This is especially true of enterprise technology like most video conferencing software and technology that insists that it’s only enterprise, such as Slack. Right now, Zoom is so similar to Slack in that it’s a product that seems to be or insists that it’s just enterprise software but it’s used like a social network or social messaging platform. Slack is used for friends groups, neighborhood blocks, alumni associations, conferences, and just for general hangouts, as well as for workplaces. Does this sound familiar? Zoom is being used in the exact same way. And there is harassment happening on both platforms.

So, why is this happening? These tools were built for conferencing, not for general socializing, and they don’t have enough blocking capabilities or moderation tools to support the kinds of new social interactions that are happening. Slack, for example, has repeatedly said publicly it’s just a workplace tool, and thus doesn't need blocking or moderation. Their stance is that ‘disagreements’ can be worked out in an office place. But that’s not how harassment unfolds in the world—work isn’t harassment free, just like harassment can come from friend groups, loved ones, and complete strangers. When a tool or platform allows for multiple people to interact with each other, there will be harassment. Case in point with the prolific harassment that occurs across Wikipedia.

In a sense, Zoom does a better job than most conferencing tools in allowing for more nuanced kinds of interactions, such as allowing for a moderator to create breakout groups #

Breakout groups are smaller, private groups inside of the larger Zoom meeting room. And this kind of design allows for a specific kind of intimacy in Zoom, which makes it a great and useful tool right now. This intimacy means users need more granular moderation tools per person: easier-to-find, intuitive moderation tools for the organizer, such as the ability to immediately block or cut someone’s video who is sharing. Imagine the ability to click on the main screen and have tools right at your fingertips, right at the right-click.

Eleanor Wynn, a former Principal Engineer at Intel and current scholar with the Ronin Institute, wrote over a messaging app about her work exploring team meetings and virtual meetings at Intel: “The mistake that I see in the videoconferencing tools is that seeing isn't primary... nobody has the patience to sit all day in video conferences. We judged that the maximum time for an effective video conference, which we also did, was 4 hours. After that, you might as well get people on a plane.”

What conference tools focus on is work and facilitating work conversations but not necessarily how people see large groups of people and interact. It’s about presenting slideshows and facilitating work conversations, not hosting dinner parties. And now video conferencing tools are being used for multiple hours per day, in our work hours and out of work hours.

With people running dance parties on Zoom, workout classes on Vimeo; people are yearning for connection right now since we can’t have real, physical human touch. Intimacy is being craved. But for tools to be used for pure socializing like karaoke, or digital brunches, conferencing tools and hangouts need to be redesigned. Imagine an online web browser tool that is just dedicated to karaoke. Imagine what that could look like. More importantly, imagine what it would need to mitigate harassment. If a tool allows for video conferencing or video interaction in real-time, people will use it, regardless of how the tool is intended to be used. Users change and reinterpret meaning to technology constantly, we see this Facebook which started out just for college students and now is larger than any nation-state.

Technology can adapt and shift, and it should especially to meet the needs of their users. Now, in the age of COVID19, it’s time for enterprise software that’s being used for all different kinds of new users, to better protect their users from harassment. And Zoom agrees. On April 1st, the CEO published a statement promising to spend the next 90 days on improvements: better encryption, and better tools. Zoom, we’ll be waiting and watching.

Caroline Sinders is a design researcher and artist analyzing technology and its impacts through a social justice lens.

Who Wrote That Hit Song? It Depends on How Human They Are.

We’re a long way from seeing C3-PO improvise his way through a poetry slam, but it’s not too soon to wonder how we’re supposed to treat the creative work of non-human intelligence. Because while today, machine-learning models remain extensions of human brains, they may not stay there forever. And in the meantime, money stands to be gained or lost depending on how intellectual-property laws govern the output—and input—of AI.

“This is largely a theoretical debate at this point,” said Meredith Rose, policy counsel with the Washington-based advocacy group Public Knowledge.

Her advice: Look past what she called “pop-culture driven ideas of an AI being sentient and inherently creative.” Instead, focus on the current reality of AI as more of a post-processing tool that requires extensive care and feeding by creative humans.

“When I write up neural net experiments, I'm choosing which neural net to train on what data, how it should be sampled, and then curating the results into something that's fun to read,” emailed Janelle Shane, a researcher and author of “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You,” a book breaking down advances in AI.

Shane regularly treats readers of her AI Weirdness blog to such treats as a set of neural-net-composed Christmas carols that led off with these grisly verses:

“The All-gracious King of all the earth,

Had a baby at Christmas time,

On Christmas Day,

A true and holy Deity,

Went down to earth,

With human flesh for sacrifice.”

“In no cases does it make sense to say the copyright should belong to the AI,” Shane said. “The AI is the tool, and human creativity determines how it's used.”

The developers of an AI-powered soundtrack composition service have taken that approach to drive additional revenue: If you use the free or standard plans at Aiva Technologies, that Luxembourg-based firm retains copyright to the output of its tools, while paying for its Pro plan lets you keep those rights.

"They know what makes your heart beat faster,” summed up Gary Arlen, a longtime tech-industry analyst of advances in using AI to craft such movie ingredients as scores and even movie trailers.

Rose’s suggestion for this level of AI development was to apply a common clause in freelance contracts to the product of AI systems. “Expand the work for hire doctrine,” she said. “Let’s treat it like it’s an employee.”

What if, however, an AI could create entertaining works without humans first carefully feeding it a corpus of samples? Then, Rose suggested, take a look at the stated purpose of copyright in the constitution—to “promote the progress” of art. "The machine doesn’t need to get paid, the machine doesn’t need to eat,” she said. "Would this mechanism work to create more work?"

History lends a recent parallel: the monkey-selfie case, in which People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claimed that a Celebes crested macaque named Naruto owned the copyright to a selfie he’d taken after photographer David Slater left cameras nearby. Slater, meanwhile, contended that he owned the copyright, citing the days he’d spent gaining the trust of the monkeys and the care spent positioning the camera so that the simians would be tempted to try a selfie. Rose rejected that, saying, “things that occur in nature are not copyrightable.” But how fine do you draw the line between the output of one non-human intelligence and another?

In the nearer term, the more likely parallel for AI’s conversation with copyright is the Google Books case #

That’s the long-running suit the Authors Guild filed against Google to stop it from scanning and indexing millions of books, many out of print, and making them searchable. That legal battle ended with Google’s claims being upheld even as a proposed settlement with the Guild collapsed, leaving the copyrighted part of Google’s book archive offline. The 2020 version of that dispute involves a different sort of mass ingestion of copyrighted work: feeding existing creative works into a machine-learning model so it can learn how to make new works along those lines.

“Needless to say, the unauthorized (unlicensed) ingestion of copyrighted works to generate new competitive creative works will ultimately cause market harm to the value of human-created copyrighted works that the AI machines essentially mimic in style and essence,” said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild, in comments submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

“If we want to preserve a sustainable economy for human authorship in the U.S., we need to create a way for human authors whose works are ingested by AI algorithms and processes to receive remuneration for such use,” Rasenberger said. “As noted above, this will eventually require a sophisticated, automated licensing system.”

The humans directing AIs can work around copyright complaints by training these algorithms on exclusively public-domain works.

“Many of the AI-generated art projects we've seen so far—like The Next Rembrandt—rely on public domain works, possibly to sidestep copyright issues with training data,” noted Amanda Levendowski, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s law school and founding director of its Intellectual Property and Information Policy.

As Rose noted, restricting an AI to a diet of only public-domain works will reflect a much less diverse authorship. As in: “That is white western males who wrote before 1923.” Plus, you need to feed so many works into an AI to train it properly (as in: create something more artful than the AI Christmas carols Shane ushered into the world), so the contribution of any one artist will be trivial.

"Even Prince, who was wildly prolific, is not going to have nearly enough material to train an AI,” Rose said. "There’s such a huge sea, it’s like trying to pick a single drop of seafoam out of the ocean.”

But rightsholders with deep pockets will still want to explore this. Said Arlen: “That’s where the copyright lawyers will get interested.”

Building the Most Unique Newsletter You’ll Ever Read

The web has gotten a bit routine. Many of us spend our days on the same three websites without putting a lot of thought behind it. I know I constantly open a new tab of YouTube or Twitter just as a reflex. We’re used to standardized experiences on our sites and take notice when something doesn’t feel the same as everything else.

That’s why David Allin Reese’s work feels so exciting. David is a designer on Google’s Material Design team and also hosts both his personal website and his self-described “mutating newsletter” on Glitch. David was generous enough to answer questions about his work and his recommendations for those interested in design.

Very honored to see that you use Glitch for your personal website. Why did you decide to go with Glitch?

I think it’s nice you noticed.

After learning about it from a friendly colleague, Glitch is the creature that grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the digital world. Before this, the web was a place I had only previously interacted with on the surface and had never contributed to, like many of us. I had never stepped through the black mirror, and Glitch let me step through and see that I could shape the reality in which most of us (and I) live.

Technically, as a graphic designer who had never built anything on the web, Glitch exposes (and in an inherent way, teaches) the many unspoken assumptions about building a website or app. A really simple example of this is how Glitch has a template for a basic webpage which contains an index HTML file, a CSS style file and a script file, and explains what each file is capable of doing. Many people familiar with the web might say things like “Well duh! That’s what you need to build a site!”.

Well I didn’t know stuff like that before Glitch showed up, many people still don’t know. No matter how many documentation sites or tutorials or books you read about making stuff on the web it can be hard to make the leap from concept to practice; Glitch provides a basis to learn.

We live in a (digital) world where most people can only “read”, and just a select few can “write”.

I didn’t choose Glitch, it continuously teaches me how to be independent on the web. Rather than the idea of “choosing”, it’s about the feeling of pride in the relationship between myself (the student, the builder) and Glitch (the teacher, the community, the movement) and it’s why I choose to stick around and build projects with Glitch’s (and some generous friends’) help. Having that shiny ‘.glitch.me’ URL is pretty sick, and mysterious to those who haven’t encountered it before.

Can you walk me through your mutating newsletter, This Is What Is In?

I would love to walk you through this.

In a tiny, shimmering nutshell, This Is What Is In is a series of my own investigations into digital storytelling. Usually it’s a short story or poem that can be read through a series of interactions on the screen; I send out an email with a link whenever I finish one.

I want to better understand the relationship between physical interaction and reading, or the rhythm of text. Digital media has been influenced by physical consumption of text such as the turning of a page in a book or the unwinding of a scroll. What is a page-turner in the age of infinite scrolling? What about cliffhangers at the end of a chapter? You can create an infinite amount of these interactions in the digital world with magical paper, a magical textile, how can stories be woven into this magical paper to quietly add mystery and meaning?

The origin of This Is What Is In comes largely from the desire to write and share stories. Throughout my life, I recently realized, I’ve used writing as a way to deal with anxiety, depression and loneliness. These are sometimes caused by negative circumstances in my life, but mostly they just appear of their own volition. The act of writing teaches me about them, but also about my desires; I learn something I had never thought of, about myself or otherwise. This Is What Is In is as much for me as it is for you.

Have you worked on projects similar to This Is What Is In before? What was your first experience with this kind of dynamic experience design?

Wow, I will be adding dynamic experience design to my resume, thank YOU.

This Is What Is In is actually the sequel to my undergrad thesis, Those Spaces In Between. I participated in a thesis exchange semester at Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam; it’s an amazing place, a place where the future looks like it already happened, and where contrarian art is celebrated. The theme of the thesis semester was the concept of “Public vs. Private”.

During my time there, I was in a long-distance relationship with someone who, in retrospect, sucked. To deal with self-isolation, depression, and lack of personal boundaries, I reflected on this experience in my work. Those Spaces In Between is a diary of compositions which are accompanied by abstract text entries written from the perspective of a being, sending messages to his significant other from great distances. The extensive abstraction between text and image allows for personal interpretation, and one to find their own meaning within them. I took a lot of inspiration from video games I played as a kid, like Pokemon and began to explore the impact of “typewriter” effects on reading text.

For the final thesis exhibition, I collected emails of those that people missed on a clipboard with the intention of sending them Those Spaces In Between… I didn’t. Three years later, just a few months ago, I pulled out that list for the first time and used these emails as the first subscribers to This Is What Is In.

Where do you find inspiration for This Is What Is In or for other projects?

You.

I often find myself getting inspiration from so many places: walks in the woods, a single word in a song, nighttime drives, sci-fi short stories, one can only hope for the moment it happens. One inspiring group of people is a musical group named iamamiwhoami**, **which started producing anonymous synthpop audiovisual projects in late 2009. Their use of symbolism interwoven into a combination of music and film creates an air of mystery and meaning which ties multiple chapters, and even albums, together. This is one of my favorite music videos… and maybe this one. I have also been diving deep into the world of David Byrne recently, I’ll let you know if I make it out alive.

Friends. A friend of mine Cortney Cassidy recently started a Mail Blog, where she sends you these beautiful analog blog booklets in the mail. I read them by candlelight. Cortney is someone I look up to quite a bit, and I’m grateful to be able to work with someone who is so creatively self-aware.

Also when I need to zoom out or change direction with whatever I’m doing, I have been using Brian Eno’s and Eric Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies since I was introduced to them in college. I also have found The Universal Traveler come in handy more than a few times.

Are there resources that you would recommend for people interested in design?

Themselves.

If someone is interested in learning about design, I would encourage them to first explore art: art theory, art history, art criticism. I feel like that may not be the answer many people are looking for, but I truly think it’s crucial to have an understanding that what you put out into the world has immense impact. The medium of the day is digital, the medium of yesterday was print, photography, sculpture, painting, textiles and the list goes on. Thinking of this current digital phenomenon as a single moment in the vast history of visual communication will give you the tools to have your own perspective about the past, present and future of artistic expression, no matter the medium.

I think anyone can design if they are willing to understand that there is no right or wrong, there is only** you, the creator, **making a choice within a set of constraints. Study color, study typography. Acknowledge that your relationship with these things must develop, but will also change and mutate over time, be ready to try something new every time you sit down to work, kill your darlings, save them, remove that self-doubt. Be subversive with everything you do, let your work tell your story and show others how you wish the world was, and maybe one day it will change. If you aren’t being subversive, I’m not really sure what you’re doing here, and no one else will either.

You can learn more about David on his personal website and you can subscribe to his newsletter This Is What Is In.

The Changing Work of Freelancing, in Photos

Technology has driven many industries to change the standard definition of work, and while “freelance” as a term has been used since the 19th century, the ability to work “freelance” today is changing, and more available than ever, thanks to collaborative, accessible technology.

John Provencher, a graphic designer and developer remarks that “websites are the design of our time.” Provencher views websites as not just a URL that lives online, but a generative system that can live independently and compound upon itself. His work involves simplicity and variables, not all websites surround themselves around code, some only need images or typography to be interesting.

In college, the web wasn’t John’s main focus, in fact, he wasn’t very good at coding either. Javascript took a long time for him to learn, as it does for anyone. Fast-forward: he now teaches students how to build websites part-time at The New School. He first started two years ago just as he was leaving his full-time job at a branding agency. Teaching felt like the perfect, stable gig to bridge the transition to freelance. He also saw it as a way to workshop his own ideas. In essence, it was a way for him to be a student again.

“You can be really risky in college and in my professional career I just always wanted to take huge risks.”

At the beginning of this year, John alongside friend and co-teacher Laurel Schwulst hosted their first workshop for their independent learning initiative, Fruitful School. Hosted for six weeks at Pioneer Works, they worked with eleven students of all different ages and backgrounds. The students at Fruitful applied with “seeds”, ideas for what they wanted to achieve in the workshop. The applicants weren’t judged on quality but instead on if John and Laurel, as teachers, had the references and resources to support their ideas.

When asked if teaching had become a crux of his practice, he readily agreed. It’s almost a breath of fresh air, being around a group of people who are curious and truthful in their willingness to learn, as opposed to getting stuck in the finite details of the industry. And the industry can be finite.

Ritu Ghiya describes it as “an intense vacuum of a certain kind of person... Privilege is a word that’s tossed around a lot, criticality [isn’t] welcomed there as much.”

An artist and designer, Ritu blurs the lines between artmaking and technology. Her interest lies in transforming physical objects into special, digital experiences.

Studying media theory in school, the path to web and technology was unexpected.

“What I’m doing still feels super new to me, and every project I’m taking on now still feels like I’m taking it on to learn something new... I feel like my whole career has been informed by chasing what I’m interested in.”

After graduating, Ritu worked in artbook publishing. But while she was surrounded by art, her role wasn’t creative. She left her full-time job on a “whim” to teach herself how to code. She spent her time introducing herself to others who weren’t inside the corporate world, leading her to the DIY tech community full “of people who don’t want to be complicit with what big tech is doing.”

Through researching, she was introduced to the School for Poetic Computation, a Black Mountain-esque school focused around care, technology, and theoretical learning. She began doing one-off design gigs for them and was then introduced to The New York Tech Zine Fair, a new project of the owners. Ritu soon jumped on as program manager.

The fair has provided Ritu with a backbone for her practice, while she “navigates the minutiae of having to be a worker in technology and art.” It brings together a community of artists that are “interrogating power, hegemony, and technology and producing independent publishing. I kind of call it a celebration of publishing about technology outside of technology.”

“There are just a lot of people who are tired,” Ritu admits. And for her and many others, this community is a way to ease the frustration of big corporatism.

“For me personally, things have started making sense with my career as a designer and developer within the last few months. I think the recipe in all these things has brought me the work I do... If I reflect, I think I have created these paths for myself because I didn’t see one that made sense to me.”

Jo Shaffer, a visual effects artist, and bassist, also created their own course. Unlike John and Ritu, Jo’s practice lies in the software that technology has created over time. Visual effects programs like Houdini and Maya were only introduced to the market in the late 90s. On Jo’s end, it has taken years of trial and error to climb multiple, steep learning curves.

“At first you’re just struggling with technology and it’s hard to, even if you can execute something, really imbue it with your voice or have a take on it.”

Jo cites *Everything is Cinem*a by Richard Brody. "The New Wave people were really interested in the idea of a filmmaker, that as tech improved, being able to lock themselves in a room and make a film in the same way an author just needs to go into a room and make their art.”

Now after taking the time, Jo has noticed themselves paying closer attention to detail, light in particular. How does it scatter? How does it diffuse?

“Stone buildings at sunset, that’s my perfect light.”

Jo found themself in a freelance position by way of music. They currently play bass in an indie rock band, The Ophelias. In order to financially support life on the road, when they’re in New York, Jo is devoted to VFX, making sure all projects are finished before touring for consecutive weeks. But it’s not something they mind, comparing it to getting lost in a video game.

In terms of the overlap between their two mediums, music and tech, Jo finds the intersection in their practice. “It sounds dumb to say out loud cause it’s so intrinsic to how you go about making... I just haven’t found that learning how to procedurally model a flower is that much different from learning how to play a bass part. You just study something, practice it.”

_Words and photography by Rachel Cabbitt_.

Building Flexible, Subscription-Friendly Apps

The recently launched Substation is one of many sites that exemplify how online subscription services will evolve in the next decade. #

*My partner Anthony and I started working on Substation late in 2019 as a way to play with new membership and subscription business models. Glitch was the perfect choice for starting a new open source project aimed at independent creators. We didn’t have to sacrifice any developer convenience because every project gets its own server container, we get command-line access, and everything can be pushed to or pulled from GitHub. At the same time, we could build something people could remix, customize, and own with the push of a button. Setting up payment accounts and mail services is complicated enough, we didn’t want the setup of our app to add new friction. So we decided Substation would be built in Glitch from the very start. *

*Building something new on Glitch took a little getting used to at first, but the borders of “on Glitch” and just working on the project sort of melted away. I worked exclusively in the Glitch editor. Its just-enough approach to editor functionality is how I’ve always liked to work, but everyone has their preferences. As friends started to lend a hand with Substation we saw people try the VSCode plugin or even local editing synced to a git repo like any other project. It’s a flexible way to build and doesn’t impose itself on workflow, so we all just worked how we work and the part where we’re working on Glitch faded into the background. *

*As our needs grew, Glitch’s flexibility kept pace. We set up a central repo on GitHub to hold code, releases, and issues. That combined with testing and production projects on the Glitch side gave us a robust infrastructure without sacrificing any of the one click remix user benefit. Before launching we boosted the projects and saw them hold up to higher traffic than we were expecting. Don’t let all the adorable comics fool you. Glitch is as powerful as it is friendly. *

___

If you’re ready to bring your favorite project idea into a reality, or if you just want to learn more about what it’s like to code in a friendly, collaborative environment, head over to Glitch and get started bringing your ideas to the world.

From Games to Tools for Work, Every Good Idea Can Become Your Own App

Glitch recently launched a paid tier, equipping users the power to give their apps extra memory, extra disk storage, keep their apps always on and take off any rate limits. With all of the different kinds of apps on the platform, we wanted to learn more about what our first members were boosting with the new capabilities they unlocked. We sent out a survey to get to know their work a little better.

🗄All Work 🖇 #

User Steve Anderson, chose to boost a barcode generator app that was important for his company. “I originally wrote it on Glitch as a prototype to replace a failing service my company was relying on, and had it up and running in an hour or so,” Steve explained. “Thanks to Glitch having git backing it, it was incredibly easy to get it moved over and running on a work server, and our clients rely on it for printing on generated invoices and delivery notes.”

At one point, a data center issue stopped his clients from being able to print their paperwork. “Fortunately we could temporarily redirect to the prototype, still running on Glitch, and it saved the day. Hurrah!”

Ada Rose Cannon, a Developer Advocate at Samsung, boosted her analytics app, aptly titled Adalytics Live. “I boosted it since it sits on every site I own so boosting it gives a performance increase to all those sites.”

🎯And All Play 🎲 #

On the other side of the app world, we also have a boosted game from Nigel Nelson called Swipe Wrong. “It's a game that lets you assemble a dating profile out of random words and then lets you browse through other submissions!”, Nigel said. “I wanted to keep it always-on to make sure nobody runs into a long loading screen instead of a fun game.”

Bryan Knowles has boosted their own hidden role game, Sneaky Epic Game. They decided to boost it “because it was an app [they were] proud of and the boosted badge seemed like a goof mark of pride and it fixes a rate limit problem the game had.”

Finally, Fabio Cortés, a creative coder and VR developer, has boosted some of his unique VR/AR apps, including a Pokémon experience. “Have you ever wondered [how it feels] to be in the middle of a Pokémon battle? Well, now you can experience it!”

In addition, Fabio boosted his viral Homer Metaverse app, which resembles a popular scene from The Simpsons. “My first memory about Virtual Reality is from The Simpsons. So, here it is, in AR/VR, right at your browser.”

All the boosted apps that creators submitted can be found in this collection. If you're interested in Glitch's paid membership, click to learn more.

Ready to run: How Glitch is making it easier to run apps in the cloud

When we created Glitch, we set out to eliminate all the barriers to creating a full stack web app. It’s the easiest possible way to instantly go from an idea to a running app, because we simplified coding collaboration and version control and configuration and all the other complex parts. It’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams: our community has now created well over 5 million apps on Glitch. So, now that it’s easy to create apps, we had to solve the next big problem:** running your apps**.

Making Apps Easy #

Traditionally, cloud web services have just been *too damn hard *to get started with, from figuring out exactly which services you need, to trying to guess how much all of those complicated pieces are going to cost. But just like Glitch simplified version control and coding collaboration and app deployment, we’re simplifying the ability to run real, reliable apps in the cloud.

There’s no provisioning, no cost calculator, no “call us for prices”. If you look at other cloud hosts, they’re super powerful, but they’re full of jargon — I don’t even know what a Dyno or a Droplet is, honestly, and the thought of learning that stresses me out. How the hell do I guess how much “compute” I need to purchase for an app that I just created? For a normal person, it’s confusing and just acts as a barrier.

How about this, instead: you pay us ten bucks, and we run your apps.

That’s our new paid plan at Glitch. For paying members, we boost your apps so there’s no rate limits, you get more storage and memory for apps that need them, we keep them always available and running smoothly for you, and you even get a nice shiny upgrade on your Glitch profile so everybody knows you’re a member of the friendliest coding community on the web. You’ll also be first in line for the equally exciting new features we’ve got planned.

Making the web, better #

At Glitch, think it’s important for the web that every creator is able to easily make and run their own apps, under their own control. And we think it’s important we build a solid, secure business to run those apps for a long time to come. The best part is, our new paid service enables both those things to happen.

If you’ve been a Glitch user, good news: we delivered the features you told us you wanted most. And if you haven’t checked in recently, you’ll be blown away by all the new capabilities — from seamless import/export from GitHub to integration with Visual Studio Code to hundreds of new starter projects for you to remix, it’s all even easier and more fun than before.

If you’re new to Glitch, welcome! Check out our starter projects, remix an app that inspires you, and start building that idea you’ve had in your head. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Then, join us. The whole community is excited to welcome you as a member, and to see all the apps you make!

Just Like Ancient Times, Modern Farmers Need Great Tech, Too

Agricultural startup CropSafe helps farmers geo-tag and log notes in their fields using a unique, mobile-friendly app (made on Glitch, naturally). John** **McElhone and his co-founder Micheál McLaughlin come from a rural area and have farming backgrounds. Micheál’s grandfather owns a farm that has been instrumental in their understanding of traditional survey methods and figuring out how they can improve upon them with technology.

Their app helps farmers assess the state of their crops “without the added complexity of dashboards and calculations,” John McElhone, CropSafe co-founder, told Glitch, and the goal is to make “farm analytics simple.”

CropSafe’s app serves a webview of crop maps which is a core part of their product.

“It allows us to deliver a much faster experience to our customers. As we're still an early-stage startup, we iterate on the code of our app every day. The Glitch platform allows us to do this 10x faster than any other platform we have tried.”

We’re proud to feature CropSafe as an active Glitch community member that uses a boosted app. Check out more boosted apps on our Glitch collection page, and get started making your app!

We Love Games So Much, It Was Hard Making This List

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you catch your pods.

After a long or stressful day, there’s nothing more enjoyable than a good game. Luckily, there are so many creators making unique games on Glitch. So whether you’re looking for inspiration for creating your first game or just looking for something to mess around with, we’ve got you covered.

“Galaxeroids” is a retro throwback game from software engineer Joe Gaffey who has been interested in both games and coding since he was young. “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,” Joe explained. “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.”

Joe uses Glitch to put his different ideas down into code. In another experiment, he built “Rock-Star”, a clone of Guitar Hero/Rock Band which uses the Gamepad API and the Web Midi API.

Most recently Joe has tried 3D programming for the web. “I’ve gotten into driving simulators in VR, and that’s a whole different experience,” Joe said. “My latest experiment, which I called WD40 for some reason… [is] a physics-based driving simulator based on three.js with ammo.js physics.”

Another interesting game on Glitch is “Power Slides” from Byron Hulcher. It takes images from presentations, clip art, strange academic articles and puts them together in a randomly generated powerpoint presentation. Each person has to improvise their way through a presentation, trying to sell a product with the slides they’re given. So you might start with a slide that just says “Driving Directions for Dogs” followed by a picture of Kevin Bacon holding a baby with his face.

Finally, there’s a game called Figma Pacman from Gleb Sabirzyanov, which is a favorite of Keith Kurson, an engineering manager at Glitch. Figma is typically a design tool, but some projects on Glitch, we see it being used in a totally different way. “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,” Keith explained. “It’s a really cool combination of two different tools and… shows off what Glitch games can look like.”

*Check out the full collection of games and make sure to listen to the Game On! episode of Shift Shift Forward.

Drag and Drop Your Art to the Virtual World

Naoto Hiéda is a creative coder who uses Glitch to experiment with new project ideas, many of which have social elements and use graphics and VR frameworks like p5 and A-Frame. One of his projects is P Code Land, a virtual space to type messages that make their own unique sound and listen to other sounds that people made, too.

Another project from Naoto is Virtual Exhibition which is a social virtual space where anyone can come in and drop in their images. “I program as my artistic practice,” Naoto explained. “Virtual Exhibition resembles an art gallery; however, everyone can drag and drop an image to upload and to exhibit on this online gallery. This flips the hierarchy of the conventional art market and questions what the authenticity of artwork is.”

Virtual Exhibition was also the first app that Naoto boosted when he became a Glitch member. “I boosted this project to keep it available 24/7,” he said. “As it is part of my portfolio, having no downtime is important. Also, as I store images on the server side, I wanted to have a bigger storage.”

*We’re proud to be a place for creative coders to thrive especially with boosted apps. Check out more boosted apps on our Glitch collection page, and get started making your app!

I Built an App to Accompany Questlove’s DJ Set in 20 Minutes

One of the few bright spots in the otherwise deeply distressing environment of the current global quarantine is the rise of superb live-streamed entertainment by some of the world’s most talented artists. Perhaps the most joyous distractions are the live DJ sets and music battles going on, like D-Nice’s already-legendary #ClubQuarantine.

As Teddy Riley’s unfortunately tech-challenged Instagram set showed this weekend, managing the technology for providing entertainment to thousands of people can be hard to do if you don’t have access to the trained professionals who usually handle such things. So when Questlove decided to do a series of nightly DJ sets as a tribute to Prince, I got a little bit nervous when I had the wild idea at the last minute to accompany his set by providing live “liner notes” that would let listeners know what songs they were listening to and to provide additional commentary and context.

You see, in addition to being the co-founder of the legendary hip hop group The Roots, and the bandleader of The Tonight Show, Questlove is a super music nerd. So, even as they’re dancing and getting their groove on, listeners to his DJ sets are also often in learning mode—it’s one part turntables and one part Wikipedia.

What makes it especially complicated is that I decided Questlove’s livestream needed these annotations about five minutes before he began his set. Fortunately for me he got a slightly late start but, in all, I had about 20 minutes to pull together an app to provide notes to an audience that, at its peak, numbered in the tens of thousands of simultaneous listeners.

I was able to pull it off. Appropriately, I did it by remixing—since that’s how you can instantly make apps on Glitch. The end result was a simple app showing off nearly twelve hours of amazing live DJing.

I had a very clear idea of how I wanted to present live “liner notes” to the audience for the DJ set:

I needed a simple, responsive web page that would load quickly for lots of users.
The page should offer some basic context explaining what was happening, including a donation link for Food Hub, the charity Questlove was trying to support
Prominently featured up top would be an embedded YouTube video of the stream, so the audience could listen while they read. (Though live DJ sets are currently mostly associated with Instagram, Questlove streams on all the major platforms simultaneously, including Instagram, YouTube, Twitch and Twitter/Periscope, which worked great because YouTube is embeddable and I think it has the best sound.)
The key dynamic part of the site would be a live-updated list of notes under the stream, with the newest at the top so users didn’t have to scroll.
We’d need a basic admin interface for easily posting new notes to the stream, ideally supporting HTML for the content so I could do formatting and links, and supporting multiple authors in case I wanted to ask anyone else to help write notes.

I also quickly figured out what I didn’t want to build:

No authentication or user management
I didn’t want to build or include a rich-text editor that might complicate things That was a pretty simple spec. I had expected to create some kind of data persistence, but surprisingly, time constraints and the actual experience meant that I didn’t end up actually having a database at all!

Having only about 20 minutes to get a basic version of the page running meant that I knew time was of the essence. I knew that dropping in a responsive page template would be the easy part, so I set about to find the simplest possible way to get the page to update. I knew about socket.io since it’s extremely popular, but had actually never used it in a project I was creating from scratch myself. (We’re pretty familiar with its feature set since Glitch enables live, real-time simultaneous code editing.)

I searched for “socket io demo” on Glitch and there were tons of example projects, but the very first one had really clean code that I could quickly understand. In the example, it was a simple chat page with the updating interface at the bottom, so I remixed the app (that’s the Glitch term for making your own copy of an app) and set about to customize it.

My first edits were pretty simple: I split off the chat submission form into its own view, which I put at /write so it would be separate from the main message stream. (For these purposes, security through obscurity was good enough.) Then, I did some quick edits to simplify how the messages were displayed on the main view.

Next, I wanted to get the page looking decent. I wanted the lightest possible framework that would give me a responsive page, so I just grabbed Skeleton even though I had only tinkered with it and not used it in production before. Instead of doing a full build process, I dropped in a CDN link to a hosted version of the styles, and copied & pasted most of their boilerplate demo in to be the scaffolding for this new page. I just barely customized the standard CSS to change some colors, and pretty soon the output of the app was looking like a real webpage.

From that point, we were off to the races. I think at the point when I dropped into the livestream, there were about six thousand people in Questlove’s Instagram live session alone, and many, many more on YouTube and Twitch and the other platforms.

He has 3.4 million followers on Twitter, and almost 2 million on Instagram, and between shares from him and other high-profile people like chef Tom Colicchio who dropped in, a couple million people saw the link, and at least a few tens of thousands checked out the live notes while watching the stream.

Just after launching, I sent the /write link to my friend iammisstlc so that she could add notes to the stream as well, and we were both instantly able to annotate the music as it played. The only slight downside was it was impossible to tell if any particular update came from me or her, but for most of the content, it didn’t matter, and we just added our name to the text if it was pertinent.

A short while into the stream, after about 10,000 people were watching and we had already written a few thousand words, I remembered that I had never built any kind of persistence or storage for all these updates. Uh oh.

This was… not my finest moment. But I decided to save the rendered HTML from my browser as a static HTML page and figure out how to put that up as an archive later. It was hardly an elegant solution, but trying to live-document an event while following an incredibly fast-moving conversation across Instagram and YouTube comments and while doing research to make sure the information was accurate didn’t leave a lot of time to come up with something more appropriate.

As it turned out, this embarrassingly hacky solution worked pretty well! Though I certainly wouldn’t repeat that decision, given the time constraints, it ended up serving our needs and people were really happy for the resource while enjoying the show.

Over the course of three days of streams, Questlove played over twelve hours (!) of music, and we published over fifteen thousand words of commentary, all delivered as people watched. We were joined by fans, journalists, artists and enthusiasts from around the world, including almost a dozen different musicians who had actually performed on the songs being played.

Through the entire experience, the app held up just as I’d hoped. (At Glitch, we’d recently launched a paid level of the service, and since I’m a member, the app had no rate limits on the amount of traffic it could serve up.) Because you can pick a URL on Glitch just by typing something in, it was really easy to get a memorable URL and people were easily able to share it even in spaces like Instagram live comments, where links can often be difficult to share.

In all, though this little Socket + Skeleton app was a success, there were a few things I would have done differently, or that I’d improve if I ever did this again:

Definitely start more than 20 minutes before needing to go live with an app in front of thousands of people.
Do use existing frameworks like Socket.io and Skeleton, but design from the user experience forward, instead of just copying & pasting their default examples.
Explore persistence solutions so that content is automatically archived appropriately; there are tons of open source CMSes that could solve this kind of thing easily.
Examine whether any of the APIs from the big platforms would make it easier to bring over comments from their live chats — there were tons of gems being shared, and it would be fun to highlight standout conversations.

This Animal Crossing Balloon Tracker Brings Calm to Chaos

I have spent too much personal time building an island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) recently, with no experience playing prior AC editions. In fact, I had never heard of the game until 2019. In another fact, I never owned a game console until the Nintendo Switch (even that I bought six months after it went to market). What does this all mean? It means I have no standards to assess what is good about a game, according to some of The Game Experts, because I am new here and don’t know what I like all the time.

Soul-baring out of the way, I want to share one more thing. Animal Crossing has these balloons that float across your island, which is your home base in the game. The balloons carry presents for you to open, according to an ancient present tradition. Here’s where the juicy game stuff comes in.

People who are better than me at understanding how ACNH works figured out how the balloons spawn and creator RayPS did a very good job tapping this secret knowledge and bringing it to life in the Balloon Timer app. When a balloon spawns, you can use this to find it.

If you know why this app is significant, then you can stop reading this and get back to your game and find the balloons. But if you do not know, I will explain: the balloons carry individual presents and as they float along above your island, propelled by the wind, you can shoot them down with a slingshot. These presents hold surprises. This is exciting because surprises are unknown quantities. You’re unaware of the delight or disappointment that awaits you. Animal Crossing: it’s like real life.

RayPS shared this with me about building the app: “We all know the balloon only spawns at the time ending with '0' or '5', then the next one will be spawn after 5/10/15 minutes. Finally, I just did some speed measurement for the balloons, I found out the speed of the balloon is 1 grid cell per 64 seconds!” There you go.

Spiderland proprietor Melissa, who is listed as Total Trash on their passport, used the tracker to find so many balloons that they acquired the ability to build the Golden Slingshot tool, which sounds like a real blast.

For the full interactive experience, test this app and tweet @glitch about it. We want to celebrate your wins. A couple of tips: walk around because the balloons spawn near different parts of the island. Avoid entering buildings or dialogue because it may disrupt the accuracy of the tracker. Cassey adds that islands have a different side that balloons will start on during the day, and the opposite side is where they will start at night.

Like I said, I’m not really a gamer. We live in a cynical world—a cynical world—and we work on an island with tough competitors. I’m just one person, unwrapping the gift of shared knowledge, one slingshotted balloon at a time.

Childcare During the Apocalypse

Parenting is hard in general, let alone during a pandemic. With schools closing, working parents have been forced to adapt to try and juggle their home responsibilities with their jobs. 30 percent of healthcare workers are parents of children under the age of 14 who might have to choose between caring for their children or working.

One innovative solution to this problem is Covid Childcare Co-op Calendar, a schedule creator that working families can use to try and handle childcare responsibilities as a collective. Participating families mark down what days they’re unavailable for and the site will generate as fair of a schedule as it can, deciding which caretakers will be responsible for which days.

The site was built by Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days and Shit Is Fucked Up And Bullshit, and a team of engineers including: Darrell DeCosta, Jane Huang, Jackson Flint-Gonzales, and Arseny Semin. We sent over some questions for the team so we could learn more about the goals, setbacks and technical considerations for the project.

**Malcolm Harris: **Most of my organizing work is via the Philly Childcare Collective, so that’s my first thought in a crisis. We can’t do our normal work supporting political organizations by doing childcare for their meetings, so I thought this was a way to prompt people to think about holes in our childcare response.

MH: Surprisingly few, considering how fast we were setting out to act. We wanted to make sure that what we were suggesting (small childcare pods based on pre-existing relationships) wasn’t contrary to best practices, but when I researched the literature on childcare and epidemics, it turns out to be a lack of childcare for healthcare workers that’s the real threat to public health. We talk about “flattening the curve” but we also need to increase/maintain our healthcare capacity, and childcare is part of that.

**MH: **We’re still trying to figure that out exactly! We’ve had users from around the world, but we’re not tracking their usage so it’s hard to know exactly how it’s being used. That said we’ve also had some great responses on social media. For me, it’s partly about technology as rhetoric, how do we prompt people to start thinking about these questions? But we also want them to use it!

**MH: **Definitely. The state has really abdicated its childcare responsibility, starting Zoom classes and otherwise throwing up their hands. For a lot of caregivers, that means a whole additional job they have to be doing all of the sudden. Even for those that have extra time now, that’s heavy, but for “essential workers” it’s even tougher. Meanwhile, millions of children are training for the telecommuting jobs of the future.

MH: We’ve had a ton of people step up to translate the tool, right now it’s available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Greek. From the beginning our users have been international, just like the crisis, that’s the level at which we need to respond.

Darrell DeCosta: I've used Glitch a bunch and have always loved it, both as a platform and as a company. Being able to see changes being made in real time as various people joined in to help made going from zero to something we could use super quick.

Arseny Semin: I had not used Glitch before, but when it was mentioned I went and tried it out and found it really convenient for immediately showing feedback. It started as just a place to share html and [JavaScript] mockups as we got a feel for how we wanted the site to look, but then became the official development site where new changes were tested and presented. It was so straightforward that I wouldn’t even say a “decision” was made to use it. The question really was “why wouldn’t we use this?” when it already worked so well.

Jackson Flint-Gonzales: A fair amount of our UI was actually from scratch. We likely could have saved some time by, for instance, dropping in a calendar from a UI library, but we opted to make our own. We didn’t want or need the hypergloss of Silicon Valley-crafted digital management tools, so politicizing aesthetics meant a little bit of extra work. At the same time, saying we consciously crafted a political posture in our design would be giving us too much credit. Much of the decision to work from scratch came about as a consequence of the absence of tools that serve the needs ours is fulfilling.

There’s this idea that open-source is a huge pile of Legos; you fish through and eventually find all of the pieces you need to make exactly what you’re building. In reality, open-source things have certain end-products in mind when they are made, and if your end-product isn’t something that a lot of people need, it doesn’t get community support. In our case, the end-product that many people need that most resembles the CCCC is employee scheduling software. But the aim of the CCCC differs from that of employee scheduling.

The latter is like an airline; it wants to fill every single open spot given a pool of people, and once that decision is made the pool of people only have a small amount of control over the result. The CCCC doesn’t seek to impose that kind of strictness on its users, and it won’t, because ultimately it’s a convenience tool, not despotic tech that tells you when to go to work. When you have these differences, it trickles down to every aspect of design and functionality.

AS: Yeah haha. I think I literally googled “multiple day calendar selection js” and clicked on a few results until I found the most barebones example that fit the bill. Malcolm had a sort of pitch for the site being “90s” style. Static, an html page and a script file. So that’s what I was working off of. Then you know, bootstrap, fontawesome, stuff to maybe take the edges off some of the buttons. The real “big” component that wasn’t really just available via a simple stack overflow search was the actual algorithm for computing fair days. But fortunately a team member knew a CS professor, who knew of a solver library that he and another team member helped implement to fit our inputs and outputs.

Jane Huang: Some heavy math was involved in ensuring that a fair schedule was generated. There’s actually a whole branch of computer science that’s useful for scheduling problems in general, and we took advantage of that to ensure the schedules generated would be fairly distributed. We also were very keen on never storing any user data, so there’s no backend to speak of. It’s completely client-side; that is, all the code needed to run it is in the user’s browser. The lack of a back-end also made banging out a functional prototype in a weekend a lot easier.

JFG: Our group’s designer chose a color palette that maximizes visibility across different kinds of color-blindness. We are making continuous updates to the app to improve screen-reader and keyboard accessibility.

AS: There was a lot of translation work done by volunteers after the launch, which was very exciting to see. And we had to pull in a [JavaScript] library for changing dates to whatever the locale’s format was. Or else you’d end up with dd/mm mm/dd confusion.

DD: We actually spent a lot of time discussing this. There was a really strong desire to gather info that would help us get an idea of how people were using the App, but we also very much wanted to avoid any kind of tracking or collection of personal data. In the end we decided to forgo any kind of third party analytics and opted to make use of the real time logging provided by the CDN we're using (Fastly) to collect ONLY the following: The referer, rough geo info (city, country, and continent), and what language the user's browser requested so we could prioritize translations. We also log when a user generates or shares a calendar, but we do not capture ANY info entered into the site. All logs have a 7 day max retention.

AS: Yeah this was part of that whole “90s aesthetic” thing. The site doesn’t have a [database], the code itself doesn’t store anything on the user. If you want to store “state”, it can encode that into a url that you can copy paste. You can share the same calendar with others that way, but there’s no id or anything associated with it, we couldn’t track that if we wanted to, and we don’t want to! You won’t “login” to view your calendar, and it won’t remember you when you leave. The only people who see your name are the other people in your coop, because you sent them a url with your name in it.

JFG: We used Discord to chat in real time and, of course, Glitch to share the work-in-progress. It’s hard to say what might’ve been done differently if there were no urgency to get the tool out. We could speculate an alternate history where a childcare co-op said, “Hey wouldn’t it be cool if we had this tool” but that would be a scenario in which COVID-19 didn’t happen in 2019/2020 and make families across the globe take on a huge increase in childcare. That’s really what produced the sudden need for the CCCC.

AS: Honestly, yeah, Glitch mostly! I could write a change and then link the discord saying “hey here’s that thing we talked about” and it was immediate. As for doing anything different, I don’t know, it went pretty well!

*If you like this story, check out this one about a mutating newsletter or this one about a year long creative coding project.

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

In this Covid-19 era, so much of my day is spent thinking about what needs to be adapted to continue: how does childcare work for two kids under four with two working parents. Surprisingly, the task of moving my class at Cooper Union online hasn't been one of the major considerations, primarily due to the way we've always gone about using the classroom in the first place.

Who am I? I am, at a minimum, a fourth-generation teacher. My great-grandfather ran a school in Jabalpur, India, my grandmother taught by mail in post-World War II Rhodesia, and my father has professed for more than 40 years in Pittsburgh.

For the past 12 years, I've approached the curriculum of my Cooper Union classes with these key tenets: approach the school's unofficial slogan "free as air and water" as a goal, focus on the "why" of the material, and utilize existing resources for the "how” and, finally, consider tensions between practices of art. I wanted to share the tools I used to transition a class to online learning, and some of the challenges and considerations I faced and learned along the way.

The web doesn’t guarantee learning tools are easy to use—or free #

Cooper Union has spent the majority of it's 160+ years of existence charging $0 for tuition. This nearly unheard-of sum (at least in the world of U.S. higher-education) has made it so that I focus as much as possible on a free approach to design and technology education. Student work now hosted by Glitch used to be on Github's gh-pages static site stack, and before that extremely cheap Dreamhost accounts.

Tutorials can be sourced from anywhere, but the free tier of Codecademy still provides more than enough to get the point across. While I'm a big fan of the flipped classroom model, the problem I run into with online tutorials is the fundamental lack of context: learning how to build a webpage, structure semantic content and consider user experience is great in the abstract, but learning the why of each of these topics escapes even the best platforms. Why does semantic hierarchy have just as much value to a design as the pixels on the screen, and how can we take advantage of this relationship? Why is Javascript the lingua franca of the internet, and yet still looked down upon by "real programmers?" Why are there so many sites that participate unknowingly in unethical data collection, and how can seemingly innocuous requests be used against us? For each of these topics, learning the "how" is a solved problem.

Walking someone through writing their first valid HTML page is most efficiently done in an online code editor that steps you through each task of learning tags, their rules, relationships, and exceptions. But these same tutorials skip over an in-depth discussion of what "valid" means, or where standards come from that aid in the definition of "valid." This ambiguous "why" is how my classes have lived so long within the walls of Cooper Union. Except… now they don't, at least insofar as the walls are concerned. For my classes though, this transition has been a long time coming.

Over the years, the tools that are both useful and approach free have changed as frequently as the technology that is relevant to teach. As Dreamhost and Wordpress were supplanted (by gh-pages and public content APIs), so too were Google Groups and the migration to Slack.

Using project management tools are inefficient without a dedicated approach to community #

At the beginning of the semester, I create a new Slack channel for a class. I walk students through the first presentation and then upload it to the channel. Asking students to join Slack isn't enough though, so I set two very clear expectations: the channel is the only place that I disseminate the presentations to and the channel is the only place where assignments can be turned in. The best value of Slack (or Discord, Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom and the like) is only achieved by setting up the community to self-reenforce. In-class participation can be hard to quantify online.

The benefits of using online tools go both ways—as a teacher, I try to model what I expect of students. Having not just the "when" of an assignment being turned in, but also the context in which it was turned in, is essential information when looking over an entire semester. So when I give presentations during most classes, I promptly upload a .pdf file to the class channel. I want to focus all note-taking onto the discussions around the slides rather than their content. And, as an added bonus, having the presentations in line with the discussions and assignments also helps in keeping everything in context.

Online collaboration tools change the approach to educational assignments and feedback #

Using multi-player tools has been transformative to the way I can teach and help students, though explaining the value of some of the tools is often difficult. It can take serious investment getting everything up and running, but there are benefits (and costs) to doing so once you do.

Some examples: Google Docs was the first real-time collaborative tool that made any sense and serves as a useful touchpoint in explaining the benefit of the more esoteric. Tools like Photoshop, XD or Sketch skirt around this by working well with programs like Dropbox and Abstract. Published versions in these programs help Adobe files have real-time commenting and review but don't let people edit the documents together. Microsoft's Office products have online components but getting documents into a good state for collaboration can be a Herculean task.

I always create a document to serve as the online "source of truth" for our collective understanding of what they're working on, as well as how it's evolved over time to get there. For example, for multi-week projects, I take notes with students in a Google Doc. This is most beneficial during student proposals, where I distill student's ideas into an actionable list.

The tools you use can dramatically change the approach to in-class assignments and demonstrations. When demoing a new topic, I usually have pre-built examples that illustrate a simple use-case, and then I modify these in-class to show more advanced variations. Whenever I open one of these projects, the first thing I do is send it to the class Slack channel. Students can choose to follow along on the large projection screen, or explore the project on their computers while I'm still working and editing it, or even explore parts of the project I'm not currently working on.

Because I can use a live representation of a project, all of the work becomes part of the example they already have access to. This functionality is even better with programs like Glitch, that let the students create a copy of the demo projects at any point at the demo, or even go back in time from the advanced later versions to the simpler starting point.

Making the jump from real life to online programs #

With the support of Dean Essl at the School of Art, I took my class online before it was required, as an experiment. I postulated that I'd get a more honest set of feedback from the students (and willingness to participate) if we opted into it and owned the decision, rather than when we were required to do so.

Given that this luxury of choice has been removed for most of the world, the actions we took seem innocent and incomplete compared to the scale of what the education community has pursued in the few short weeks since then, but the recipe that made the transition easy for my class is at least repeatable.

A brief checklist of facets of a class migration from in-real-life to online:

Focus on using native online document-format applications
Only use room-based persistent chat applications with a heavy focus on public, discoverable channels
Zoom. Zoom is still the best for group chat, if you can accept their improvements over the last month as a sign that they're finally respecting their user's data privacy.
Online reading list, preferably that is subscribable.
Preserve ceremonies. That last point on ceremonies feels, more than ever, like the key to migrating classroom culture online. My four-hour classes are usually in the evening, and it was inappropriate to go without food during that time. Usually, this meant eating hurriedly in a room that definitely says "no food or drink" in multiple places around the room, on the door, on the desks, or near the teacher's workstation... And so we maintained that in class, and will continue to do so throughout the rest of the semester: a shared break to eat, a real-time, collaborative Mukbang if you will.
Gone Virtual Link Repo (via Zach Lieberman's Slack Group Gone Virtual)
Tips for Better Online Meetings (MIT)
Shools' Distributed Learning Strategy Pages (Daniel Stanford at DePaul University)
Adobe Extended Home Access (Adobe)
Remote Resources (Glitch)
Working From Home Bingo (McSweeney's)
Online Teaching Guide (Harvard Business Review)
Hello From Home (Postlight)
Guide to Online Events (Creative Mornings) Editor's note: The author's recommendations are his own.

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

You’ve interacted with Calm Technology even if you don’t know what it is. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a decades-old design framework that advocates for ethical technology. It asks that technology be usable, safe, and simple. It asks that it should be calm, non-intrusive, and allow for maintenance, too.

Calm Technology isn’t a new idea. It was created by two researchers in 1995 from the renowned technology research lab in Silicon Valley called Xerox Parc (yes, Xerox the copy-maker; they did a bunch of interesting stuff back in the day!).

In 2015, the researcher and futurist Amber Case wrote a book that took a concept developed almost 30 years ago and resituated it for the right-now. Her book, Calm Technology, built off the methodology developed at Xerox Parc in 1995 but contextualized it within our current interconnected world of networked devices and the internet of things.

During global and tech solutionism in 2020, the principles of Calm Technology have never been more important. It shouldn’t be jarring or invasive. Perhaps a good way to understand what it is is to think about what it is not. Surveillance cameras are not Calm Technology since users have no real agency or control over them.

Alexa is not Calm Technology, as designer Daniel Harvey shared with me in an interview. Alexa’s “false activations and poor voice recognition” and general misunderstandings (not to mention it’s lack of data privacy) make it a ‘not’ Calm Technology, Harvey said.

Calm Technology may not seem revolutionary, but when it was conceived of in 1995, it was #

John Seely Brown and Mark Weiser conceptualized first the internet of things, taking seriously “the belief that soon we will have hundreds if not thousands of computers surrounding each of us” but then wanted to focus that belief in on the user. The idea that so much information and technology would be surrounding us should not overwhelm the user.

Seely Brown describes this in an updated introduction to the paper:

_“..now start to consider how to move from user-centered design and the design of affordances to user-centering design, design that keeps us feeling located in the maelstrom. The key is to honor, if not amplify, the interplay between content and context or the interplay between center and periphery...our goal, nudges us to incorporate the periphery, amplifying how we can attune to it without having to consciously interpret it and thus creating a sense of calmness.” _

As calm technology comes more into users' lives, how it alerts users and the invasiveness of the technology needs to be heavily considered and reduced. It offers a glimpse of the world that is less whirring and beeping, and constantly measuring everything, and is a lot quieter. If anything, it’s thinking about all users' daily lives, and how interruptive technology can be—when it alerts, when it functions, and when it fails.

Aspects of Calm Technology are rising in popularity due to Covid-19, like the programming language COBOL. The programming language is having a resurgence in popularity, as we see with the New Jersey Governor asking for COBOL programmers to help program their unemployment program. Its popularity is due to the fact that a lot of government infrastructure is written in COBOL, since these programs were written decades ago.

Over a messaging app, Case shared a few thoughts on the beauty of COBOL and maintenance. Many Twitter users expressed surprise over COBOL, often considered an ancient programming language, still being used. But it’s a low level, reliable language, Case emphasized, and the reliability is what makes it calm tech. Case wonders what if COBOL had an enthusiastic community around it, like Ham Radio operators which have new, growing numbers of maintainers, then would it seem so strange to update and use this language currently? Often we forget that infrastructure, programming languages, technology, and electricity itself are forms of innovation. This kind of innovation actually falls under the "Calm Technology" umbrella.

Case wrote in our interview, “I think of good code like electricity... But most of the time it works, and it has to. We operate it with a switch. A specialist with training is the one qualified to change it. Yes, it can be upgraded. And it should be! But fundamentally it’s all the same stuff. I’d rather have my code run like electricity than some IoT cloud device system that accidentally sets off a fire alarm. COBOL is complicated for a reason. It’s super low level abstract. It’s fine that it’s difficult to write.”

Reliability at the scale of something like COBOL is what makes it Calm Technology—it’s knowing that it won’t break (as much) that shifts COBOL and Calm Technology away from current technology and design frameworks.

It’s not "move fast and break things." It’s moving slowly and building things sustainably.

Where Calm Technology can lead us next #

We need to revisit the principles of Calm Technology, especially as governments and companies are trying to build so many things, quickly, and using this time to further surveillance into products. In order to solve problems during a crisis—and a crisis of a global scale—care is key. So are minimalism, user privacy, and simplicity. Things built quickly, that can fail or break, or aren’t thinking of harm reduction (or are just... tracking everyone and all data) are problematic technology, definitively not Calm Technology. Here are two principles by Case that feel particularly pertinent to this time, during the Covid-19 pandemic:

Principle 6: Technology should work even when it fails

Think about what happens if your technology fails.
Does it default to a usable state or does it break down completely? Principle 7: The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to solve the problem
What is the minimum amount of technology needed to solve the problem.
Slim the feature set down so that the product does what it needs to do and no more. In a time of global uncertainty, it’s understandable that our fears would lead us leaning towards any kind of rapid solutions, including technology-based ones. But, especially in these times, we should lean into sustainability and to solutions that will benefit society, including marginalized groups. And we should lean away from quick and easy solutions that could be poorly built, break, or increase unnecessary surveillance.

_Illustration by Emily Griffin_.

When Twitter’s Private Chat Goes Down, the Public Roars

A terrifying reality faced Twitter users after the platform’s private messaging feature Direct Messages (DM) became unstable. Twitter confirmed the case shortly after tens of thousands of tweets triggered a trending phrase.

Twitter doesn’t profit from the use of what may be one of its most successful features, and it is a strange thing to think about in that context: a publicly-traded web platform known for public information-sharing having a beloved, private purpose. But that’s specifically what DM is—a private function. What DM represents is a case study in the dissonant and conflicting definition of what “social” and “media” mean, and it all hinges on the issue of privacy.

Social media is usually considered a prototype of modern, public expression. But “social” implies, importantly, that someone is listening or observing that expression. When someone is listening or responding one-on-one, or in group chats, does that not also constitute social behavior? And if that behavior takes the form of creating media: is that not social media, in a semi-private state? (Note: you should not assume DMs are private.)

Many people have struggled to say if they believe private chats are Social Media, the way the platforms themselves say they are, even though DM and similar chat programs are practically both social and media. This is all to say, I believe that DM* *is functionally social media, we just haven’t recognized it as such. For many users, DM is Twitter. For some, when DM malfunctions, it means all of Twitter is down. You can see it in the way people react to losing it: they expect it to be part of their experience on an otherwise public platform.

But what about the individual Twitter user? Why should anyone care who sees tweets or if DM is down? Consider listening to those who mourn the loss of DM. Even on a platform celebrated for open discussion, privacy is valued. Companies and people define privacy differently, too: when users talk about "privacy" they usually mean control over who can see what they post. When social media companies talk about it, they usually mean who they can sell your data to.

Given the rapid response, it appears Twitter understands the value of the feature. For those who don’t care, it may seem curious to see eighty thousand public statements about a private matter. But the lesson is clear: many people expect to be able to choose who they talk to even in the digital world, and even on Twitter.

Looking for other ways to customize your Twitter experience? Check out this Twitter-built app that helps users to hide replies containing toxic language in your conversations.

Who Is “In Tech”?

Sheridan Kates, says that it’s easier to learn to code if you have a specific project in mind. Sheridan used to work as a Product Manager at Google and one of the ways she started to become more interested in engineering was because she had a problem she was trying to solve.

“One of the things that got me back into this world was I really wanted a way to see bands on a map,” Sheridan explained. “If I had nothing to do that evening, I wanted to be able to say, ‘Okay, who’s playing around me?’ and there was nothing, I still don’t think there’s anything that great, that lets you see for a given date, what’s [going] on around you, on a map.”

As a result, Sheridan created her app “Gigscape” which still works, although as she notes, “it’s not very useful right now because everyone’s socially distancing.”

Glitch’s VP of Engineering, James Turnbull, agrees that it’s a lot easier to learn technology if you don’t focus purely on skills. “I think it’s very hard to pick up a book that says Programming 101, or learn a programming language. But [it’s easier] if you have a specific problem or thing that annoys you about the world.”

Sometimes you might stumble upon job listings looking for 10 years experience with React even though it’s been around for about half that.

“How Old Is It” is a project made by a Glitch user named James, (a different one) as an informative resource.It’s also a cheeky jab at job postings that require years of experience that are longer than the existence of certain languages.

Glitch Director of Community Engineering and resident internet menace, Jenn Schiffer, thinks the debate about who is “in tech” is tedious and pointless.

“The reality of who uses tech and creates it will hopefully continue to evolve,” Jenn said. “I think that despite our industry’s typical gatekeeping, I envision code being seen as a normal everyday tool, like a pen and paper, hammer and nail, or whatever. And I think that because of that, folks who find the apps that they use are maybe not serving their needs or harming them or others, I think that they’ll use code to make their own tech in response.”

*Check out the full collection of apps and make sure to listen to the new episode of Shift Shift Forward.

Pop Up: The Aesthetic of Art Museums

I had my first experience with “pop-up” art galleries when I was in college. It was the summer of 2018 and my friends and I decided to go to “Wonderspaces.” After we began to explore the space, it became increasingly evident that this was not the type of museum visit I had expected. There were no regal galleries all hung with oil portraits and lined with wooden benches where visitors could sit and stare at the art or other people. There were no velvet ropes or placards nor the dense atmosphere of reverence that compels one to whisper. At Wonderspaces, it seemed that I was allowed to interact with the installations as much as I wanted. In fact, the pieces seemed to invite observers to become a part of the displays.

Minutes in, my friends and I found ourselves in a hall of mirrors. It was dark, except for the neon lights that stretched into the shadows, and the light that the mirrors reproduced; reflections that became reproductions of reproductions. Likewise, the images of me and my friends went on and on, the copies of our reflections populating the illusory tunnels created by the glass. The armies that we raised, just by being there, were the real intrigue.

“Can someone take a picture of me?” My friend asked.

This question was the continuous refrain of the time we spent there. Each gallery presented a photo-op. There was a circular enclosure with a paper sculpture shaped to look like the underbrush of dense rainforest. Another stark white room had potted plants suspended from the ceiling to look like they were floating in mid-air, just surreal enough to catch your eye. Our favorite was a structure of hundreds of string lights hanging from a metal frame, enclosed on all sides by black curtains, to ensure that there would be no sunlight to overpower the tiny bulbs as they changed from blue to green, to yellow, to pink, to orange, and back again, changing the color of our skin as they went. It was the perfect backdrop. All of the pieces were.

Everyone had a new Facebook profile picture by the following afternoon.

Wonderspaces was the first pop-up museum that I experienced in person, but it was not the first of its kind. Based on the groundswell of nearly-identical photographs that surfaced on Instagram a few years ago, it appears that The Museum of Ice Cream, which has locations in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, set the era of the pop-up museum into motion. The photos, all ice cream-themed, came in slowly, then all at once.

One backdrop, which featured a cascade of fake bananas hanging from invisible strings against a wall colored bright-millennial pink, seemed to have been particularly popular. What struck me was how perfect all those images seemed, the way they created intrigue around their subjects, but never upstaged them.

For a moderate fee, visitors could (and still can) acquire dozens of photos amongst sculptures of larger-than-life confections; their ordinary selves in a veritable pastel wonderland, where everything was pretty, ready-made, and, perhaps most importantly, under control. The exhibit was overwhelmingly successful; tickets sold out months in advance, and lines to get into the galleries wrapped around the block. Everyone wanted to be seen in the Museum of Ice Cream.

One of the main reasons some people create a social media presence is so that they can control the idea of themselves that they reveal to others. Cultivating the images that make up the fabric of that presence (or, in more vernacular terms, cultivating one’s “aesthetic”) is surprisingly hard work. Anyone who worries about creating a digital aesthetic knows the difficulty of finding surroundings that enhance and reinforce the vision of the person that they want their followers to see. Usually, that vision is of someone (real or not) who always looks their best, who stays on-trend, and, notably, who appears in desirable places—places where everyone is going, where the surroundings are eye-catching, but never to the extent that they outshine the main attraction: you.

Therein lies the peculiar allure of the pop-up. It provides a stage for anyone who needs one, mixing the artistic with the trendy, so that all you need to do in order to achieve the vision is open a camera app, hand a phone to a friend, and step inside.

Pop-ups reveal a profound desire to be seen #

But now it’s not just pop-up museums that are using this allure to their advantage. The interiors of public places of leisure (bars, clubs, and theaters, to name a few) are catching on as well. I haven’t been to a bar or club in the past year that didn’t have a wall that served as a stage for photo-ops. Sometimes it’s as simple as a neon sign of a single word or phrase mounted just high enough that an adult of average height can stand beneath it.

Other times, the stage is elaborate, as was the case in one hotel lobby that I was in, where there was a wooden structure built to look like a gazebo that guests could stand under and take photos, to later be posted on their social media profiles and carefully tagged at that specific location.

For better or for worse, all of these stages are a sign of our times, the message of which everyone should take to heart: social media has created a reality in which being seen somewhere desirable is just as important if not more so than actually going to that place. Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether or not we actually enjoyed it, because we as a society now need only for others to believe that our lives are polished, under control, and rich with coveted experiences, if only because their belief will make the vision of ourselves as we wish we could be that much more tangible. In all honesty, I didn’t have much fun at Wonderspaces. But the photos were great, and if anyone were to ask, I could pull them up on my phone and show them how beautiful the space was and how everyone had wanted to see it.

I could prove that I was there.

Teaching Computer Science Requires A Lot of Creativity

Teaching computer science is unique in that it’s one of the world’s newest industries, so it’s based on valuable skills that you wouldn’t learn in traditional education. That’s why so many intensive courses and boot camps exist, to give people the opportunity to pick up new skills and potentially change careers.

But what about computer science education that is provided through primary education? To learn more about being a K-12 CS educator, we talked to Kelly Lougheed, who is the sole CS teacher at her school and often blogs teaching and posts examples of work online.

Before I taught computer science, I worked as a web developer and also a Latin teacher, so teaching computer science was a natural combination of the two! I started working in tech when I moved to California (as one does), but quickly missed teaching. I volunteered as a TA for programming classes and loved being in a learning environment again. Then, when I saw a job ad for a computer science teacher position at a local private school, I jumped at it!

I write a lot of coding tutorials, partially because I enjoy making CS accessible to others, and partially because it’s a future resource for my students and for myself, when I want to remember how I coded something previously. I blog (and Tweet) about pedagogy as well because as the only computer science teacher at my school, I’m always dying to start a conversation about teaching CS!

I think CodeHS and Code.org have some solid curricula for teachers who are just starting out. For teachers of any level, I recommend professional development with Upperline Code -- they have great pedagogy as well as a great curriculum. For students or anyone else who wants to learn more coding, I always recommend FreeCodeCamp.org -- they have some nice algorithmic challenges for beginners, and web development is one of the most fun areas of computer science (in my opinion)!

Actually, I’ve been able to preserve a lot of my normal class routines! I’ve been making videos for students to watch instead of giving direct instruction live, and then we meet up in Zoom to practice a new skill by pair programming on an activity or challenge. The breakout rooms in Zoom (along with the option to remotely control each other’s computers) have been instrumental to preserving the social element of the class.

I think Glitch makes collaboration easier for students, especially middle schoolers. Most students want to be the driver, and Glitch’s collaboration mode allows both partners to be the driver. On a survey I gave, the overwhelming majority of my middle school students said they preferred Glitch collaboration mode to traditional pair programming. I think there’s also some value in having them develop the communication and collaboration skills necessary for pair programming, but Glitch is a great option to have.

My high school didn’t have computer science classes when I was there, so the proliferation of high school CS classes is a huge change! I took my first CS class at the local college, and of course college classes are different from high school classes. I would say the main difference between the classes I took and the classes I teach would be the amount of collaboration. I remember spending most of my college classes working individually, but I try to use a lot of pair programming in my own classes so that students don’t feel alone in the struggle that computer science can be!

There are good and bad parts about being the only CS teacher. Of course, I would love someone to collaborate with, but I also have a great amount of freedom in my curriculum and the classes I teach. As for expectations, it’s actually more common that people aren’t that familiar with computer science and CS education. So I really appreciate administrators and other people in leadership positions who support computer science (even without knowing much about it) and trust me to teach the courses how I think is best.

*Check out Kelly on Twitter and Medium to keep up with all her new work and writing.

How to Get Your App Featured on Glitch

We’re immensely proud of the work our community does and we are constantly looking for ways to show off the unique projects and creators on our platform. A couple ways we currently highlight cool apps from our community are through Twitter and in written posts on The Playlist.

There are so many amazing projects out there, we want to make sure we’re seeing as many as possible, so we’ve created a form for submissions. Whether you’ve made a useful tool or a gorgeous data visualization, all projects are welcome!

Getting your app featured on Glitch is a great opportunity to have thousands of users see it in action. We’ve put together a list of things we look for when featuring a project.

An app that is fun to look at. Although we love being a place for complex interactives, games and productivity tools, there’s something about a beautiful app that is exciting for everyone.* *

*Example: Canvas Card*s

We love to leave new coders or tech adjacent people with a “wait how did it do that?” response and show tech people the unique kinds of projects they can only find in the Glitch community.

_Example: Magic Sketchpad, LikeLike

In addition to featuring unique projects, we love to show off apps that show off something cool and lets users, regardless of technical ability, get right into the fun.

*Examples: Orbital Paint, Input Delay, Tenori-Off

One of our favorite things is to see all the relevant, opinionated or funny apps that come in during a trend or around a big news event. It doesn’t need to be super complex!

Examples: *Liam Bot, COVID Update, FoodHype

_Don’t feel discouraged if you think your app doesn’t fit into any of these categories perfectly. If you think your app is interesting, personal or tells a good story, we’d love to see it_!

Coming To a Tab Near You: The U.S. Supreme Court

For the first time in history, Americans with web access will be able to listen to live oral arguments as heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on a range of issues.

The proceedings will be conducted over the phone and, according to NPR, lawyers presenting arguments allegedly plan to wear formal clothing suited to the occasion—though perhaps not to their living rooms. While it might be the first time the dilemma of wearing a bathrobe or a court robe has arisen with national implications, this isn’t the institution's first time thinking about offering remote access to its proceedings. According to its official website, oral arguments have been recorded since 1955 and as of 2010, files have become more readily available online, though not live-streamed until today. It's the first time recordings of these events have been live-streamed on C-SPAN and thus become so instantly accessible.

This marks a true sign of the times as more people, including the justices, are socially distancing to limit the transmission rate of Covid-19. The court’s decisions may have deep implications, as usual, so Americans might not want to miss out on listening in. It’s no moon landing video, but it’s almost as historically significant as listening to the moon landing audio.

And you’re not alone: not even the Supreme Court can choose between existing options for audio formats or players. The audio files are available for download in various audio formats, too: MP3, Windows Media, RealAudio.

The scheduled arguments will present matters of whether the inclusion of “.com” in a registration name is a valid trademark claim (heard today and now posted online); federal funding of nonprofits based on key policy issues; religiously-affiliated institutions and the application of the Affordable Care Act; the right to robocall (seriously); the status of land as a tribal territory in eastern Oklahoma; the adjudication of labor law at religious institutions; Trump financial records and congressional subpoenas; and Electoral College members who do not vote for their pledged candidate, or so-called faithless electors.

There’s no plan for live-streaming other key functions of the Supreme Court but it’s still possible to imagine a day when other actions like big case decisions might be available to a live audience of millions. In a few years, maybe the question we will ask each other is: where were you when you heard the Supreme Court decision?

To read expert reviews of the cases visit SCOTUS Blog, which is also hosting online seminars for educators. To listen to the oral arguments live, for free, visit C-SPAN’s website.

Lead illustration by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

Throwing the Remote Movie Night of Your Dreams

My Friday nights used to consist of movies, games and YouTube marathons. Despite social distancing, my weekends these days aren’t actually all that different. Thanks to a few helpful online tools, I’ve been hosting game and movie nights with my close group of friends that make it feel like they’re right in my living room.

It started about a month ago when we all jumped on a Discord call and played Animal Crossing: New Horizons together, some of us even using the Island Name Generator. Just last week, I hosted a virtual board game night with a combination of Discord’s screen sharing and Jackbox Games—it was seamless.

My friends and I have movie nights once or twice a week and have been working our way down a diverse list of reality television, prestige films, anime and cult classics. All of us are pretty indecisive so once or twice a week we run the Name Randomizer to decide who will be in charge of choosing the movie.

But the way that all nine of us watch movies together is the coolest part. I get to use a tool called TwoSeven, which helps you synchronize your viewing of a movie, TV show or YouTube video. One person creates the chatroom, acts as a host and then invites all of their friends to join. According to TwoSeven’s FAQ, they’ve successfully tested with up to 400 people. The host can choose to watch a file from their computer, a YouTube video or a title from any of the major streaming services. One person controls the virtual remote and is able to press play, pause or rewind for the whole room. No more counting down.

The one complicated part is that sites like Netflix require users to each have accounts to those platforms. Because of that, I’ve found the best luck with YouTube videos or downloading movies and sending them to my friends ahead of time. We all load up the same file locally in TwoSeven and don’t have to worry about streaming issues.

Even outside of our current situation, I have friends, family and a boyfriend who don’t live near me. This is a site that I’ll be using for a long time to come and the type of tool that I think will be popping up more and more as our world gets more remote.

If you’re interested in a whole new way to host movies, check out [TwoSeven](https://twoseven.xyz/jUKMXzu7Jb).

Working with Empathy: Q&A with Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

*Journalist and author Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips' book Future of Feeling was published in February, just prior to the global spread of Covid-19. The book covers key subjects and shared research and insights about managing digital communication, empathy, and healthy habits—matters which are all the more important now *that digital connections have become essential to protecting health for other reasons. Below is our brief conversation.

**Kaitlin: **Well, I did not expect there to be a global social experiment in what the “future of feeling” might be like, but here we are! I have been thinking a lot about how research shows we struggle to empathize when we’re upset, and/or when we feel our basic needs aren’t being met. Pretty much everyone is in that state right now, and a lot of us are spending a lot more time using social tech, so the issues I researched and wrote about - trolling, gamification of conversation, the flattening of context - are amplified. I see people lashing out at each other, and it’s really distressing.

We have seen a lot of schools, businesses, and cultural institutions move online and start to adopt new technology, from basic streaming to virtual reality. There have been some positive moves that I hope will continue, like more accessible telehealth (especially for mental health), but there are some developments (spying software on work and school computers, for one) that are pretty scary in terms of trying to preserve an empathetic future.

When it comes to social tech - since that’s what most people are familiar with - I have a feeling this experience might push innovation to move more quickly in the direction of empathy, privacy, and quality over quantity. I’ve heard whisperings about a shift from the newsfeed-dominant platforms we have now to smaller digital social groups where context (and empathy) can thrive. We’ll see!

I did not expect some of the negative effects of so much Zooming, but I’m feeling them. It’s truly not the same as being in a room with someone in terms of presence and body language; you are stuck looking at your own face for far longer than you’re used to, and you have zero privacy to yawn or look away or tend to something that comes up (which is happening a lot these days)!

Two main things that are related: expectation of constant work/productivity, and lack of family flexibility. For the latter, I don’t even mean paid time off, I mean flexibility throughout the average workday. I think it’s becoming a lot clearer just how difficult it is to juggle work, life, and family, and with everyone (for the most part) in this together, I hope some changes will be made to address that. Productivity has taken on a whole new meaning, whether you’re working from home or not. It would be nice to believe we would all walk away from this realizing we’ve been pushing ourselves and our employees too hard, but that may be too much to hope for… At the very least, though, we’re being forced to confront the burnout culture many of us have been living in, and it’s going to be hard to ignore going forward.

One of the hardest things for me has been accepting that one of the best, most empathetic actions I can take is to do nothing. To stay home or go out as little as possible. Beyond that, this concept of thanking those who work to keep us healthy, happy, and alive, from the mailman to the ICU nurse, should continue, but this crisis is also a reminder of how much more is needed. This is an opportunity, if we are lucky enough to be safe and healthy, to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are on the front lines, and ask what they need from a policy perspective to do their jobs and stay well, pandemic or not. Similarly, as we read and listen to stories about the hardest hit demographics, and put ourselves in their shoes regarding COVID, now we have a spot to come back to when this is over, to imagine how else we could address the broader systems that impact them in a disproportionately negative way. To spell it out: this crisis illuminates long-simmering problems like structural racism and poverty that can’t be fixed by a vaccine, but that we have always had - and will continue to have - the ability to speak/write/lobby our representatives about.

I’m gonna admit to being one of the millennials who has invaded TikTok… but I’m not posting! I just truly love watching people take on dance challenges, especially with family members they’re quarantined with who might not otherwise be cajoled into doing something like that. Any video of cooped-up people dancing together brings me joy, right now.

My usual answer to this question is to take a deep breath, count to three, and see if the benefit of you posting what you’re thinking of posting outweighs any potential harm it might do (intentional or not). These days, though, my answer is: take some time off. I think it can sometimes feel like we *have *to be online all the time to be participants in society (especially now, when we can’t literally go out and participate in real life). But it is okay - in fact, necessary - to give yourself a break, if not to prevent your own burnout, then to prevent lashing out at others. When you do go online, I suggest just trying to be a little more gentle right now, with yourself and everyone else. Assume everyone is even more anxious than you are, because there’s a good chance that’s true.

_Lead illustration by Aaron Fernandez_.

Animal Crossing Helped Me Get Back to Real Life

Around the third day of social distancing, my apartment started to feel suffocating. All of a sudden everyone who had ever made a stupid joke about cramped New York apartments was getting the last laugh. It was clear that, in order to keep sane, I needed to make a change, but unfortunately, Brooklyn apartments leave little room for change — literally. All I could manage was to get rid of one shelf and move around another, but to my surprise, this little change actually improved my emotional health. It felt substantial to have even a semblance of control during a time where control seemed impossible.

This is also why Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Nintendo’s most recent major release for the Switch, came out at the perfect time. In Animal Crossing, you play as a community planner of sorts helping to develop the playful deserted island you inhabit into a thriving town filled with adorable cartoon animal neighbors. The world is open and no two days of play are the same: one day you might gather fish and fossils to donate to your museum and another day you might sell fruit and other items to pay for a bigger home, your time is your own.

While social distancing has impacted my relationship with my physical environment, Animal Crossing lets me create my own relationship to a digital environment. Almost everything in the game is decided by the player. You get to place all the buildings and bridges in town, and at a certain point, you can add roads and terraform the environment altogether, altering the rivers and land as you see fit. For eager players, it’s possible to make towns that look completely different than the island you started on.

Even among other Nintendo games marketed towards kids, the Animal Crossing series is pretty unusual in that there’s no harm, violence or even tension. Everything happens at your pace and your neighbors are just excited by you being there. I believe the overall calmness of the game is part of the reason people who aren’t familiar with the series are so confused by its popularity.

When people tell me the game seems boring, it’s hard to explain why it isn’t. There isn’t just one big show stopping selling point like you might look for in a shooter or fantasy title. The joy of Animal Crossing isn’t big and flashy, it’s in the quiet moments. You feel it as you try on clothing in your wardrobe, which can be a refrigerator by the way, and your character does stylish diva poses into the mirror. You feel it when you’re about to catch a rare fish and your controller vibrates slightly differently. You feel it when it’s raining out and your villagers carry around umbrellas and put on cute raincoats. Surrounded by a real world that’s overbearing and obnoxious, the game comes to life in its details.

There are obviously many ways to spend the hours at home that we’ve recently been thrust into, plenty of things to distract you. However, what’s unique about Animal Crossing: New Horizons coming out during the quarantine is that it doesn’t quite feel like a distraction from the physical world, it feels like a new way to engage with it.

In fact, the game clock moves in real time and always matches your own clock, so you’re never truly separated. But unlike real life, my friends can visit me on Animal Crossing as much as they want and I’ve been able to use these visits as a genuine surrogate for the interactions I can’t have right now. Just last week, I knew my coworker had a stressful week at work, so I sent her a cute beret in the mail. When I went to visit my boyfriend, I brought him a new outfit that I picked out at the clothing store. As strange as it might sound, giving those virtual gifts felt just as good as giving physical ones, because although the result is just pixels, the love and care behind those relationships are still very real.

My favorite moment in Animal Crossing so far was a few seconds when, while I was visiting his island, my boyfriend and I just sat on a bench next to each other, looking out at the river. I couldn’t tell you what was so compelling about that moment, but it’s stuck with me for the last week. We’re currently in a long distance relationship and because of the limited travel right now, we have no way of seeing each other for a long time. I don’t know when I’ll be able to sit next to him again in the physical world, so for now, I’ll just have to take what I can get.

Google Searches For What It Can't Find

The news business is battered and bleeding, and some people in it now want Google to pay. That is, the dominant search engine should compensate the publishers whose work it indexes and makes searchable. The notion that one site should pay other sites to which it links conflicts with the Web’s founding principles of openness, but it keeps coming up in Google’s case—and, increasingly, in Facebook’s.

First, the two make most of the money in the online ad market, accounting for 60.9% of U.S. digital advertising spending last year by the research firm eMarketers’ estimate. Second, business keeps getting worse for news publishers--and the novel-coronavirus pandemic has both made their work more necessary and incinerated much of their advertising revenues.

That’s undercut Google’s traditional defense: “Google helps publishers and journalists by helping people find news content and sending them to news sites,” as Google News head Richard Gingras wrote in a September 2019 post.

David Chavern, president of News Media Alliance, flicked the traffic-always-helps argument aside in an email: “That is impossible in a world where digital advertising is dominated by Google and Facebook, and that domination is growing by the day.” That Arlington, Va., trade group represents news publishers and supports requiring compensation from Google and Facebook.

So a campaign that had previously been limited to other countries is now picking up in the U.S. with calls for Google and perhaps Facebook to follow the recent examples of Australia and France by mandating compensation for publishers.

At the same time, Google is quietly testing a new experiment that would enable it to act as a sort of assignment editor for news sites by conveying Google searchers’ unanswered questions to them.

Google can make for a tempting punching bag, while today’s ink- or pixel-stained wretches ought to warrant some sympathy. But a rush to stick Google and Facebook with the bill for a broken journalism business model risks cementing current inequalities in the news ecosystem while leaving cancerous flaws in digital advertising untreated.

“I think anything that allows local and niche news organizations better realize the value of their journalism is a win—but I'm highly skeptical that a search-snippet tax is realistic for the U.S. any time soon,” emailed Amanda Zamora, co-founder and publisher of The 19th News, a nonprofit site covering politics and policy from a female perspective that’s due to launch this summer. “Publishers have already ceded so much to platforms -- and when they have had a seat at the table, it's been the same big publishers time and again.”

As in, Google and other search sites already neglect local publishers in their rankings. “They're dwarfed by the domain authority of big publishers when they decide to swoop in on a trend or story,” Zamora said.

“Even if [Google] was going to pay, it’s going to benefit the people who always benefit from platform plays—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,” said Damon Kiesow, a professor at the University of Missouri’s school of journalism. Kiesow also pointed to the practical difficulty of getting money to the right places: “If I were the product manager, how would I even account for that and get people checks?”

Chavern, with the News Media Alliance, suggested that the music industry offered a template in how hip-hop artists must license the samples that they use. But individual musicians have to negotiate those agreements; there’s no “compulsory license” regime like the one that lets cover bands play who they want and then make the appropriate payments through a rights clearinghouse like ASCAP.

“There have been other circumstances where people have worked out complex licensing arrangements around content—and, contrary to many tech complaints, it’s certainly not impossible,” Chavern said.

A news-royalty system would also require deciding which sites produce journalism versus words, images and video.

“What will count as news and who gets to be considered a publisher?,” asked Adam Engst, publisher of TidBITS, an Apple news site that touts itself as the oldest online-only tech publication. Engst, however, would still like Google to give back to the sites that make its existence possible and profitable: “If Google were to pay some non-trivial amount for the value that our content brings to its search results, I’d be very interested in that.”

Assigning value to what Google takes from a news site to list it in Google News or its general search raises other problems, in that there isn’t much taken. Google News only shows headlines and thumbnail previews of photos, while regular Google results also include brief snippets.

Is it a problem if a story’s headline alone spares the reader a click?

“Most people only consume the summary or snippet,” said Chavern. “The ‘free’ item often tells them all they need to know and provides the consumer value.”

Engst dismissed that concern, saying “Our articles are way too long for that to matter.”

Dan Pacheco, a journalism professor at Syracuse University, noted that news sites can always block Google from indexing or displaying their content if they want—and yet they don’t.

“Due to how information is atomized online with the article being more valuable than the front page, having deep links from search and social is almost a requirement for relevance in the digital landscape,” he said. “If the tech giants are forced by law to pay for news in certain countries, I think they are more likely to just stop indexing there. The very publishers that are supposedly being protected will be the first to beg Google and Facebook to list them again.”

Scott Brodbeck, publisher of ARLNow, a news site covering Arlington, Va., said in an email that getting new readers mattered more: “I want Google to highlight our articles and send us traffic, I don't have any expectation that they'll pay me for the privilege of sending me readers.”

Other search sites already offer a deeper preview of stories—see, for example, Microsoft’s Bing News, a better news-search site in many respects. But Google’s outsized weight makes it different from other search engines. It shapes the market in ways that other search sites can’t.

Journalists and their editors have obsessed for years over SEO—search engine optimization—to get their stories ranked higher in Google.

Question Hub, a feature Google launched in India, Indonesia, and Nigeria and is now quietly testing in the U.S., can surface when Google’s algorithms decide search results don’t adequately answer a user’s query. They may invite the user to submit a question to be relayed to unnamed publishers: “Get the answer you’re looking for added to the web.”

Google began testing this in the States weeks ago on COVID-19 topics, but Question Hub prompts now surface on unrelated pop-culture and tech queries.

“The question collection box can appear on topics not COVID-related, but currently we're only sharing COVID-related questions with health organizations,” emailed Google spokeswoman Lara Levin. “In this pilot phase, this isn't available to publishers.”

It remains unclear which U.S. publishers will be eligible for this closer look into Google search curiosity (that is, beyond the insights long available from Google Trends). Question Hub also risks passing on personal information from Google to third parties, although its prompts warn against sharing anything too close to home. Wrote Levin: “We do have systems trained to detect when personally identifiable information may have been input and we filter that out.”

Google essentially telling sites what information they should publish would represent a step forward in its shaping of the Web--which is already Google’s world, and we just live in it. That gets to the philosophical aspect of calls to make Google compensate the Web’s creators: It’s made the Web searchable for everyone but profitable for few besides itself.

As Pacheo put it: “Facing the possibility of having no quality journalism to link to in the future, could tech giants be compelled in some other way to pay as a form of good will for the value they’re getting?”

But Google (and Facebook) might do more good for news publishers by looking at aspects of their businesses that they can fix without creating new intellectual-property obligations. Zamora’s recommendations: “more transparent algorithms that reward credibility, accuracy and relevance of a news brand apart from its sheer size and influence as the standard across platforms.”

Engst said he’d like to see Google not leave so many results frozen in amber: “Even with Google’s normal search, it seems that Google anoints a particular page as the top hit, and there’s no way to dislodge it, even with better or more current content.”

But those ads that are supposed to reward traffic—and don’t require readers to break out credit cards to pay directly via subscription or membership, often a significant hurdle for the smaller publishers that already struggle for Google search relevance—offer the biggest potential for improvement. Today, that business ecosystem is outright toxic. A disturbing amount of the money spent on digital ads doesn’t reach publishers: 32.7% in an eMarketer study released last summer, 49% in a PwC study done for the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers and announced in May.

That newer report found that 15% of digital ad spend could not be traced to anybody, as if it fell off a truck somewhere. “The place you really need to fix is digital advertising,” said Kiesow.

Readers suffer from the results too, in the form of tacky “around the Web” ads pushing the same old schlock and “forced-redirect” ads that hijack their browsers and push malware or fraud. Oh, and all the tracking of their online habits required to target ads against their behavior.

ARLNow’s Brodbeck pointed back to Google’s domination of display ads. “It has conveniently avoided doing much of any innovating, thus making programmatic banner ads weak competition for its search ads,” he said. “Google should be compelled, via antitrust action or otherwise, to spin out the display ad side of its business.”

Without some sustainable way to make money, news sites may be left with two unsavory sources of support, Chavern warned: “the government and rich people.”

_Have you seen the Question Hub prompt appear in your search results? If you're comfortable sharing it publicly, tweet a screenshot to @Glimmer_.

Managing Chaos: Incident Response Edition

“When the page first goes off, I think maybe the most uncomfortable experience is if you're getting woken up three in the morning,” Emmett Walsh, Site Reliability Engineer at Glitch, explains what it’s like to get a technical incident page in this week’s Shift Shift Forward. “I would say, my first response is just pure confusion. I don't know what's happening.”

“When you don't know what's going on and everybody's affected... that is fear-inducing and stress-inducing. Panic-inducing maybe is the right phrase, at least for me,” Cori Schlegel, Senior Site Reliability Engineer said.

While incident response, the actions taken to investigate, fix, prevent and provide communication about a function that is not working as expected, is a team effort, Tasha Hewett, Senior Support Engineer at Glitch explains that it’s more specifically like an orchestra. “Everybody has their own part to play,” Tasha said, “and while we all know what each other's role is, we might not necessarily know how they physically play their part. So we have to sit back and let everyone play their own instrument.”

As a Support Engineer, Tasha shares with the community news about outages. In her words, she feels like the gong player of the Glitch orchestra. “I don't play much, but when I do, it's very important and the audience is going to hear it,” Tasha elaborated. “So I have to sit and wait and wait. And when is it my turn? Okay, here's my turn. I'm going to do a status update, or I'm going to post on Twitter. And it has to be at the right time and it has to be accurate. So it can be a lot of pressure, but it's an important role.”

And when Glitch service is restored, the job still isn’t done. “We go through an instant retrospective. We first try as best we can to understand what happened… then we get together everyone involved or [those] who might have domain expertise [and] we'll discuss what happened,” Emmett said. “We'll try and pick out things that went well in how we dealt with the incident. Be that from how we noticed it to how we dealt with it in the moment to how we communicated about it.”

Outages and incidents are the best learning experience, adds Anil Dash, Glitch’s CEO. “You learn more about your systems when they're broke then when they're working just fine. I think that part is really fun and can be very rewarding. Finally, once you've gone through the whole incident and you figure out what's actually wrong with the systems and you fix it, then you're done. That can be extremely fulfilling.”

*Check out Shift Shift Forward on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Secure your secrets with new .env editor

The .env file in your project is a secure place to keep API keys or other credentials for your app. It’s only visible to you and your project collaborators, and it isn’t duplicated if someone remixes your project.

Now, the Glitch editor is introducing a brand new way to edit your .env. Never again do you need to worry about syntax mistakes causing invalid .env files, and if you miss the plaintext view it’s only a click away.

Open a project and try out the new editor!

Building a More Privacy-Centric Web

Have you ever started writing a post on your favorite social network, and then paused before sending it, worried about who might see it? You might think about how a certain friend might react or how it might affect your chances at a job in the future. If you know about how much social networks track you, you might think about which ads you're going to start seeing after making that post. You might worry about how parents, teachers, or your community might see what you wrote — especially if you're discussing something they don't accept.

The apprehension we feel before making a social media post is an important instinct. In the real world, whether speaking to a friend or close group or large room, we're used to having control over who hears our words. We naturally modify it by moving around or changing how we speak in our physical environment. But using the internet today means giving up a lot of that control. We rarely speak over neutral “phone lines” anymore; instead, our voices travel through complex digital services, with ads along the way, and algorithmic filtering at the other end.

Today, we frame these issues in many ways — from a loss “privacy” or “control,” to “data” and how it's collected. Each of these is a large and nuanced topic, but I'm most interested in a very specific aspect of privacy: how crucial it is for creative expression, and how we can make the web a more human place by building more privacy-centric platforms.

First, it's important to remember that apprehension you might've felt before making a post online. That gut feeling is the “chilling effect” we get from being watched. When we're speaking from deeper places within us, we're vulnerable. Whether we’re writing our first piece of poetry or a deeply personal story, early ideas can instantly whither away if we have to worry about something larger at stake, like other people’s perceptions, or our past reputation.

This need to protect ourselves doesn’t change when we go online — it’s even more important as we connect to a global network. That network, the web, has grown into more than a place where we connect with each other. We build projects, start businesses, and over time, we can form our identity there. This makes a nurturing creative environment even more important, so new projects can come to life and new experiences can be shared, without fear of failure or ridicule. One of the best ways to create this environment is by building platforms that put privacy and anonymity first.

Of course, anonymity without basic social counterweights can lend itself to abuse. Privacy liberates indiscriminately, whether it’s new work that benefits and connects people across the world, or antisocial behavior that harms others. So we need a world that respects personal privacy, but we also need shared respect among each other. Digital communities that enable privacy should spend just as much time building a culture that harnesses that privacy toward positive ends.

We spend a lot of effort on this at Write.as, a privacy-centric writing platform. Primarily, we get there by giving you anonymity by default, then introducing social friction as you look to reach more people.

At first, you don’t even need to create an account if you want to publish a one-off article, like a long tweet or essay. In this way, you’re anonymous — we haven’t collected any personal data about you, and readers won’t know who wrote the article unless you sign your name.

If you decide to create an account, you can start building a public blog, but you still don’t need to give an email address or other personal information. At this point, you become pseudonymous, and can still express yourself freely, with only your collective posts forming your identity. However, you’re still responsible for promoting your writing. This gives you real privacy if you want it, like for a personal journal, but also keeps abuse on our platform low — the proverbial tree falling in the forest.

Finally, if you want to reach that wide audience on Write.as, we introduce higher social expectations. You can choose to share your work publicly in our community space, Read Write.as, after a few roadblocks: either human moderation, or upgrading to a paid plan. Free users can submit their work anonymously, which we’ll publish or reject after vetting. Otherwise, users who upgrade can automatically publish to Read Write.as, with the explicit agreement that they’ll abide by some basic community guidelines (which we enforce).

With these hurdles, we’ve found that many people self-select on whether or not to join the community, which saves us time and effort on moderation. Combined with a small entry fee and an established culture of respect for each other, we’ve been able to create a warm social space that still puts privacy first.

This has been our approach to building a privacy-centric writing platform — but we're not the only ones doing this. There are services like Glitch that let you create projects without signing up, and have chosen a business model that doesn't cost you your privacy. Open source social platforms like Mastodon, Pixelfed, and our own WriteFreely help you create communities that aren’t built on ads and runaway data collection. We need more of these platforms, and more business models that aren’t built on mass surveillance.

Ultimately, the beauty of the web is that we can all have a part in building it. We can all work to make it a diverse, vibrant city created by its inhabitants, instead of some creepy panopticon invented by a few tech giants. We don't need to wait for a better web to simply emerge from them. We already have the right tools and ideas. With a little effort, we can build the web in our own image, starting with a concern for privacy and the human behind every screen — and starting today.

Try out anonymous publishing on Write.as with this Glitch app. Write a letter to a friend, press “Create Message,” and then send them the secret link you get. When they’re finished reading, they can delete the message — all without signing up!

The Workers Who Keep the Web Safe in an Unsafe World

In early March, Tonei Glavinic, the Director of Operations for the Dangerous Speech Project, was filing a report on hate speech when they were greeted with an unusual message in the reporting interface. The message read: “We have fewer people to review reports because of the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak.”

Other users and researchers—including Data & Society’s Robyn Caplan—noticed these reporting flags as well. Facebook had sent its content moderators home, it appeared and were relying on AI to help manage content and harassment reports.

Content moderators do a very important, and often unacknowledged job, from having to look at extremely violent content to having to decipher what harassment is (or is not). Content moderators are, effectively, the cleaners of the internet.

This critical, human workforce reviews and moderates some of the worst content on the web. But if every data point of harassment is a real person’s experience, there is a person looking at that report. Recently, Facebook was ordered to pay a total of $52 million to content moderators suffering from PTSD, a real risk that comes from the job.

Content moderators are exposed to harm even as they provide a necessary service #

Social networks need this human workforce because AI isn’t up to the job yet, especially when it comes to its understanding of the extreme nuances of harassment and abuse. What content moderators do really does require human skill. Artificial intelligence has an extremely difficult time deciphering context and harm in speech and has a well known, recorded history of amplifying societal bias. Even recent forays into understanding abusive online language can be fraught with bias; for example, DeepText (a variation of which is used by Instagram) was originally and accidentally taught that the word ‘Mexican’ is negative and harmful.

The deeper issues surrounding content moderation as a workforce are really starting to show. How do companies outsource work, and who do companies consider ‘actual employees’ versus contract workers? Content moderators are a mix of full-time employees and contracted, third-party workers.

Acknowledging the dichotomy here is important: full-time employees at tech companies can have better pay, full-time healthcare, better access to internal resources, support, and documents needed to work at the frontlines of the internet, harm, and policy. Contracted workers don’t have access to most of those things, and additionally, it’s been reported that the places that employ contracted workers can have extremely poor working conditions and grueling hours.

This brings into question how content moderators are able to work from home. Can contract employees bring their laptops with them? How is Facebook, or any platform, determining safety, not just for moderators, but the security of the content is being seen?

Suddenly, a work from home order has a lot of challenges, especially when dealing with abusive content and users’ data #

Sarah Roberts is a professor at UCLA and one of the major forces looking at content moderation. She has been studying content moderation and online systems for a decade.

“Where we are today, with the example of Facebook, is a grossly reduced workforce that tends to frontline, generalist content moderation in a product environment. So that really changes the landscape of what is possible. And users have encountered that change when they’ve perhaps gone to report content on various platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, at least have had notices up acknowledging the reduced workforce,” Roberts shared during our phone interview.

Roberts added that “every platform has its own apparatus for dealing with this [and] there is going to be variance from platform to platform. In the case of Facebook, on March 16, they did announce they would be sending mods home. It was unclear to me in those releases if that was globally or the ones in the United States. It’s important to understand it’s not the flipping of a switch, with the people or AI. A lot of the responses have probably been graduated with those factors.” But this further reliance on AI has created a myriad of challenges. Roberts described AI as being a broad and blunt tool, but also working in a ‘proactive’ way meaning it was catching content before people reported it, which can lead to content that didn’t actually break any violation standards of being removed.

Platforms are removing content that creates misinformation about Covid-19. Facebook across its newsroom sites are updating blog posts with information about Covid-19 misinformation patterns, and what they are doing to keep users safe in regards to content moderation. Platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram even have removed posts by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro that contained misleading or false information related to Covid-19.

Roberts recounted an experience of someone reaching out to her that had reported abusive hate speech. A reporting system operates almost like a phone tree for users: users select a general what kind of harm or content reporting issue it is, and then they select the specific kind of harm be it hate speech, targeted harassment, something including personal information, violence, etc. It’s a triage for ordering and labeling content to be given to a content moderator. The user who reached out to Roberts got to the end of the flow and was told the content they had reported was ‘deprioritized.’

Roberts emphasizes that to this user, and to others, this kind of content is urgent, serious and important. “We are seeing users posting and responding [about] this reduced workforce in a way we haven’t seen before- articulating their feelings, frustrations and their experiences in seeing this content.”

When there’s a reduced workforce, harms like suicide and violence to others take precedent. It becomes this disturbing “hierarchy of bad things” and of what to prioritize, and when.

Roberts stressed: “This might be the first time that users, even users who have reported content before through these various systems on the platforms, have really encountered the fact that it’s a human workforce on the other side for those reports, and when they are gone, there is no one to pick up the slack.”

What can platforms do better? #

Right now, platforms are making a concerted effort to take down Covid-19 misinformation and disinformation but as Dia Kayyali, program manager of Tech and Advocacy at Witness pointed to over Zoom, lots of previous content have had offline, real-world effects, too. "We’ll hear people say if you could put this much resources into this where people’s lives are threatened, why can't you put more resources in Myanmar or India where people’s lives are also threatened?” As Kayyali highlighted, these online harms, like Hindu extremist posts on Twitter currently, result in offline harm, too, just like corona misinformation.

Kayyali suggested focusing on content moderators and their needs, during this moment and beyond it. “[The platforms] should make content moderators full-time employees, they shouldn’t be contracting out.” More importantly, Kayyali explained, “I really hope they look at what are the different error rates between full-time employees and contracted content moderators, what are the self-reported mental health repercussions, what’s the difference between what full-time employees have access to and the contractors have access to.”

All employees, right now more than ever, need the support of the companies they work for or have been contracted out to. Content moderators, especially in this time, and once this time is over, need support, full-time employment, healthcare, mental health access, and good tools to do their job, otherwise the safety of the internet could be at stake.

Virtual Dance Clubs Are Creating New, Thriving Communities

With all of the physical dance clubs closed, people are looking to emerging digital venues for entertainment and community. One of those is Club Quarantine, a queer online rave that hosts shows on Zoom every night of the week.

On April 27th, live coder Lil Data performed a set at Club Quarantine while creative coder Cabbibo controlled the visuals through a Glitch project. They were nice enough to answer some of my questions about the performance via Twitter and email.

Have you ever done a remote live show before? What was the experience like, how does it differ and how is it similar to a show at a venue?

Lil Data: I've been doing remote works and working with themes of telematic intimacy for almost as long as Lil Data has existed since 2014. When I was at SXSW 2015 playing the first big PC Music Showcase I simultaneously had a remote interactive installation happening as part of an Algorave at Access Space, Sheffield, UK.

That piece is still online — for the audio to work you need to perform some user gestures before the page finishes loading. The page features a grid of words which when clicked turn into their opposite (good turns to evil, etc) and flip the generative music that's running on the page. It's like a jukebox but operates at the abstraction level of a track rather than a music catalogue.

The word-music mappings came from an interactive essay I did for DIS Magazine (RIP). The mappings are mirrored across all viewers, so the webpage was projected in the venue walls in Sheffield and the audience were controlling the music via their phones. I was also viewing the live stream and the webpage from Austin, Texas, watching and hearing as people collectively played this web-based multiplayer musical instrument. Initially people tended to press all the buttons, but after a surprisingly short time a collective sensibility and stability emerged.

For me, it doesn't make sense to differentiate shows as IRL versus URL, what's important is the atmosphere created by the context and audience, and on my side the depth of flow I am able to access.

Performing to me is like being an energy conduit channeling through a membrane that varies in thickness depending on those factors I just mentioned. If I'm really in the moment that membrane disappears and everything becomes attuned, and everyone mutually senses each other's attunement, and this feeling is the same for me wherever I play.

I definitely felt attunement and transparency when playing this show for Club Quarantine, even more than I've felt at some IRL shows. Their use of Zoom as a jumbotron, and how hyped and dressed up and gorgeous everyone is, made it really intimate for me and gave me permission to express myself.

Even more special in this case was Cabbibo live coding a website via Glitch based on a sketch by Mr.doob, where people could control little avatars on screen that you can see in the video. We first did an interactive together for my Sup EP in 2014 (also still live, buried in data.pcmusic.info), and I was supposed to be visiting Cabbibo last month but my trip got cancelled. So this was important for us to do something in spite of the pandemic.

How did you decide on what music to play? Did you make any decisions because of the virtual venue?

Lil Data: This show was celebrating Namasenda's new single Dare AM/PM on PC Music, and I was playing first, so my set was designed to welcome everyone and get them excited for Hannah Diamond who was playing after me. Namasenda and me share a love for euro trance, dance pop, nightcore, generally anything fast and bouncy with high-pitched vocals, so I did live edits of Venga Boys and Special D specially for her.

Another edit I did was of GAIKA whose music I adore, plus edits of Charli XCX's new singles Forever and Claws which are both really amazing, along with a re-edit of my Vroom Vroom edit which is a crowd pleaser. I had to put this set together really fast but was quite pleased with it in the end, had a couple of hiccups so only uploaded about half to YouTube in the end. This was my first live stream since the pandemic began and it was great so I'm up for doing more, although I really want to go beyond video streaming and explore ways of streaming computation itself.

What kind of changes did you make during the show?

Cabbibo: Part of the show, for example, it was just emojis on a white background, but then I would push something that would make it so the background would clear [and] everyone’s movements turned into drawings.

Then [I] would push a change so it would glitch the background while people were moving around or change the background color and pattern, or make it so everyone’s emojis were different sizes or whatever.

How did you decide what to do for the visuals? Did emojis, glitches, etc. come to mind immediately or was there a lot of experimentation?

**Cabbibo: **[We] tried a few different things, sort of starting with Mr. doob’s multiplayer sketchpad. The more we did it the more we a) wanted it to feel like a party and b) wanted to fit as many people as possible, but also didn’t know if it would work at all, so [we] wanted to make it fun even if no one was there.

From there it was just like “what set of emojis should we use?” and “what will make people get excited for what’s next?” For me it was also like “how the heck do I use the Canvas API?” so I sort of coded up a few things to parameterize beforehand, but ended up making the glitch effect for the first time during the show.

*Check out Lil Data, Cabbibo and Clu*b Quarantine to keep up with their upcoming projects and shows.

Get the Most out of Glitch with These Four Pro Tips

Whether you just discovered Glitch or you're a long-time user, here's a rundown of five features everyone should have on their radar. We try to keep things simple and fun, but there's a lot of power under the 'hood that enables all kinds of creators, from beginners to experienced professionals.

Import/Export with Github #

You might have already discovered Rewind, Glitch’s version control system, but did you know that a Glitch project is also its own Git repo?

And it gets better - in addition to giving you a commit system, you can import/export to Github. Import a project from Github for a great starter project experience. Then export your Glitch project to Github if you need an external repository for your code.

Access the Terminal #

Need console access? We’ve got you covered.

Fire up your Glitch project in the editor. Click the “Tools” button located on the left side of the editor to reveal the Tools menu. Then, click “Terminal.” Presto - a fully functional console ready for your commands.

Make Your Code Prettier #

You’ve probably discovered the Glitch editor’s built-in “Format This File.” We use the fabulous Prettier library for this, and have the default options applied.

Want to do even more? Use a .prettierrc JSON configuration file in your project to set your own preferences.

Keep Your Secrets… Well, Secret #

Hosting a project with API tokens, passwords, or other sensitive information? You can (and should!) store private data securely inside the .env file. It’s a secure environment config section of your project, and only invited collaborators are able to see the contents.

If you need help using Glitch or want to see a new feature added, head to the support forum where you'll find some of the friendliest, most creative coders on the web. And after you've made something awesome, share it with us via email or tag on on Twitter @glitch.

Taking Action to Protect Black Lives

This past week has again made visible the centuries-old systems of violence that have been one of the ugliest and most painful parts of America's foundation. It's time to uproot those foundations.

There are pragmatic, specific, achievable actions we can take to end police violence. Police contract reform, demilitarization and non-police alternatives work and save lives. We encourage our community to join us in financially supporting Campaign Zero and their work to advocate for policy solutions to end police violence in America, which are grounded in these meaningful, effective tactics for stopping the bloodshed in our communities.

We support the Black Lives Matter movement, and offer our full support and and strength to our Black workers and community members who are deeply affected by this ongoing trauma. On top of these sentiments, we make specific requests to the leaders who regularly tell us they want to support companies like ours. While our team is remote and distributed, we are a company based in New York City, and so we begin our work in our own community.

Our goal is simple: **we demand the end of police violence in our community. **We categorically reject NYPD Commissioner Shea's blaming of violence on protestors, and the broader NYPD pattern of attributing violent policing actions to "protecting business interests". **It is never valid to commit systemic violence against people, and we reject our work and our workers being used as an excuse to do so. **We reject media characterizations and policing policies that prioritize objects or buildings over lives.

We call upon our Mayor Bill de Blasio to unequivocally take action on the reforms listed above before the end of 2020, and to commit to ending police violence. We ask our Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to prioritize advocacy around these reforms. We ask Borough President Gale Brewer to use her powers of fund allocation to defund programs which enable this kind of systemic violence. We ask District Attorney Cy Vance to end carceral abuses like cash bail and over-prosecution.

We ask New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to stop enabling violent policing through funding militarization of police and through enacting criminalizing actions like curfews, which are disproportionately and unfairly enforced against vulnerable communities, especially Black communities. We ask NY Attorney General Letitia James to continue her stated intent to prosecute policing abuses. We ask Senators Schumer and Gillibrand to support the specific actions above to reduce, and quickly end, police violence.

We commit to asking our leaders about their actions on these efforts each time they look to us to support their claims of supporting businesses, entrepreneurship, or innovation. There can be no opportunity without justice. Black Americans deserve accountability and justice from the systems meant to serve them. It should be enough for a single person to stand up and say "this violence is wrong, and these killings are wrong", but if it takes companies adding their voices, then we lend ours to amplifying the call to end police violence.

We remember George Floyd. We remember Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Abery. We honor their lives, their names, their memories, and those of the far too many other people whose voices have been silenced.

Yassin Mohamed, Finan H. Berhe, Sean Reed, Steven Demarco Taylor, Breonna Taylor, Ariane McCree, Terrance Franklin, Miles Hall, Darius Tarver, William Green, Samuel David Mallard, Kwame Jones, De’von Bailey, Christopher Whitfield, Anthony Hill, De’Von Bailey, Eric Logan, Jamarion Robinson, Gregory Hill Jr, JaQuavion Slaton, Ryan Twyman, Brandon Webber, Jimmy Atchison, Willie McCoy, Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford J, D’ettrick Griffin, Jemel Roberson, DeAndre Ballard, Botham Shem Jean, Robert Lawrence White, Anthony Lamar Smith, Ramarley Graham, Manuel Loggins Jr, Trayvon Martin, Wendell Allen, Kendrec McDade, Larry Jackson Jr, Jonathan Ferrell, Jordan Baker, Victor White III, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Kajieme Powell, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Rumain Brisbon, Jerame Reid, Charly Keunang, Tony Robinson, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Brendon Glenn, Samuel DuBose, Christian Taylor, Jamar Clark, Mario Woods, Quintonio LeGrier, Gregory Gunn, Akiel Denkins, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Terrence Sterling, Terence Crutcher, Keith Lamont Scott, Alfred Olango, Jordan Edwards, Stephon Clark, Danny Ray Thomas, DeJuan Guillory, Patrick Harmon, Jonathan Hart, Maurice Granton, Julius Johnson, Jamee Johnson, Michael Dean

How We're Making Glitch More Reliable

Hi friends,

We want to acknowledge the past several weeks of service issues. Many of you have reached out thoughtfully and offered support. Thank you for that. You’re the reason why we have a reputation for being one of the friendliest communities of coders on the web!

Here’s what’s going on: we’re continuing to grow at a really rapid pace, and also seeing new kinds of high-volume automated requests hitting the service. Handling both of those at the same time is straining the platform. In addition to all the increasingly-popular apps that community makers are creating, we’re also seeing an influx of attacks on our service and some projects running malicious code. These make the task at hand even more challenging. In the coming weeks, we’re going to be making significant changes that will have a big impact on uptime and stability. On top of that, we’re working on improving your experience with managing projects on Glitch.

To be clear: Until we get through these changes, you can expect there to be some instability from time to time. We’re sorry for the inconsistent experience, and are working as quickly as we can to fix this in a way that will last. In the meantime, here’s what you can do if you are experiencing instability:

Keep an eye on status.glitch.com for updates. We’re making sure those updates are more timely and descriptive.
Send a message to support@glitch.com if you find your projects still aren’t loading once an incident is resolved.
Avoid making changes to a project if you start to see reconnecting errors. Changes to your code are only reliably stored when that connection is working
For incidents going forward, we may temporarily block pinging services as an alternative to blocking traffic and shutting down projects, as we have done in the past. This will lower the impact on the community as a whole, but anyone still using pinging services will likely receive more notifications that their apps are down. We’re also asking for your help! Here’s how:
One of our big challenges is dealing with third-party services that ping Glitch to keep apps awake. Not all of these services are as reliable as we’d like, and sometimes when there are problems they can cause as much load on our systems as a malicious attack would. We’re not banning the use of pinging (or “uptime”) services on Glitch right now, and we’d like to not have to. So, if you use these services, disable or turn off any pinging services you don’t need or that aren’t absolutely necessary. (You definitely don’t need to ping more than once every 5 minutes or so — more than that just adds load to the system but doesn't make any difference for your app.)
Boost your apps! Glitch members have the ability to boost up to 5 projects, which prevents those apps from going to sleep. It’s much easier to set up and manage than remote pinging services, and they won’t fall asleep when we temporarily block those services during incidents. Oh, and you’ll also get extra disk space, extra memory, and no rate limits! You can sign up right here if you want to become a member. We’ll continue to post about our progress here. Thanks again for your support and patience!

✌️ Jenn + Tasha

Ping Services on Glitch

We’re doing a ton of work behind the scenes to make our infrastructure more stable. ** **As we mentioned in last week’s post:

*One of our big challenges is dealing with third-party services that ping Glitch to keep apps awake. Not all of these services are as reliable as we’d like, and sometimes when there are problems they can cause as much load on our systems as a malicious attack would. We’re not banning the use of pinging (or “uptime”) services on Glitch right now, and we’d like to not have to. *

We did some more investigating and started to temporarily block traffic from ping services to help reduce the load on our servers. The temporary block allowed us to see just how intense a strain they put on the platform.

Despite our attempts to find a happy medium, we’re making the tough call to block this type of traffic permanently. While we’re sorry for the inconvenience this causes some users, this policy change puts us in a much better position to make Glitch more stable for everyone.

If you currently rely on ping services for your project, know that your project or account won’t be suspended. They just won’t work any more as intended. Please email support@glitch.com if you have questions or are seeking advice about what to do with your projects.

An Update On How We’ve Been Making Glitch More Reliable

One month ago we talked to you about the increased number of incidents that Glitch was experiencing at the time, and how we’re committed to keeping Glitch reliable so that you can focus on creating and sharing:

“In the coming weeks, we’re going to be making significant changes that will have a big impact on uptime and stability. On top of that, we’re working on **improving your experience with managing projects on Glitch.**”

We wanted to give you an update on how things are going and a peek at more good things to come.

A big impact on uptime and stability

We have seen a significant improvement in uptime over the past few weeks. The platform is experiencing fewer and shorter incidents. This is a huge win for us and wouldn't be possible if our community hadn’t helped us make some key decisions like reducing the impact of pinging services on the site. Thank you so much for sticking with us through the turbulence.

Also, special shout out to our Support Forum regulars. You all have been super helpful and welcoming to newcomers asking about service incidents, policy changes and general questions about code and Glitch!

A better way to manage your projects

Something we quietly launched earlier in the month was a more straight-forward way to manage what you make on Glitch. If you’re logged in, you can try it at https://glitch.com/dashboard, and you can also get to it by clicking “Your Projects” from your user menu on the top-right of the homepage.

We want building and sharing apps to be frictionless and intuitive, which is why we've always shielded you from having to know the complexities around how projects are run. That said, we've heard many of you say you want more information about your projects and greater control over how you manage them. This new tool is a step towards creating that experience — and it’s going to keep getting better.

Exciting changes are coming soon

A lot of the changes coming up are all in service of empowering creators like you to quickly and easily host projects, but also give you the stability and control you might expect from more conventional hosting providers.

We have to strike a balance between keeping things simple and free, but also give everyone the tools and transparency to manage more resources if they need them. Launching boosted apps was a big first step in this direction, but it’s just a start.

Hopefully you’ll find our next set of updates a nice enhancement to the free Glitch experience and also an upgrade for those of you looking for more power.

Fast and free static sites on Glitch and new Project Hours

When we think about our plans for Glitch and what we need to build, it’s usually in service of two things:

Today we’re excited to share some changes that make the Glitch experience better while also offering more transparency about our free tier and paid membership.

Always-On Static Sites #

Since Day 1, we’ve always put Glitch projects to sleep no matter how big or small. It was just a general rule that we enforced in order to keep our servers happy and run more efficiently. Over the last month or so, we’ve made some significant changes to our back-end, which now means your Static Sites never go to sleep — even for free users!

We pride ourselves on being a great full-stack solution for web apps, but we also know that so many community members just want a quick and easy solution to create and share simple web pages. From students sharing out a resume for the first time to local Pet Adoption centers, we’ve seen a whole range of pure HTML, CSS, and JS goodness.

If you have static sites on Glitch, check your projects view and you’ll see a little label that says “Static Site”.

Important note:** **If you’re not seeing the “Static Site” label and you know the project is static, just wake it up or hop into the editor and you should be all set!

1,000 Free Project Hours #

Back in April we launched Boosted Apps, which is a paid upgrade on Glitch. Members who opt-in get up to 5 boosted projects, which keeps them on and also increases rate limits, disk space, and memory.

One question that kept coming up for some users is, “How do I know if paying for Glitch is right for me?” Here’s our official take.

If you want to build something quickly or you're just tinkering, get started for free. (We don’t even make you sign-in if you wanna give the editor a spin; just create an account if you need to save your work.)

If you want to make a lot of stuff, but don’t need projects to run all the time, the free experience might still be enough. Here’s where today’s update comes in.

We’re introducing Project Hours to give you greater insight into the resources that your projects are using without the typical complexity associated with cloud hosting. We don’t want you to have to think about things like compute, transfer, dynos, and droplets. All you need to know is every month you’ll have 1,000 hours for your projects to run and they’ll reset back to 1,000 on the first of each month. This new policy will go into effect August 1, but you can see and monitor your July hours in your dashboard now.

If you find that the 1,000 hours isn’t enough, that’s when you should upgrade. You’ll get the 1,000 hours plus the 5 boosted slots, which you can rotate projects in and out of.

In short, there’s a lot that comes with the free Glitch experience. As of today, you’re getting static sites hosted for free without going to sleep. You’re getting a full-stack container and in-browser editor that’s simple enough for beginners, but powerful enough for professionals. And you’re getting 1,000 hours of free hosting time.

If and when you need more magic under the hood, upgrade and support the community. In the meantime, we’ll continue working to make the Glitch experience the most reliable, intuitive, and friendly place to build the web.

*Log-in and see what’s new. 🥳

Building an app to stream Tweets in real-time using the Twitter API

_The code for this tutorial is available on GitHub_. *You can also check out the live demo of the app on Glitc*h

The first endpoints of the new Twitter API are out and waiting for you to explore and build apps with in order to understand what’s happening in the public conversation.

This tutorial will walk you through how to build your own real-time Tweet streaming app using the filtered stream endpoints and Tweet annotations to listen for Tweets based on your own topics of interest.

After building the app, you will learn about how it can be applied to some real-life examples to inspire you to get started such as.

Discovering new music videos: Imagine a dashboard that lets you see the music videos being shared across Twitter
Finding remote developer job openings: Imagine creating a remote developer job listings app with remote developer job openings being shared across Twitter
Learning about personal finance and savings: Surface public conversations about personal finance and savings happening on Twitter

Setup

To get started here’s what you will need:

You must have an approved developer account, and have activated the new developer portal experience. If you don’t have one already, you can apply for one. Access is available with active keys and tokens for a developer App that is attached to a Project created in the developer portal.
A Bearer Token from your App in the Twitter developer portal.
Node.js
Npm (This is automatically installed with Node. Make sure you have npm 5.2 or higher.)
Npx (Included with npm 5.2 or higher)

First, install Node.js. Check out the Downloads section from Node’s website and download the source code or installer of your choice. Alternatively, if you are running on a Mac you can install the Node package using the Brew package manager

Open a terminal window and bootstrap your React app using create-react-app by using npx.

After create-react-app has finished executing, change to the newly created real-time-tweet-streamer directory and replace the scripts block in your package.json with the following script block in your package.json. These lines will provide a command shortcut to concurrently run your client and server backend code in development or production as needed.

package.json

After updating the scripts section, your package.json should now look as follows.

Next, remove all files within the src/ subdirectory.

Then, create a new file within the src/ subdirectory called index.js. The code for this file will be as follows.

Credentials

Connecting to the filtered stream endpoints requires you to authenticate using a bearer token from your app in the Twitter developer portal. To utilize your bearer token, you will need to have the following environment variable set. You can do so by issuing the following command in your terminal window assuming you are using bash as your shell. Replace , including the left and right angle brackets, with your bearer token.

Server Side Code

First, you will need to get started with implementing the Node server, which will be responsible for making the actual requests to the Twitter API. This Node server will serve as a proxy between your browser-based React client and the Twitter API. On your Node server, you will need to create API endpoints that connect to the filtered stream endpoints. In turn, requests from your React client will be proxied through to your local Node server.

Before you go any further, cd to the project root directory and install the following dependencies

Next, while still within your project root directory, create a new subdirectory called “server” and a new file within that subdirectory called “server.js”.

This source code file will contain all of your backend logic for connecting to and receiving Tweets from the filtered stream endpoint. The contents of your server.js file will be as follows.

server.js

Filtering Tweets on the filtered stream endpoint using rules

Filtered stream has two endpoints, a streaming endpoint, to receive data and a rules endpoint that is used to create and delete rules. The filtered stream endpoints require you to define search queries called rules, in order for it to know what kind of Tweets to send to you*. *Rules allow you to narrow down to only the Tweets you are looking for by using a set of operators. You will see some example use cases and corresponding rules you can use later once you finish building the app.

The other filtered stream endpoint is the streaming endpoint, which uses a simple GET connection. Once a connection is established, Tweets are delivered in JSON format through a persistent HTTP streaming connection. You will only receive Tweets matching your rules while connected to the stream.

Client-Side Code

The next step is to work on the following React components

App.js - The parent component that be will, in turn, render all other components

NavBar.js - Displays the navigation bar for navigating between the Tweet feed and managing rules

Tweet.js - Displays a Tweet on the page

TweetFeed.js - Renders multiple Tweet components at once in a “feed” like fashion

Rule.js - Renders an individual rule on your stream

RuleList.js - Renders multiple Rule components and displays an input field to add a rule

ErrorMessage.js - Renders any status or error messages to the screen

Spinner.js - Renders a loading indicator for any pending API calls

Now you will need to get started with creating the React components. Under your /src subdirectory, create a directory called “components”. The source code files above will be stored in this new directory. First, create the parent most component of the application. This component will be responsible for rendering all other components.

App.js

Next, create the component for the navigation bar.

Navbar.js

Next, create the parent component for rendering all job listings.

TweetFeed.js

Next, create the child component for the previous component that renders an individual Tweet.

Tweet.js

Next, create the component responsible for rendering all the rules on our stream as well as displaying input controls for creating new rules. In this case, we will only be using one rule.

RuleList.js

Next, create the child component of RuleList.js responsible for displaying a single rule and deleting a rule.

Rule.js

Next, create a component for displaying any status or error messages.

ErrorMessage.js

Finally, create a component to display a loading indicator during any pending API calls.

Spinner.js

Proxy Setup

The final step is to proxy requests from your client to your backend server. To do this, from within your src/ directory, create a new file called “setupProxy.js” and add the following code.

setupProxy.js

You can now start up both the server and client by going to the project root directory and typing the following.

After this command completes, your default web browser should automatically launch and navigate to http://localhost:3000. You will then be taken to the rules management section of the app.

Now that you have an app in place to listen for any kind of Tweet you want, let’s walk through some real-life examples of how this app can be used such as

Discovering new music videos
Finding remote developer job openings
Learning about personal finance and savings

For each of the examples and accompanying rules listed below, you can navigate to the rules section of the app and simply copy and paste the rule into the input field to add it to your stream. Once the rule has been added, it will take effect within seconds and only Tweets matching the criteria of that rule will be sent to you.

Remote developer job openings

In this first example, let’s say you are interested in finding remote developer job

openings. To surface these kinds of Tweets, you can use the following rule.

To understand what this rule is doing, you can break it down into two parts. The keywords part and the Tweet annotations part.

Using keyword operators

The keywords part of the rule will match Tweets containing the keywords “developer” or “engineer” and the keyword “remote”. These keywords alone will certainly match Tweets containing remote developer job postings, but it will also match on irrelevant Tweets. For example, the Tweet below will match this rule.

https://twitter.com/EraserFarm/status/1220013392766947332

Since this is not the desired Tweet, you need to take this rule a step further. Though this rule matches irrelevant Tweets, it is also successful in matching Tweets with actual job postings. For example, the rule you have so far will also result in matching the Tweet below.

https://twitter.com/plataformatec/status/1225460423761317888

Tweet annotations: Using context operators

The challenge you have now is, though you are receiving Tweets containing job postings you will still have to go through irrelevant Tweets. If only there was a way to only match on Tweets that contain job postings as best as possible. Are there operators you can use in your rule that only match these relevant Tweets?

Fortunately, this is where the power of Tweet annotations comes in. Take a closer look at an example Tweet object payload that was sent for this Tweet on your filtered stream endpoint. Within the payload, the nested “context_annotations” field is present. Context annotations are delivered as a “context_annotations” field in the payload. These annotations are inferred based on the Tweet text and result in the domain and/or entity labels, which can be used to discover Tweets on topics that may have been previously difficult to surface. Note, that these fields will only be included if data is present since not all Tweets will contain this data.

To match on the domain and entity ids within the context_annotations field, you can use the “context” operator. The “context” operator can be used to instruct your filtered stream endpoint to match on Tweets containing specific domain and entity names. Here’s what that would look like.

The operators above follow the format “context:.”. As seen in the example payload above, the domain id 66 represents the “Interests and Hobbies Category”. The entity ID 961961812492148736 represents the “Recruitment” entity and the entity ID 850073441055133696 represents the “Job search” entity. For a complete list of domains, the Tweet annotations docs contain a table with 50+ domain names.

With the operator explanation out of the way, this 2nd part of the rule matches Tweets containing the entity names “Recruitment” or “Jobs search”.

In summary, taking both parts of this rule together, it will match on Tweets that contain the keywords “developer” or “engineer” and the keyword “remote”, but only if those Tweets also contain the entity names “Recruitment” or “Jobs search”

Discovering new music videos

If you need new music video suggestions, you can start by using a simple rule that matches on Tweets containing the keywords “song” and “YouTube”. You will also want Tweets that actually link out to external videos

Taking a closer look at the payload of this Tweet, you see that it has some annotations on it that can help you match more relevant Tweets. Notice the Annotation with an entity label of “Pop” and a domain name of “Music Genre”

To make this rule better and narrow down your Tweets to be even more relevant, you can update your rule as follows.

This will take the original rule you used a step further by narrowing down to only the Tweets that are labeled with the Music Genre domain label and the Pop entity label.

Learning about personal finance and savings

As a final example, let’s say you are interested in learning about personal finance and you can be savvier about your spending and savings. You also only want original Tweets that contain links to online articles to learn more.

Going through a similar process as you did with earlier examples if you simply add the following rule, only Tweets containing the words “personal”, “finance” and “savings” will be sent to you.

Taking a look at one of the Tweet payloads, the nested annotations contains an entity label about personal finance that will help you narrow down your Tweets to the most relevant ones

Using the context operator to match on Tweets containing this label, you can revise your rule to look as follows

Conclusion

Using the filtered stream endpoints to stream publicly available Tweets to your server and annotations, you created an app to more easily surface Tweets around a topic of interest. The filtered stream endpoint gives you the haystack of data in the form of Tweets and the Tweet annotations help you find the needle in that haystack.

Have you found other interesting ways to use this app? Follow me on Twitter and send me a Tweet to let me know. I used several libraries beyond the Twitter API to make this tutorial, but you may have different needs and requirements and should evaluate whether those tools are right for you.

Going from Full-stack to Static

Over the summer we announced fast and free static sites on Glitch, providing you a way to create and share simple webpages that never go to sleep. Static sites are great for ambitious client-side apps, landing pages for educational demos, compelling artworks from code - basically any project that needs only HTML, CSS and client-side JavaScript to come to life! Some of you have reached out asking how to turn your full-stack JavaScript apps into static sites so you can save on Project Hours and keep your projects awake for free, so I’m going to show you how to get started.

Glitch distinguishes between a static and full-stack site by watching for any of three simple configuration files: package.json, requirements.txt and glitch.json. Those two last files are for configuring apps built in other experimental-to-Glitch languages; for this tutorial I’m going to focus on full-stack JavaScript apps using Node.js, which are configured in package.json. If you’re not familiar with the anatomy of a Node app, you can check out our free zine on Making Web Apps with Node!

To get started, you’ll need a full-stack app that’s running all of its important code on the client-side. For this tutorial I created ~full-stack-to-static, whose server-side code only contains routes for where the client side files are.

The first thing I do is remove the server-side files and see what breaks and troubleshoot from there. So, I remove package.json, letting Glitch know that this should be a static site. Then I remove server.js, and .env since they will not be run without package.json.

Going to the app view, I see that something looks very wrong. Instead of my index.html content, I see a file listing like this:

This is because my index.html file is still in a“views” folder. Renaming“views/index.html” to“index.html” moves that file in the root of my project and fixes that.

I can now see index.html rendering but I now get errors when trying to load my stylesheet and JavaScript. This is because they are inside a“public” folder but my index.html references them as if they were in the root of my project - something my server-side code had handled before. I can fix this either by updating links in index.html to add the“public/” directory, or by renaming“public/style.css” and“public/script.js” to“style.css” and“script.js”. In this example, I did the latter and now my static site is looking great. Here's an embed of the final result:

Now I have a project that does basically the same thing it was doing before, but it stays awake and it doesn’t count towards my Project Hour limits. I recommend you take a look at your Project Dashboard and see if you have any full-stack projects using up Project Hours that could be refactored to static sites! And for all your projects that need to be full-stack apps, just remember as always that Glitch gives you 1000 free Project Hours each month to run your apps, and subscribers can lift those limits if you need even more.

*The project featured in this post's header image is ~iris-cockroach by @potch. Have a project you want us *to feature? Tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com!

Worlds to Explore: Immersive Web Experiences

As many of us are spending more time at home and looking at the same screen before, during and after work, a change of scenery is often welcome. Lucky for us, the Glitch community has been producing incredibly compelling immersive web experiences that take us to other worlds, tell stories, and inspire and teach us to create our own.

Here are some of the virtual spaces I’ve found myself getting lost in over the past couple of weeks. Happy exploring!

**Groad Tour, a **glimpse of Portland then and now

Creator Nathan Backous takes us all on a virtual tour of all-ages venues around Portland, Oregon where the band JonnyX and the Groadies played at and have since closed. "Some of the venues captured in this project are separated over 20 years from their previous purpose. Some of the buildings remain relatively unchanged, some are drastically different, some are entirely gone,” writes Backous. Each “stop” contains flyers, signs, and photos from the band giving viewers a true trip down memory lane.

**The Homer Metaverse, for Simpsons fans everywhere

Something that creator Fabio Cortés and I have in common is that our first exposure to VR was an episode of The Simpsons from 1995 where Homer finds himself in a mysterious 3D world behind a book shelf. This Glitch app is a playful throwback to the series.

Jurassic Warp, a multi-media exhibit (Note: it auto-plays sound on page load)

This is an incredible A-frame art piece created by artists KT Duffy and María Luisa Sanín Peña. It’s just one of many examples of artists converting their work in response to recent gallery closings. According to New City Art, Duffy’s original exhibition was planned for Ground Level Platform in Chicago, but then the project was moved online to Glitch!

These are just a handful of projects to check out; you can find them and more in our Immersive Web Experiences collection. If you’re interested creating your own immersive web experiences, there are a lot of great resources to get you started. Here are just a few:

Check out our WebVR starter kit, which includes short videos and app examples that introduce you to WebVR and guides you through creating your own virtual solar system in A-frame.
For a guided introduction to A-frame, check out their free interactive course, A-Frame School, and you can remix any of their starter apps here on Glitch.
I’m a big fan of the Immersive Web Weekly newsletter, published by the W3C’s Immersive Web working group. Subscribers get a weekly email curated with news, events, art and projects related to the immersive web, and it’s a great way to learn more and be inspired by this community! We can’t wait to see what you create, and we can’t wait to help you show your projects off! If you have Glitch projects you’d like us to feature, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com! ✨

*The project featured in this post's header image is ~earthy-course by @adarosecanon.

Worlds to Explore: Storytelling with Maps

Last week we showed how our community has been using WebXR to create new worlds and tell stories in 3D. There’s a lot to be said, though, about how much you can create with only two dimensions. The Glitch community has not only been showing what can be done with a little bit of JavaScript and map tiles, but they’re changing the way we think about maps entirely! These projects don’t just help us get to a place, but they tell compelling stories as well.

Let’s take a look at some of our recent favorites.

Carta Marina, a map of fantastical Nordic sea creatures

Creator @mapsmania has been making some of the coolest interactive maps ever! Some are location-based like their interactive history of the London tube, but some like ~carta-marina guide us through art and history in a really unique way. Every map enthusiast would enjoy their blog, Maps Mania.

**Waking and Sleeping, a world map of wakedness

This real-time map of users tweeting “good morning” and “good night” across the world does what most maps don’t do: remind us that we’re not alone. Its creator, creative technologist @bookwormgirl910, describes the project as “a reflection on world interconnectedness and our daily waves and flares of activity and wakedness across the globe.” I recommend you check out the about page of the project to learn how it works and what limitations Katherine faced around languages and geotagging with the Twitter API in particular.

**Supertall Vacancies, a story of NYC **housing in the shadows of luxury vacancies

This interactive map by @apr2136 and collaborators at Columbia’s Points Unknown takes a look at both commercial and residential real estate in Manhattan and vacancy trends from recent years, and even gives a literal voice to doormen who have witnessed the impact of luxury housing surplus firsthand.

If you have a story to tell, it’s clear from the above projects that using maps is a great way to get your readers interested. And with Glitch, you can have something running in seconds–you can remix all of the above awesome map projects and more in our collection of storytelling maps. The collection also includes some apps that can get you started with the JavaScript libraries that these creators used for their own projects:

Leaflet.js, a lightweight and open source library for creating apps that are mobile friendly. We created this Guide to Leaflet including remixable apps to get you up and running.
Mapbox, a location data platform that lets you build powerful location-based apps on the web. They’re on Glitch at @mapbox and have posted some great apps to get you started!

We can’t wait to see what you create and what stories you tell–we’d love for you to let us know about them! If you have Glitch projects you’d like us to feature, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com! ✨

*The project featured in this post's header image is ~lhh by @darzhz

Too Close to Call: A conversation with creator Daniel Flanagan

Throughout the election season, we saw data from a small number of states captivate the attention of a global audience. Social media feeds were a constant stream of numbers and maps; it was nearly impossible to make sense of it all in real-time. Instead of getting overwhelmed, Daniel Flanagan created Too Close to Call, a Glitch project that does all the marginal math needed to follow close races in competitive states. I reached out to Daniel, a recent college graduate and freelance visual effects artist, to talk about his process and the aftermath of creating a popular app during, and for, such an energizing national moment.

Jenn: With every election there are lots of maps and data–I, for one, often get overwhelmed. What drove you to create your own app among all that noise?

Daniel: That feeling of data overload is exactly what drove me to make this app. I knew the election was going to come down to a handful of states, but once early counts confirmed as much, I, and I’m quoting myself here, “was annoyed with constantly searching” a whole map of the country when only a few states were relevant.

Add to that the fact that all these maps would only tell you which way the state was leaning and maybe a percentage/vote count if you selected a specific state, it was a pain to find the information that was truly relevant. I wanted to know how close each state’s race was: 200 votes or 200,000 votes?

I do appreciate the work that goes into all those maps, I follow a few of their developers on Twitter and I think they knocked it out of the park. My little app is not possible without all their work and the ease with which those maps convey the state of the race at a glance is incredibly valuable. In this case I just wanted a more concise version of only the data I found relevant.

You mentioned in the support forum that you hold a degree in political science! Do you often build apps that are politics related, or was this a special opportunity for you?

I did yes. Technically it's a minor in political science but I definitely got more out of my poli sci classes than any others. To be honest, I don’t build all that many apps in the first place, this sort of user-facing development is a hobby more than anything else.

I build things around stuff that interests me, and to say that I was interested in this election would be an understatement. The challenging thing with anything political is the fact that everyone comes to it with their own politics. I’m not looking to make something that drives people apart, or even something that affirms someone’s beliefs; the interesting projects to me are the ones that provide the opportunity to bring understanding and context to an area, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, otherwise overlooked or misunderstood.

This was a special opportunity for numerous reasons, chiefly because it allowed me to channel my election energy into something productive. I was also excited to be working with real-time live data, that’s not something I get to do often.

How long was the process from getting the idea to sharing it with the world?

I had the idea as I was scrolling through Twitter that morning and set up the project on Glitch shortly thereafter. I didn’t get to start in earnest until lunch around noon, and my work on this project was sporadic throughout the day as I was working on, well, work. I’d say it probably got 4-5 hours of dedicated attention throughout the day. I took a look at my commit history and it looks like the first commit was at 10am, the UI was done by about 2pm, I made a commit noted “Functional Prototype” just before 5pm, and I shared it on Twitter an hour later at 6:03pm. So from commit to tweet we’re looking at 8 hours and 3 minutes.

What made Glitch the place you chose to build and share this project?

For any project or idea that requires a web server, Glitch is always my first choice. I don’t quite understand how Glitch is able to provide so much for free but I’m not complaining. Glitch containers allow for websocket connections, terminal access, and persistent storage, all while abstracting the infrastructure away from me. Aside from the technical, I feel like my kind of app development, small, one-off experiences fits so well within the Glitch community. I’ve come across so many awesome small projects on Glitch and being a part of that is something that’s hard to find on the internet.

Did you know how you were going to build the app when you got started or did those decisions come to you as you were coding? For instance, did you go into the process knowing you’d be using WSJ data?

I didn’t start this app until I had the Wall Street Journal data source, which I didn’t even find myself, it came across my Twitter feed courtesy of Paul Miller. I knew when I started this was going to be a Flask based Python app because I’m super familiar with that setup and how it interacts with Glitch. I built out the UI first, and comparing what it looks like now to a sketch in my notebook, I can confidently say that I built exactly what I set out to build.

Updating the data went through a few design ideas: First I thought I’d have the data be filled out server-side and sent to the client using Flask’s built-in Jinja templates. The biggest benefit to that approach was not having to write JavaScript. JavaScript is a great language and it powers a lot of what I do, but I really don’t like writing it.

Eventually I came to my senses and decided the flexibility of being able to update the data without a full page reload was worthwhile. I did that with a Flask endpoint and a fairly simple client JavaScript file. Ironically I built in this flexibility and didn’t take advantage of it until I started getting some feedback on the app.

Once you shared the app, it really took off! How was it received, and did you need to make changes to the app in response to the reception? Was there anything you would have done differently given more planning and time?

It was so exciting, and a little frightening, to see this app take off. It was a crash course in social media virality for me; I tweeted it to my 81 followers and to date it’s reached 3,000 unique users totaling more than 7,000 page views.

The reception was awesome, it was great to see so many people using it, and it turned out a lot of people were looking for something to cut out all the noise for them. One of my best friends sent me a photo of the app on his company’s office flat screen and told me how the app flickered as they refreshed it. Conveniently, I had built in the flexibility to have the app update the data automatically, I just hadn’t implemented it. That’s where the two minute refresh countdown came from.

In response to comments on Twitter I added the electoral vote counts, the map color changes, and the minimize maps toggle. I also added PWA (Progressive Web App) capabilities after I kept losing the tab on my phone.

I enjoyed the time pressure, knowing that at any moment it could become irrelevant was a motivator to get it done. The one thing I wish I did was cache the data and show some sort of trend line from it. Even something as simple as showing which direction the vote margin was trending would have been awesome. There’s a similar app another group of developers made that was brought to my attention by people commenting on my app on Twitter that I think does that really well.

What do you plan on building next?

This week I’ve been a part of an awesome Glitch ✕ Twitter collaboration on an in-browser Jeopardy board. I adapted an old API of mine that allows a frontend developed by Patrick Weaver and Trent Willis to pull clues from previously aired episodes of Jeopardy. You can check out my API, the gameboard, and the Twitter thread.

Other than that I’ve got a lot of ideas but no concrete plans as of yet. Maybe something similar to this app for the upcoming Georgia Senate runoff elections. Although answering these questions for the Glitch blog is making me think that maybe I want to have my own blog 👀.

Thanks to Daniel, who should most definitely start his own blog, for telling his story and for building Too Close to Call on Glitch! If you build or see an app on Glitch that you want us to feature, tell us about it by emailing community@glitch.com.

Adopting SLO-based alerting on Glitch

We’re taking a break from our weekly round up of noteworthy apps to share a post written by Mads Hartmann, the Engineering Manager for our platform team. From time to time, we’ll post articles written by Glitch employees that give you a sneak peek into some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making Glitch go and grow.

Over the past year, Mads has written a multi-part series about observability at Glitch and the tools and processes we’ve implemented to make the site more reliable. The most recent post goes into a deep dive on SLO-based alerts - challenges with our previous on-caller system and an excerpt of our internal tech spec. There’s also a getting started guide that’s a good primer if you’re not familiar with SLOs or want to learn more about what goes into their implementation.

Read the full post here. And if you want to work alongside talented and thoughtful engineers like Mads, we’re hiring.

Upcoming Developer Events and Happenings

2020 is winding down, but industry events are far from over. And unlike previous years where attending a conference might require getting on a plane or spending all of that professional development budget, online events make attending easier than ever.

If you’re a developer - especially one interested in javascript, open source, or general web dev - here are some upcoming dates and happenings to put on your radar.

Already under way, Advent of Code, is a series of daily coding challenges that makers of all skill levels can participate in and use any programming language to solve. Similar to #100daysofcode, you can use advent of code to test your speed, sharpen new skills, or participate in a little friendly community competition. The first 100 entries each day get added to a leaderboard.

With four distinct tracks, you’re sure to find something that piques your interest at this year’s virtual event. The developer track is tailored to open source contributors and maintainers, the enterprise track is for senior leaders and decision-makers, the play track is for creative coders, and last but not least, the university track is for students and teachers.

If you’re interested in general trends related to open source and the broader developer landscape, add the keynote to your calendar (12/8, 12 PM EST and check out this year’s State of the Octoverse report.

Learn about updates coming to Chrome and watch speakers share protips on the latest tools and best practices for web devs. We’re looking forward to seeing some really well-produced videos; Googlers working on Chrome have impressed us in years past with their talk, both virtual and in-person. Request a free invite and keep your eyes peeled for some Glitch apps that might make an appearance!

Kick off the new year with some fresh takes on how to find work-life bliss. The You Got This conference series is dedicated to helping you develop "core skills needed for a happy, healthy work life." The upcoming conference in January is split into paid workshops on Friday (£40 per workshop or £90 for the full day) and free sessions on Saturday, the 16th. The topics are all related to 7 overarching themes: professional development, self care, working with others, ethics in tech, self advocacy, how to best support your teams as managers and diversity, and accessibility & inclusion. Free tickets available here.

If you want to spend two days focused on all-things Node, this event is for you. The full schedule hasn’t been published yet, but you can reserve a free ticket today. And if you have something you want to share with the community, you have until January 10 to submit a speaker proposal.

According to the official website, MozFest is “a unique hybrid: part art, tech and society convening, part maker festival, and the premiere gathering for activists in diverse global movements fighting for a more humane digital world.” Organizers recently made the call to shift from Amsterdam to a virtual event this spring. We attended last year and loved being surrounded by thousands of developers who were just as passionate about making a better, healthier Internet as we are. Call for speakers is officially closed and the schedule should be posted in the beginning of January.

The easiest way ever to control who you share your app with

Starting today, Glitch members with paid subscriptions can easily control who accesses their code and who sees live projects.

We’ve made sharing your app easier than ever. Control who has access and who can edit a project all without having to build some complicated authentication system for your project.

Here are just a handful of things you can do with this feature:

**Stay in stealth mode until launch. **Developer advocates can build demos and keep them private until the big announcement.
**Share code with students or workshop attendees. **From classrooms to conferences, you can control who sees assignments and projects.
**Build internal tools. **Whether you’re prototyping a new feature or using Glitch for your latest greatest Slack integration, create apps with your colleagues in mind.
**Interview candidates. **We’ve heard from teams who use Glitch to evaluate new team members. Now it’s even easier to share code examples with potential hires.
**Grow your own private blog or newsletter. **Have something you want to save for your inner circle? Share your best ideas with a select audience. **Here’s how it works: **

Build a project and hit the “Share” button in the top left just like you normally would. You’ll see a new pop up with a drop down menu where you can set your project’s sharing settings.

Public is the default setting, which makes your project visible and its code remixable for everyone
Private limits both your code and live site to project members
Private Code keeps the live site visible, but restricts code to project members We’ve eliminated the ability to join projects with share links and instead, are now asking project owners to explicitly invite collaborators via email. This implementation is more secure and gives projects owners greater visibility into who has access.

Current free users with “private” projects will still have their code only visible to members of their project. However, changing a project from private to public on a free account can’t be reversed.

What’s next? #

We’re spending a lot of time thinking about how to better enable groups of users on Glitch and what collaboration looks like in a professional setting. Since we launched our paid tier in the spring, we’ve seen lots of individual creators build more powerful apps and also introduce Glitch into some of their professional workflows - from hiring and onboarding team members to prototyping new features and internal tools. We’ll share more on this front as our roadmap evolves.

If you have any fun or interesting projects you’re building using today’s news, feel free to tag us on Twitter or email community@glitch so we can share with the community!

A Google Docs for Markdown

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.

Hitting The Mark #

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.

What Comes Next #

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!)

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

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.

**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.

**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.

**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!

**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.

**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.

**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!

How Technology Helped Building A Meaningful Gift Experience

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.

New year, new virtual you: a conversation with Kalidoface creator Rich Yee

_The coming of a new year is a great time to imagine what cutting edge, interactive technology we’ll see trending in web app creation. One trend that I hope to see grow ever more popular on Glitch is the use of body and face motion capture. So, it was a real delight to see Rich Yee launch Kalidoface on Glitch. Rich, a full-time visual designer and free-time creative technologist, has been prolific in the Glitch community, collaborating on Whirly Birdie and creating one of my personal favorites, THEREMIX_. I reached out to him to talk more about virtual character technology and how he used Glitch to bring it into the browser.

Jenn: For those who are not familiar, can you explain what virtual characters or VTubers are? And why do you think they are such a compelling technology these days? 

Rich: Vtubers, also known as Virtual Youtubers, are part of a rapidly growing genre on platforms like Youtube or Twitch where creators will base their identities around a digital avatar. While the early days of "Vtubing" (mid 2010s) involved a more expensive full body motion capture setup, the genre has slowly shifted towards face tracking connected to Live2D model, a setup better suited towards streaming. Live2D is a popular character animation format found in mobile games. Kalidoface currently uses official Live2D demo models and also allows users to upload their own Live2D models.

This technology has been a super fun way of merging fiction with reality. While there is backstory and lore behind each VTuber, the creator's voices and subtly animated expressions allow for their personalities to shine through, becoming a mix of fantasy and a genuinely human connection. I definitely couldn't have experienced this much character development by just watching seasonal anime.

Kalidoface is cute, but it’s also really powerful - not only letting users create a virtual character, but also communicate with others. What inspired you to create this app? 

Kalidoface aims to bring native-app-like face capture to the browser. Without needing to install anything, I wanted to create an easy way to animate your own avatars and introduce the concept of “Vtubers” to more people.

In the early days of development, I surprised some coworkers in Zoom calls using Kalidoface + OBS. However, it wasn't until I added one-on-one voice calling that I felt truly immersed in the world I was trying to make. There was just something special about seeing my long time friend as a talking dog while I was a talking cat that made the moment magical. In fact, I've been able to reconnect with old friends who were more willing to chat using Kalidoface over a regular video call.

How long was the process from getting the idea to sharing it with the world? 

I started playing around with the idea around early October, trying to get a sense of how feasibility and if the web platform was ready. I think I tried over 4 different face detection methods before finally discovering an official Tensorflow solution. From there, it was a grueling process of figuring out the vector math needed to transform a cloud of points into usable values for character rigging.

The design and UI of the app took up the other half. I wanted a jellymorphic visual design as I was already thinking that I wanted the mascot for the app to be something cute and squishy. I also wanted to be conscious of safe zone for use in streaming. My talented type designer friend helped make the cute logo, icons and custom illustrations while I was in the weeds trying to assemble it all together. It definitely was a tight deadline, but I wanted to be one of the first creators to release a "Vtuber" app for browsers.

What made Glitch the place you chose to build and share this project?  

Glitch has always been my preferred platform to prototype web experiments. Being able to work from any computer (and sometimes tablet) is super convenient and powerful. Combined with the fact that I'm running a dev server that doesn't take 1-2 minutes to recompile code has made this my go-to setup. I'm currently using Svelte + Snowpack for that sweet Hot Module Refresh life.

Glitch as a community has been super welcoming and creators on it are always releasing inspiring web experiments. My last 2 projects have also seen successes on Glitch and I saw no reason not to release Kalidoface on it as well. What can I say, I am a Glitch fan!

I imagine building something like this for (and in) the browser wasn’t possible several years ago - what libraries and APIs available today did you use to build Kalidoface? Were there any pain points you hit in the process? 

Definitely! At the core of this project is Tensorflow's Face Landmarks Detection (formerly Facemesh by Google Mediapipe). Their impressive machine learning model tracks 486 facial points + iris detection. Unlike other models, it tracks well even with glasses on.

Getting Live2D models to render in the browser was also a challenge. The official SDK is super hard to use and mostly in untranslated Japanese. Luckily, a single developer in China is currently working on a plugin that lets developers use the popular graphics library, PIXI.js with the Live2D format. Him and I went through alot of bug reports and feature requests throughout the development of Kalidoface, and even now, the app uses a beta version of Pixi-Live2D-Display.

The app is currently in beta, so what can we expect next for Kalidoface? 

A mascot! I’d love to commission or learn to draw an original character for Kalidoface. I’m thinking something squishy and bouncy. A time-traveling inter-dimensional jellyfish? Maybe that’s too crazy.
Stickers and layers! While you could just open up Kalidoface in OBS and customize your streaming scene to have png images/text layered on top, I do want to offer a simple way to add floating stickers (maybe even animated gifs!) to your canvas. There might even be some Kalidoface exclusive stickers!

And of course, bug fixes. If anyone has any more suggestions, feel free to tweet me @yeemachine. I definitely have a long list and exciting list ahead of me.

Shouts out to Rich for teaching us more about vTubers and the tech behind it, and make sure to try out Kalidoface for yourself! If you build or see an app on Glitch that you want us to feature, tell us about it by emailing community@glitch.com.

Last Month on Glitch, the January 2021 edition

January was as long a month as 2020 was a year, but we've finally reached the end. Before we fully dive into this perfectly rectangular February, why not take a look at some of the apps our community created last month?

For a bunch of us, the new year means coming back after a break and having to re-learn how to code, type, speak, etc. Here are some neat utilities that helped me get back in the working groove.

Adrienne made ~betternotes so we all can create…better notes!
Clive shared this really neat take on the pomodoro timer he built. It's become a regular part of my own productivity workflow.
~color-gd is a tool by Alex that not only lets you create color schemes, but share them easily as well. For my fellow devs out there, check out some of the resources and demos our peers have been building on Glitch!
Our pals at Postlight Labs built ~divsarentbtns to let us all of us to know that divs aren’t buttons. I’m sure no one is more devastated to be on their Hall of Shame, frankly, than…Nathan’s Hot Dogs. All kidding aside, the page includes resources for “a more accessible web” which everyone should be striving for – not just our favorite fast food eateries.
While we're talking about accessibility, I really love this ~toy-screen-reader. The creator, Cameron, tweeted that he initially wrote it all on Glitch using an iPad!
John wrote about his work in visualizing Covid cases in Congress and shared this demo on Glitch of the final results. *Oh boy, Potch has got me dithering again, and so can you with a webcam and ~dither-cam! Here are a couple *of other really rad projects that turn your presence into art.
Kalidoface turns you into a virtual character, alone or with friends! We talked to its creator, Rich, about how he made it, so check that out!
Google AI's Magenta team hosted an experimental series merging music and machine learning, and one of the coolest projects out of it is ~dance-project. The creator, Aparna, explores turning motion into sound, taking inspiration from Bharatanatyam -"one of the oldest forms of classical Indian dance."

As I stare out my window at over a foot (and counting!) of snow accumulating, I wish I was seeing the above scene, by Niko the Neko, instead. Here are some other works of art and expression our immensely talented community created.

Emma's, ~blackoutpoetry, a really nifty tool for creating blackout poetry in the browser, has been around for awhile but has been picking up a lot of traction with teachers and students coming back to school after the holiday break.
Literally every app on John's Sunday Sites page is incredible. Sunday Sites is a cool sort of web ring and hackathon group who primarily have been using Glitch! One of their other members, Seán, made this joyful app that displays the four seasons in splendid ASCII.
Artist Christina Sadovnikov hosts her art portfolio on Glitch and it's really beautiful. I especially love Divisional Tide and* holy crow *do I miss going to art galleries!

You can count Rowan, creator of ~overly-particular above, among my fantasy roster of Glitch superstars. The following are other miscellaneous superstar apps that inspired me, thrilled me, or made me not hungry anymore.

Shouts out to one of my former home towns, East Brunswick, New Jersey, where a teen started a New Jersey chapter of Balance Boxes – a youth-led non-profit that distributes all kinds of items to children in low-income communities.
An r/incremental_games redditor was inspired by the community to create ~incresite, an incremental game where you’re in charge of a social media site. If only this were all a game!
~aimless is a Spotify recommendation app that got some heavy traction in the r/csMajors subreddit!
Aaron's specialty foods generator, ~uk-food [content warning, some fresh language] both delighted and broke many, particularly those who did not know that London Broil is an American dish. This was a fun journey of apps for me to revisit, and I hope you had fun too. You can even be a part of it in future months – just remix and create the app of your dreams, and then let us know about it! If you have Glitch projects you built or love and want us to feature, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com! ✨

*The project featured in this post's header image is ~bananaland by @potatowizardtwo 🍌

Last Month on Glitch, the February 2021 edition

February may be the shortest month, but it has the most personality (biased Aquarius here!). That personality has definitely shone through the apps you all were creating and sharing over the month.

Our community not only loves collaborating and creating with each other, but it loves to build tools to facilitate collaboration and creation.

~coolzone is a multi-user drawing/writing tool by @crafah where anyone connected can communicate. Remix it and make one for your next virtual hangout!
If you prefer communicating through sound, then fresh from The Gallery is ~one-hand-band, which is like ~coolzone but for making music. @hatandbread built it so you can create your own room or join an existing one, and it's a progressive web app!
@high_byte created ~digital-pottery so you can make pottery without the mess and be able to share your models with others.

_Many of you were building and sharing apps to celebrate Black History Month and the landing of Perseverance on Mars. By the way, please don't send me to Mars. I can enjoy Perseverence from here thanks to _@AngelFQC, thanks.

@jeffrey.rivera created ~knowledge-of-space as a 3D educational...space to float around while you learn.
A class made this informative site, ~bhm-website, to add to as they learned throughout Black History Month, including interviews and useful resources.
Mariame Kaba's ~blackphotobooth (design by @netanoir) is a beautiful zine of found photo booth portraits of Black people.

I'm excited to see how this fake terminal by @louh evolves! Here are some other apps that are inspiring me away from my work :)

~spline-isometric-room is a demo of a Spline export hosted on Glitch. Read more on the support forum about how @khalby786 made it!
~birdfolder is a landing page for a new project by @hootalex that I can only best describe as "sweet" and "🕊". All the way to outer space and back in a single blog post, look at us! If you have Glitch projects you built or love and want us to feature, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com - You may just end up in our next roundup! ✨

The project featured in this post's header image is A Very Long Walk, which is currently about halfway on it's journey from Russia to Portugal 🚶‍♂️

Artists building tools to help other artists: a Q+A with Blockasaurus creator Joe Sondow

Earlier this month, the third most expensive artwork sale by a living artist happened on the blockchain in the form of an NFT, or non-fungible token. The excitement of innovation around selling fine digital art for fine analog art prices has flooded social media and offline conversations ever since. Now, truly anything can be minted and sold: images, text, and even *moments in time!* Of course, such excitement often arrives hand-in-hand with the valid fears of being taken advantage of, and that's for sure happening with NFTs; not only can anything be sold, but it seems like *anyone* can sell it, and that has left artists feeling vulnerable of theft that they already deal with in the conventional fiat market.

This lead to Joe Sondow creating Blockasaurus, a Glitch app that has allowed artists on Twitter to quickly block all of the bots that have been taking advantage of this NFT movement by minting their tweets and artwork. I talked to Joe about Blockasaurus, the why and how behind it, and the problem with the NFT movement that this project is helping to mitigate.

Jenn: What is Blockasaurus, and why did you create it?

Joe: Blockasaurus is a web app that lets any Twitter user quickly block a list of accounts that they paste into a form. I made it because the existing Twitter mass blocking tools didn't seem up to the task of quickly and easily blocking the growing list of hundreds of accounts that have started using automated services to mint NFTs of other people's intellectual property on Twitter. Blockasaurus accepts any text format that contains Twitter screen names with or without punctuation, and blocks as many of them as it can.

Blockasaurus has been one of the most widely shared Glitch apps on Twitter over the past week or so because of the explosion of crypto art and NFTs. What does blocking Twitter accounts even have to do with NFTs?

There are some new unethical Twitter bots that claim to automatically do the work of minting NFTs of the contents of any tweet. They then grant ownership of that NFT to any random person who first requests ownership, even if the requester is not the owner or publisher of the content. By making this type of art theft trivially convenient and free via Twitter, these bots enable an order of magnitude increase in the number of people who are trying to steal art profits. To mitigate this problem, a lot of artists and other creators are making their Twitter accounts private, deleting high quality old tweets, or swearing off using Twitter to promote their work. All of those solutions mean less success for creators and a weaker artistic culture for all of us. Blocking one NFT minting bot account is no guarantee that other bot accounts aren't working in a similar way, so people are sharing lists of the users of those NFT minting bot accounts, so creators can try to mass block the thieves themselves. But there are a lot of them. Artists have been tweeting about spending hours each day manually blocking each of the accounts on those lists. The purpose of Blockasaurus is to make it easy to block all the accounts on medium-sized block lists.

Can you talk a bit about the tech behind Blockasaurus (what it’s written in, any APIs you use, etc)?

It's written in Node with Express, because that's what https://poop-blocker.glitch.me/ used, and I wanted to build the new app as fast as possible to help artists facing an emergency. It uses the Twitter API to authenticate and block accounts.

*Side note: Joe is extremely prolific on Twitter and uses it a lot for his art and tech: he writes interactive fiction stories using Twitter polls (see: #ChaosRaccoon and #StarshipWonder) and has made a lot of novelty Twitter accounts, both automated and manual (see: @PicardTips, @RikerGoogling, @StarTrekHour, @WorfEmail, @EmojiTetra, @EmojiSnakeGame, @EmojiAquarium, @EmojiMeadow, @EmojiPrincesses, @TinyPettingZoo, @TrumpsVitals, @InaugCountdown, @realRealDukat.)

What made you choose Glitch as the platform to create and host Blockasaurus?

The short answer is that https://poop-blocker.glitch.me/ already existed and I knew I just needed to clone it and change a few things to make Blockasaurus quickly. The time between my first code change on Glitch and my launch tweet was 6 hours, including breaks for taking care of my sick cat. But the longer answer is more interesting.

I have more expertise in Java than JavaScript server-side development, but Glitch is unparalleled for facilitating getting a simple but useful free web app running quickly with a decent URL, without much research or boilerplate to go through. I've used Glitch before, to make a web app called Superblock, which is only usable by me. Superblock is for when someone is bothering me on Twitter enough that I want to quickly block them on all of my accounts at once so they won't try to harass me through my novelty accounts. I wrote the first working version of Superblock using just my phone when I was away from home and didn't have my computer. Not a development experience I recommend, but it is possible to do. That experience is connected to how I started writing Twitter interactive fiction ("Poll-Playing Games") to help myself get through my father's last few months of life, and how little patience I had for strangers online telling me not to retweet my own work during that time. So, Glitch genuinely helped me get through a very difficult period in my life.

@Rumpelcita's Poop-blocker, one of the apps that inspired Blockasaurus, is another popular Glitch app that's helped users improve their Twitter experience.

I was actually introduced to your work via your EmojiAquarium twitter bot! How is creating art with code different or the same as creating utilities like Blockasaurus with the same tools (ie. code, Twitter APIs)? Do you prefer creating one over the other?

What an interesting question. I think for me, creating art, games, or utilities with code are all connected to a desire to delight other people. Making art like EmojiAquarium is similar to making utilities like Blockasaurus in that they're both things I wanted to see in the world, but that didn't exist yet, so I made them. But there is a difference in making art that isn't to solve a known problem so much as just to add something good into the world that helps people feel a little better sometimes. I guess I prefer creating art and games, since I have a huge backlog of ideas still to implement. But when the situation calls for a utility that I know a lot of people need, it's gratifying to be able to provide it.

Usually I use AWS Lambda with Java to automate Twitter tasks on a timer for things like Twitter bots and certain custom retweet automation. The interface for Blockasaurus needed to be a web app, so Glitch worked perfectly for that. The Twitter API is a royal pain but I've gotten to know its ins and outs pretty well over the years. My stumbling block now tends to be that I'm a novice at Node.js.

Since your app is being widely shared and discussed on social media, I could imagine you’ve seen a lot of discourse about NFTs and other reasons users have taken to using Blockasaurus. Have your opinions on crypto art changed in any way since you tweeted the app?

No, NFTs are trash.

Were there any surprises for you after you launched Blockasaurus (ex. The response, the kinds of communities using it, etc)?

I'm pleased that a few other types of Blockasaurus uses have come up for some people, but I haven't seen people sharing public lists of accounts to block for any uses besides NFT art theft so far. One community that just found out about Blockasaurus yesterday is the BTS fan base, so for a while the profile pictures in my notifications were all hot South Korean guys.

So far I've been pleasantly surprised not to get any backlash against the existence of the tool itself, although some of the block lists that were going around have been questioned and deleted because they weren't made carefully enough so they included some artists that people didn't want to block.

**What can we expect next from you? **

A bunch of things...I'm working on a new version of Blockasaurus that will work better with Twitter's rate limit API to succeed in blocking more of the accounts a user requests in a larger batch. It will visually communicate better which block attempts succeeded and which failed, and it will retry failed attempts when Twitter allows them again, as long as the page stays open in the browser. I've started working on ongoing automation of collecting and sharing all the accounts that are attempting to mint NFTs for other people's work.

I'm aiming to do some of my coding in livestreams on Twitch like I used to, although I'm a bit out of practice in streaming. I'll also be live streaming some digital board game playthroughs with some of my Twitch streamer friends this month. And when I'm not too exhausted from pandemic life I plan to get back to making more Twitter games. One of the next ones might be about crossword puzzles.

Those are all unannounced things but they'll be on my Twitter as they go public.

_Thanks to Joe for talking to us about Blockasaurus, as well as the controversy behind the NFT minting bots that inspired it. If you build or see an app on Glitch that you want us to feature, we want to know! Tell us about it by emailing communi_ty@glitch.com or tweeting @glitch!

Rapid prototyping for rapid annotation, a Q+A with Ada Rose Cannon

One of the most empowering things about programming is being able to code your own solutions to problems that are important but maybe a bit small or different from what existing software is made for. Being able to remix and create apps on Glitch is perfect in such cases; you can go from identifying a problem to building and sharing your solution in minutes with a friendly community doing the same! One such example is Ada Rose Cannon sharing her simple YouTube annotation app, ~yt-annotator.

Ada, a developer advocate for the Android Web Browser Samsung Internet, is no stranger to building great apps on Glitch, but ~yt-annotator was a bit of a detour from the WebXR work she often does [she is one of the co-chairs for the W3C Immersive Web Groups, the groups working on the Web Standards for the WebXR APIs that let websites use Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technology].

I recently asked Ada some questions about this app, and her thoughts on rapid prototyping in general.

Jenn: What is ~yt-annotator and what is the tech behind it? 

Ada: ~yt-annotator is a very simple little website for leaving time-stamped notes on YouTube videos so you can quickly jump back and forth and re-watch bits. The tech is very simple, it's just the YouTube API, some vanilla JavaScript and a smidge of HTML & CSS. It uses the localstorage API to save your annotations locally in the browser so you can come back to them later. The links which change the current time in the player also work as normal YouTube links with timestamps so you can open them in a new window or share them.

There is some RegEx to parse the YouTube URLs to get the video ID.
It loads the video into the page with the YouTube API.
When the user adds an annotation it adds a new row to a simple HTML table with a timestamp link and the second cell is contenteditable so the user can type into it.
When the user makes any changes to the text it serialises all of the data into JSON and stores it as a string in localstorage. It's not the most efficient method but for a simple use case like this it works well. If it was expecting very large amounts of text I would've done it slightly differently by using IndexedDB to store individual annotations but this works well enough.
If the user reloads the page it decodes that big chunk of JSON and reconstructs the table.
when the user clicks on the timestamp links it updates the iframe with the YouTube video

**When I reached out to you about talking about ~yt-annotator, you mentioned that you “only spent like an hour building it” which speaks to your “get something out there…it doesn’t have to be perfect” ethos that you’ve expressed in the past. What drove you to build ~yt-annotator and get it “out there?”

It started with this conversation about learning from YouTube videos and how videos are are still useful for code tutorials even though a more accessible format, like a blog post, would in theory be better. For things like graphics programming, like this SDF Raymarching tutorial with a lot of graphical elements, videos are a great format. Unfortunately I am a purely visual learner and I usually prefer watching these videos on mute or with minimal audio, skipping back and forth to the relevant parts. I really don't like hearing people talk whilst I am trying to learn things.

I then remembered YouTube's ability for deep-linking into timestamped videos and thought about how one could create a website where you annotate a video with timestamped annotations and could deep link them via the URL targeted to the iframe. I was hoping there would be some kind of postmessage-based API to YouTube iframes to obtain the timestamp from the videos and fortunately there was. Even better, YouTube had made an API library for loading & controlling videos in an iframe, so I used that.

The code is simple enough (less than 100 lines of JavaScript) that there is not a lot of space for bugs, and it works cross-platform well. At first there was a weird race condition in Chrome due to the non-standard way I was loading the YouTube library, but that was a quick fix. Once I was satisfied it was working well enough I shared it back to twitter.

I have many years experience of rapid-prototyping websites where getting an MVP in a very tight time frame is an important goal. It's a skill that gets better with practise. Don't be afraid to kill-your-darlings. If you've spent some hours on solving a problem but don't seem to be making progress, it's okay to set that code aside and try a different path. There are often many different ways to solve a problem with code. Try stepping away from the keyboard and having a shower, or go for a walk, and often the solution will come to you. When I make something in a few hours like this, people often see the occasional success story, not the dozens of projects which just aren't turning out how I'd like and I have set aside. Knowing when to try a new solution is a really useful skill.

The other thing that really helps with rapid-prototyping is keeping things simple. It may be tempting to spend the first few hours of coding setting up a fancy development environment, with complex build processes and large frameworks. At first this may seem like you are putting in a little time now to save time later. Unfortunately, this process usually ends up constraining your solution space to work within the paradigms of the framework you choose. By working with a minimal set up and getting used to using everything the web platform offers, it will give you benefits no matter what web frameworks and toolkits you work with in the future. In addition, when you return to the project in the future, you will have elements you can reuse in other projects, fewer dependencies to update and you won't have to relearn the particular tools that project was built with.

What made Glitch the place you chose to build and share this and your other projects?  

I like Glitch because it's a really fun place to mess around and share something. If a project becomes more serious I can export it to GitHub or move it to a new hosting provider but for just trying out a quick idea to see how it works, Glitch is great. Spending an hour or two to see if an idea works is a great way to try out something new, if it doesn't work I often end up learning just as much if not more as when a project works the first time. When a project is good enough to share after a quick prototype it's a really nice feeling and if someone wants to take it and run with it they are welcome to remix it.

Can you share what YouTube videos you’ve been annotating, or at least what kind of videos you think an app like yt-annotator would enhance the experience for viewers?  

The SDF Raymarching video (mentioned earlier) is the video which mostly made me want to have a tool like this. Since I was writing the raymarching code for the web rather than unity I was rewriting the code in a different language which meant I was jumping back and forth in the video to see how the code compares with the techniques that were demonstrated.

The surprising place I found yt-annotator really useful were recipe videos. I love cooking and following YouTube tutorials. A Chinese YouTuber called Gao does amazing videos, her techniques and instructions turn out perfectly as long as you follow them exactly, she often goes into detailed explanations of how things work. Since it often involves techniques unfamiliar to me I end up replaying bits again and again as I am working in the kitchen so having the time-stamped shortcuts is really handy to be able to quickly replay a particular section.

What do you plan on building next? 

I have some fun ideas for more Virtual Reality demos, but they are a secret right now. so you will have to stay tuned. You can follow the Samsung Internet team on twitter @SamsungInternet.

Many thanks to Ada for building yt-annotator and all of her other awesome contributions to the Glitch community! And if you build or see an app on Glitch that you want us to feature, tell us about it by emailing community@glitch.com or tweeting @glitch!

Last Month on Glitch: the March 2021 edition

Happy April! As the saying goes, March went in like a lion and out like a lamb for many of us at Glitch. One thing that hasn't changed is that our community is still building really awesome apps that surprise and inspire. Let's dive into the tools, games, and art you have been building over the past month!

Code is a powerful instrument for building solutions to all sorts of problems, big and small!

~blockasaurus is an app by @joesondow that lets you mass-block twitter accounts. Check out our creator interview with Joe where we talk about his work and the NFT movement!
If you are working at home and miss the chaotic background noise of a busy office or coffee shop, just keep ~hatnote-coffitivity by @elvedin open in a tab. Make sure to leave it open during meetings too!
The twitter bot, AltTxtReminder, was created by @ckolbeck to help remind folks via direct message if they've posted an image without alt text. You can view the source and remix to set up your own at ~alt-reminder-bot.
~cake-icer lets you create messages in the form of cake icing, created by @stegriff. Use it to send a message to your coworkers apologizing for any weird artificial coffeehouse noises that disrupted your stand-up this morning.

*~emojraw by @shannonlin and @bwasti1 is like *a pixel art editor but with emoji. Take a break and have some chill time with these apps, too:

~dans-online-snake is a simple multi-user snake game by @dantechguy. It's single-player too and I would be lying if I said that I didn't once have this game open in a window for 20 minutes while I was on hold with a utility company the other day.
~evergiven-everywhere, by @garrettdashnelson, lets you get the Evergiven Everywhere ship stuck...everywhere. We've got an interview with Garrett coming soon here, so stay tuned and not stuck in a canal if you can.
~squarez is one of many really cool canvas apps that @bengarvey's been creating and sharing. Check out his profile - clicking virtually any app will lead to a brief escape from any mundane moment!

*Whether you're practicing advanced improv or riding the unicycle that your dad once gave to you 8 years ago for reasons still unknown, there's a ~practice-guide for that, thanks to @thricedotted. Here are some other apps that you need to check out!

March 14th every year is Pi Day. Celebrate belatedly by throwing slices of pizza in a circle with ~pizza-pi by @potch. In This House, We Eat Pizza and Learn Math!
~wikipedia-around, by @tomayac, shows you Wikipedia articles from around wherever you're located. Bookmarking this one for when I can start traveling again!
~landmarks by @chelsea.l.thompto is a powerful, interactive artwork that "explores facial recognition and the politics of technologies of visualization," bringing awareness to the danger from such technologies to trans people. Closing out this round-up, I want to give a special shouts out to @aboutDavid for building ~this-month, which lists apps that are shared in our Support Forum's "The Gallery" category so anyone can clearly see what folks there are sharing. 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 - You may just end up in our next roundup! ✨

*The project featured in this post's header image is ~march-lions-lambs by @bplmaps 🐑

The ship and app seen virtually everywhere: a Q+A with Evergiven Everywhere creator Garrett Dash Nelson

It's a tale as old as time: one of the largest container ships in the world gets stuck in the Suez Canal and captures the attention of the entire world. It also captures our imagination, leading us to consider the possibility of something both disruptive and absurd happening close to our own homes. Then, suddenly, there's an app for that. It's called Evergiven Everywhere and it was created by Garrett Dash Nelson (@garrettdashnelson), the Curator of Maps & Director of Geographic Scholarship at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. Like the news of the actual Evergiven ship, ~evergiven-everywhere captured the imaginations of people all over the world, from a mall in Mayalsia to the opinion pages of the NY Times. We talked to Garrett about how and why he created this app, and why maps are such an important and interesting medium for storytelling.

Jenn: Tell us a bit about the work you do!

Garrett: I’m a historical geographer, and my research focuses on how people’s ideas about community, politics, and place have changed over time in response to spatial transformations like industrialization and urbanization. At the Leventhal Center, I oversee the library’s quarter-million geographic objects; we run exhibitions and public programs on history and geography themes, and also build digital tools to help people explore maps in new ways.

**What is ~evergiven-everywhere, and why did you create it?

If I’m being honest, there were three main reasons why I created this thing. First, I had been wanting to try Glitch to see how quickly I could use it to wrangle a project together. I’ve seen a lot of people whose work I admire using Glitch, and I was particularly intrigued by the open, collaborative concept since we’re always trying to get people interested in digital humanities methods in a friendly, welcoming manner. Second, I had a writing project that I was stuck on, and I’ll oftentimes do a little bit of coding when I’m procrastinating on writing. It was Sunday morning, and I told myself I’d try to do this before my second cup of coffee, and then move on to writing. Third, I just thought it would be funny to see the familiar picture of the Evergiven transposed onto other places!

How does the app work technically? It’s pretty simple, actually: there’s a map of the world, and on top of it there’s a picture of a boat! I used the Leaflet library to create the map, pulling it in via a CDN. When we do more complicated mapping projects, I usually use the more complicated library OpenLayers and a build tool, as well as frameworks like Vue or Svelte, but in this case, I wanted to keep it super simple. With Leaflet I can make a simple map in about two minutes. I sourced the base map tiles from ESRI’s World Imagery layer. Beyond that, it’s just some vanilla JS to manipulate the DOM.

In the first version, the one I did in about 20 minutes, there was no option to keep the ship true-to-scale. As it started getting popular, lots of people were tweeting at me saying they wanted this feature. Though I’d sworn I wouldn’t spend any more of my writing day working on this project, I figured that scaling the ship would make it a little bit more of a plausible educational tool rather than just a silly meme generator. Most web maps use the Web Mercator projection, in which scale is a function of both the zoom level and the latitude of the center point. (Mercator has considerable size distortion along the y axis.) So I used a calculation that figures out the pixel-to-meters ratio at the map’s center point, and then implements a CSS transform to keep the Evergiven image true to that ratio.

What made you choose Glitch as the platform to create and host evergiven-everywhere?

I’ve been intrigued for a while with the Glitch platform’s emphasis on remixing and sharing code. I also liked the challenge of seeing how quickly I could push out a project like this, without having to set up space on our web server, create a GitHub repository, and so on. We’ve been thinking about using Glitch for some of our adult education programs on web mapping, and I wanted to give it a try.

Your app is one of (if not the) most shared apps all around social media and the news. Why do you think this reached the virality it did, and was that something you were expecting or hoping for while you were building it?

I honestly wasn’t looking for meme fame when I created it. The Internet is so fickle; I’ve put many hours into projects that I thought would be more popular, and they barely made a splash. Then this project, which as I’ve noted was just a kind of coffee-break distraction, went absolutely crazy. Reflecting back on it, though, I think its virality does tell us something important about the collision between geographic scales. On the one hand, we consume a globalized media diet, and the herd effect of the Internet means that millions of people across the world are likely to have their attention turned towards a single topic at any given time. On the other hand, though, people still live their lives mostly in local geographies: we’re familiar with—and oftentimes emotionally connected to—the places that are near to us. The ability to juxtapose these scales, to see an image that’s become placeless dropped into a location that represents one’s sense of geographic “self,” is both amusing and instructive.

Some of my favorite Glitch apps use maps to do creative things, your work included! What is it about maps that have gotten you into the work that you do, and why do you think they are such a compelling medium for app creation?

Making sense of the spatiality of the world around us is one of the foundational patterns of human consciousness. Maps are extraordinary visual devices because they reduce the geographic complexity of the real world into a simple and recognizable representation. (That means maps can also be very dangerous, as they sometimes come to seem more real than reality itself.) I’ve always been interested in the way that maps configure people’s intuitive sense of what places are important to them—and also what kinds of communities they feel that they belong to. I sometimes refer to that as the interplay between the geography of “here” and the social solidarity of “us.”

Maps oftentimes become interesting to people because they mix the familiar and the unfamiliar. I did a project a few years back with my colleague Alasdair Rae where we redrew the map of the US into regions based on the geography of commuter patterns. The outline of the US and the locations of major cities are very familiar to most people, at least people who live in the US. But the alternative geography of urban megaregions was something people had never “seen” in this way before, even if they often intuitively understood some of these regional interactions.

**Going back to your app being so widely shared, what are the weirdest or most surprising places you’ve seen someone place Ever Given? **Honestly, I feel like I’ve seen it placed almost everywhere in the world over the past week. I thought it was kind of interesting to see it dropped into places where it looked absolutely ordinary, like the Port of Rotterdam or Long Beach. It was also surprising to see just how huge it seemed when it was dropped onto land, even in comparison to massive buildings like stadiums. And I laughed when a few people used the app early on to wedge the boat between the Cape of Good Hope and Antarctica (not to scale, of course), blocking the channel that shipping traffic was using to re-route around the plugged Suez Canal.

**What can we expect next from you? **

Well, hopefully, the writing project I was procrastinating on won’t take me too much longer! It’s a book that looks at the history of how planners debated how to handle different types of geographic “units” like the neighborhood, urban metropolis, or ecological region. At the Leventhal Center, we’re constantly building new mapping projects, like our Atlascope tool for exploring historic atlases in the Boston area. I also hope over the next decade or so, we’ll be creating even more tools that make digital mapping more approachable and engaging. There are many people doing amazing projects with digital geography, but there’s still a formidable technical learning curve for everyone from K-12 teachers to academic historians. I can certainly imagine that some Glitch-based learning tools might be part of those efforts.

Thanks to Garrett for chatting with us about ~evergiven-everywhere and the impact Glitch has had on digital geography. If you build or see an app on Glitch that you want us to feature, we'd love to know! Email community@glitch.com or tweet @glitch!

Going global with Glitch: a Q+A with AMP educator Ben Morss

It’s an all-too-familiar scenario for most of us. One day you’re looking at a calendar chock full of upcoming events and plans, and then BAM! A global pandemic hits, canceling everything in sight for the foreseeable future. But what to do if you’re an online educator and devrel professional trying to bring new devs to the web in various locales? This was the exact plight Ben Morss, Developer Advocate for Google faced last year when COVID-19 struck. We chatted with him about how he was able to face this situation head-on, how Glitch helped take his team global, and some of the challenges of being an online educator.

Can you provide an overview of the coding workshops you’ve run, or are running? Who do you work with on your team to make them happen and who participates?

In 2019, Rob Ocel at ThisDot and I created a set of three free courses on AMP. We designed them not just to help experienced web developers get started with AMP, but also to help aspiring web developers get started. After all, AMP lets people create interactive websites without writing JavaScript (though you can), and we felt this made it a nice entry point for newcomers.

Running live web coding classes over the years, I learned that starting up a web server presents a significant obstacle. Also, for these courses, we wanted to give students starter code, mostly so they wouldn’t need to write their own CSS. Thus, we decided to incorporate an online coding environment into the courses. Other Googlers were already using Glitch for web.dev. Glitch was cute, simple to get started with, and it made it quick and easy for people to copy a starter project. Rob and I decided it would be perfect for the AMP courses!

We published the courses on amp.dev. We also created decks and videos and made the training materials available to anyone. But we also wanted to make them available to meetups. So we compressed the first course into a two-hour workshop. And we encouraged training programs and boot camps, Google Developer Groups, Developer Student Clubs, and everyone else to run this workshop.

Meanwhile, I was organizing and running a series of AMP mini-conferences around the world. In 2020, I planned to focus exclusively on developing markets. Local contacts helped me set up a three-city trip to Pakistan, an event in Sri Lanka, and another in Bangladesh, all in March and April. I couldn’t wait to get started!

Then, COVID-19 happened. We had to cancel all of our events. How could we reach developers now?

After a period of mourning and confusion, I set up a couple of virtual workshops. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that these could be quite effective. Glitch was a key element here. Not only could students easily find our starter code and start working without having to start up a web server—but everyone’s projects were public by default as well. As people completed exercises, I’d ask them to share their Glitch URLs with me. I could then load those up on my computer and show them to the group. This provided a much-needed social element. And when people had trouble, they could still share their Glitch URL, and I could help them debug.

In 2020, we ran about twenty of these virtual workshops.

~nice-consonant is an app that represents most of the work done in the AMP courses Morss facilitates.

**How does an international coding workshop differ from a program that’s just confined to the US? **

Our events centered in the US and our events centered elsewhere were very similar. One wonderful thing about the developer community is that it’s so international. A web developer in Australia often works with similar tools and similar problems as a web developer in Colombia. As long as everyone can understand the same language, they can use the same content. Of course, there are differences and exceptions, but to me, the remarkable thing is how much programmers around the world have in common.

I noticed early on that a workshop put on by a group in one country would attract people from other places as well. I remember that a workshop put on by GDG Nuremberg also brought in students from places like India and Brazil. Which was spectacular.

We’d love to know how you structure the actual workshop. Can you share any of the materials or apps that you built?

For each of our three courses, we made one Glitch with the starter code and another Glitch with what the student should have at the end. Each course contained a series of exercises, each of which built on the previous work, so we also made Glitches for each intermediate step.

For the workshop, I included 5 discrete tasks. Each involves adding features to a simple webpage, and as the student completes them they build the page. They start with something very simple—modifying an image so that it uses instead of the standard HTML <img>. Then, they add an attribute to make that image responsive. Soon they’re adding an image carousel, social sharing links, and a menu. Within ninety minutes, they’ve learned how to use AMP components to create a basic interactive webpage! It can be quite empowering.

**How do these workshops help you achieve your team’s goals? How do you measure success? **

Even though our international mini-conferences were thrilling, the workshops have been much more efficient. Our live events included a workshop portion, but it was hard to keep it going in a large room full of potentially restless people, not all of whom were developers or who’d brought along a laptop. Sometimes we didn’t have enough power strips or reliable WiFi. And, of course, to run an event in the physical world, we had to find a venue, secure catering, reach out to developers to come spend a day with us, and convince a set of volunteers to fly across the world. Live events were a wonderful adventure, but they also involved substantial time and expense. For the virtual events, I simply reached out to developers who ran an existing meetup. When the time came to do the workshop, I’d just walk up to my office and fire up my computer.

Of course, I really miss the communities we discovered through live events. But some groups have successfully built community through virtual workshops. Last May, eight different groups from across North America, from Memphis to Winnipeg and Houston, all collaborated on a workshop. It became quite the social occasion!

We ran live events for a few reasons, but quite possibly the two most important were exposing developers to AMP and getting their feedback. These virtual workshops help us continue to accomplish the first goal: participants get to make their first AMP site. Interestingly we tend to reach a lot more beginners and less experienced developers, so they become more of an educational event, a chance for newbies to get their feet wet.

To help measure success (or failure), I usually ask participants to fill out a survey at the end. To incentivize people to take the trouble to fill it out, when possible we raffle off a small prize. Taken together, the survey results are about as high as I’ve ever seen for any event I’ve ever been involved with. Go Glitch!

**Has anything in your workflow changed as a result of COVID-19? What’s different and how have you adjusted? **

For a Developer Advocate, well, yes, pretty much everything changed. :) One week I was planning events in five cities, scheduling my own trip to Pakistan, and working on a talk for Google I/O. The next week, my main projects vanished. I had to start again.

A year later, I’m accustomed to the new life that many of us are living—working from home, cooking and cleaning more, taking care of kids, and learning new skills, like how to snake out a clogged shower drain. I still feel highly privileged and incredibly fortunate. I still have a job, no one in my immediate family has caught COVID, and we are fortunate enough to be able to stay home. (This would have been much harder if I’d stayed in my previous career, as a musician.) We’re also fortunate that the extended family time has brought us closer together. But as I thrive on social interactions and the novelty of moving from place to place, I do still find this new life difficult. On the other hand, I’ve also had time to start coding more. Recently I even re-learned C in order to add support for AVIF to libgd.

**For educators and dev rel professionals thinking about using Glitch to reach learners, what are some of your pro tips or lessons learned the hard way? **

I really believe in workshops instead of talks, especially for online events. They help involve everyone. Start off with something easy. Make it fun, encourage people to chat, encourage them to stay involved.

When doing this workshop, I always compress the part where I just talk to people. I’m pretty sure that after five minutes of me talking, most people watching me on their computer screens will have tuned out. I try to replace this talking time with discussion and with coding. Let people be active. Give them the space to learn!

_Thanks to Ben for sharing his experience and wisdom in guiding international workshops and how Glitch was able to empower web devs in the making. If you build or see an app on Glitch that you want us to feature, we’d love to know! Email community@glitch.com or tweet @glitch_!

Top 30 ways companies are using Glitch

There are at least a million ways you can use Glitch, and here are 30 ways we’ve seen your favorite companies, communities, and organizations build with Glitch.

When we set out to create a way to enable people to get their cool idea spun into internet reality in a matter of seconds, there was no way to predict how folks would take Glitch and make it their own. While we try to keep the Glitch community updated on all of the amazing apps we come across, we also want to share a broader glimpse into who is embracing Glitch and how.

Some apps you’ll recognize, others might surprise you

The team behind everyone’s favorite workplace communication hub, Slack has been using Glitch for quite a while. From a place to spin up quick demos, to a portal for multiple workshop materials, to sample starters for their framework Bolt, the Slack team has embraced the many uses of Glitch. They aren’t alone—in fact, another popular communication application you might have heard of ~~[Twitter](https://glitch.com/@twitter)~~ famously built a demo of their API late last year on Glitch. One of their UI engineers liked Glitch so much that they used it to build an Eleventy site.

Speaking of visualization, John Keefe of the New York Times wrote about his work in visualizing COVID-19 cases in Congress and shared the above demo on Glitch of the final results.

Teams from Postman, Microsoft, and Vonage also used Glitch to host internal resources like this self-service learning platform Postman launched using Glitch as the backends of their API training workspace, which is a self-serve learning platform they just launched! Tomomi Imura at Microsoft created a tutorial series on developing for Microsoft Teams using Glitch throughout for the coding exercises.

Dwane Hemmings from the Communications API folks at Vonage posted a tutorial on using Web Components in a React app on Glitch, as part of a series and Garann Means has been posting cool videos showing how to get set up on Glitch to build with the Vonage API.

Using a browser to read this? Count their teams as fans, too

By giving developers the tools to easily set up a demo, Glitch has enabled the teams behind some of your favorite browsers to make them even better! Google Chrome used Glitch to show a demo of the web serial API during the Chrome 89 release, and shared many similar apps during 2020’s Google Chrome Dev Summit. In Mozilla’s MDN Web Docs, they point to Glitch as a way to test out the Element.requestFullscreen()function—or remix it!

As recently as earlier this month Microsoft pointed users to try out the new CORS error reports with ~cors-errors in their latest doc on what's new in Edge DevTools. When it comes to standards work, we joined DuckDuckGo and many other major industry leaders in the call for a Global Privacy Control standard and implemented it in their suite of privacy browsers, which you can test at ~global-privacy-control.

You too can use Glitch to try out or test new browser capabilities, just like the teams behind the browsers themselves do.

Empowering developers with tutorials, tools, and documentation

Browser teams are not the only ones who have caught on to the powerful set of tools Glitch provides software teams. Three use cases we frequently see hosted on Glitch are hands-on tutorials, developer tooling, and approachable documentation.

As we recently shared, the AMP team used Glitch over the pandemic to create and share their series of online workshops with beginners. Speaking of beginners, we created Glitch with them in mind, not only to help folks get a site started in seconds but by introducing the rewind feature to help beginners and professionals alike, take a step back when they need to. Evelyn from Canada Learning Code wrote this great post about her journey of learning how to code and building her first site on Glitch. Here’s a Twitter thread we love of Corin Faife of Witness.org talking about using Glitch to teach his coworkers an intro to HTML workshop and how they now have their own personal sites!

Tammy Butow of Gremlin created this cool coding workshop using Glitch for GirlGeekAcademy’s She Hacks hackathon. This web.dev tutorial on making custom bullet points using CSS from Google is a fantastic example of how Glitch can transform the average tutorial into a hands-on experience.

~pouchdb-bug-helper makes it easier for developers to create reproducible bug reports for PouchDB.

One of the most popular uses of Glitch we see out in the wild has to be for demos and dev tools. The PouchDB team created ~pouchdb-bug-helper to enhance the bug reporting experience for their users by making it easier for them to submit reproducible test cases. It’s linked directly in their repo README and is one of several ways maintainers can get great use out of Glitch! Team STEP is an indie collective of game developers, musicians, 3d artists, and illustrators, and one of its members built this CLI tool for pushing local files to Glitch. Their README is pretty thorough and they wrote their reasoning behind it on the forum.

Jenny Brennan of the Ada Lovelace Institute built this tool ~hashflag for testing out hashflags (those emoji in Twitter hashtags) to use when they were designing the #AdaLovelaceDay hashflag. Read more about the tool and the cool process on Jenny’s blog. The Tableau team also put together this demo showcasing how to create a Web Data Connector from start to finish. Keisha, the dev in the video, won Tableau’s internal hackathon using Glitch earlier this year!

There are so many intriguing and innovative Glitch sites and apps that inspire surprise and delight that listing them all in one place would take away from the time you could spend exploring and tinkering with them. But don’t take our word for it, check out the gallery where the Glitch community shares their works of art! Or, better yet, try Glitch for yourself. And if you're working with a larger team, or need custom billing or priority support, we've got you. Contact us for pricing.

Remix a whole new Glitch

We’re excited to announce some new updates that will have you building even faster with new starter apps, support for generated static sites, and a clean new look that makes the Glitch experience faster and fresher than ever.

Get from idea to “Hello World” in seconds with our new lineup of starter apps, along with new and improved support for generated static sites

We’ve created new, fresh and fast starter apps to get you building websites and Node apps in seconds. In addition to a refresh of our static website and full-stack Node app starters, we’re improving our FREE static sites to support generated static sites, too! This was something our community has been asking for, so we’re excited to give you the benefits of fast and free static sites with the power to configure how your sites are built.

Try it out by remixing our brand new React and Eleventy starters or updating your app’s package.json file.

We picked a powerful set of tools to help you create full-featured apps on Glitch.

There’s so much anxiety about which JS framework or build tool to pick, so we made some really good default choices for you. Our new Node starter now uses Fastify to give you a faster, extendable developer experience when writing Node. We chose React and Eleventy for their versatility, documentation and the wealth of developer content created by their communities. And we harness the powers of Vite to further improve the development and build experience in our React starter.

You get all of the benefits of these tools without having to do any setup. But if you do want to configure your app or use other tools, go for it! Glitch won’t lock you into the platform or abstract away the code that is powering your idea. Don’t forget the rewind feature is always there if you need to backtrack—mistakes are welcome and encouraged!

Syntax highlighting support for more file types

With this new update we’ve added support for syntax highlighting to make your code as clear and concise as possible. Open your Glitch editor to see syntax highlighting in action for the following file types:

JSX
Nunjucks
Handlebars
Vue
Svelte
TypeScript These updates can help you go from idea to app in seconds, or serve as an introduction to a whole new world of frameworks. Don’t see your favorite framework listed right now? Our community is already collaborating to make the next wave of super-easy starters for Glitch. Join them and let us know what you want to see next.

What do you want to create?

Our newly updated “Create Project” page is available for everyone now, featuring our new official starters as well as Github import. Watch this space for more useful starter apps, as well as projects curated from and by our community!

There’s always something new to inspire you at Glitch

Whether you’re just beginning to experiment with Glitch or a remixer extraordinaire, we are excited to introduce—or reintroduce—what Glitch is all about to everyone. Yes, you can use Glitch to go from idea to site in seconds, but not just any site: a reliable, performant, accessible site (or app!), backed by some of the most powerful tools on the web. These updates and features are the result of a lot of careful consideration for our amazing community of explorers, dreamers, and builders, resulting in a Glitch that is faster and fresher than ever.

If you have any fun or interesting projects you’re building using our new starters, feel free to tag us on Twitter, share in our support forum gallery, or email community@glitch.com so we can share with the community! In the meantime we’ll be hard at work making the Glitch experience the most reliable, intuitive, and friendly place to build the web. ✨

Take your apps to the next level with a Pro account

*Glitch is the fastest way to go from code to deploy. You can build anything from small static websites to complex full-stack apps for free! All Glitch users get our powerful and collaborative in-browser editor, with Github import/export and Prettier support. Static sites come with free always-on hosting; full-stack apps sleep to save resources but wake on demand. Upgrade to a Pro account to get all of that and more: access controls, private projects, and the ability to Boost 5 full-stack apps for more disk space, memory, and always-on status. Check out our pricing page to learn more and subscribe*!

Last month on Glitch, the April 2021 edition

We can’t think of a better way to start off a recap of last month than to say that it’s never been easier to get started with Glitch since the recent introduction of our starter apps, including React and Eleventy. We’re already seeing some fantastic new sites, remixes, and suggestions for even more starters!

And finally, after all those winter months, April brought a spring bounty of creativity, art, tools, and a healthy dose of internet magic/nostalgia/silliness to the Glitch community. Here is what you created, curated, incubated, and disseminated during last month.

**Dev tools and tutorials **🛠

For anybody who wants to get started with Webpack on Glitch, @KumuPaul created a very minimalist Webpack app with support for hot module reloading. Try out ~hello-webpack-typescript and see the new TypeScript syntax highlighting in action!
Finally, someone brave enough to speak out about JavaScript, @tesseralis, has created this handy ~js-psa.
Preview your markdown rendering in a multitude of themes with ~multimark by @javaarchive.
We love these collections of demos created by @matdesl. ~p5-demos shows you p5.js examples of generative art, motion graphics, and interactive design, and ~tone-demos gives you examples using Tone.js for interactive and procedural sound. Try them out! **Visualizations and fun with data! **📊

*~state-of-nyc is a map app by @jordanderson that with each refresh moves the population of a handful of cities across the map so you *can get the scope of the differences in population around the country.

~wikidata-explorer is a remix of ~evergiven-everywhere by @ramiroaznar that visualizes wikidata queries. It’s awesome to see EE used as a remixable starter for other map apps!
Bill Gates Land Ownership is an app by @doniecasey that lets you see the scale of how much land the Gates owned.
@eojthebrave scraped the #DrupalCon attendance once a minute from Hopin to visualize the flow of the conference and you can check it out here. **Fun and games **👾

*~tubatutorials by @lanek85502, *will teach you how to play the tuba in less steps than you would think!

Glitch often comes up in this incremental_games subreddit. It's just folks being wholesome, creating and sharing games that have incremental mechanisms. Try out ~1stgame, by @Dravitar, or ~sushibeans by @corbancg to start, but only if you can stand to lose focus/attention for hours.
We love this 2048 clone, ~2048-1070835 by sabrina15hallie using characters instead of numbers.
Here is your new obsession: with this Gigapet-inspired cat sim by @dpalencia you can remix it to create one for your own cats...we have. **Miscellaneous and necessary **😎

Remix ~away-message by @jdan to create your own nostalgic AIM away message profile, and it was written with one of our faves, 98.css, also created by @jdan.

It’s still a little chilly at night, here’s a ~quilt-generator to keep you warm, made by @csb324.
“Tis tea time” according to @jrwren, who made ~tis-tea-time so you can keep track of what kinds are in your pantry, using localstorage.
If you like making patterns, ~pattern-preview by @ellell is a neat little that shows you what the pattern is as you draw the tile.
~veg-calc is a very cute and remixable tax calculator by @kvcarido. Since April has come and gone that means it has officially been one year of ~multiuser-sketchpad by @mrdoob, one of the most viral Glitch apps ever! Take a stroll down memory lane back to the beginnings of quarantine, and watch the time lapse of everyone drawing together. 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 - You may just end up in our next roundup! ✨

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~bison-namer, created by @laurenbiron and steph. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has bison babies to name, so they created this fun tool. 🦬

A closer look at the new Glitch starter apps

We just launched generated static sites!** **🎉 This has been an in-flight feature for a *long* time, and something I’m really excited to finally see out in the world. There are a lot of moving pieces, but the most important thing to take away is this: generated static sites allow you to run a development process and, when you’re done editing, Glitch will run your npm run build script and upload that optimized build to the glitch.me** **domain every project gets free.

The new starter projects were created for remixing. This bumps up our two templates (hello-express and hello-webpage) to four (website, node, react, eleventy) with opinionated and minimal versions of each. Thinking through the technology choices for each starter and choosing the packages that we were endorsing was an exciting challenge, and we were able to build on the incredible work the open-source community has been doing since we last created new starters. Let’s walk through the new starters and what powers them to give you a better idea of how they’ll help you get started building your idea in seconds.

Node.js

Our previous Node.js starter, hello-express, was in daily use but starting to fall behind modern Node best practices. Looking at the landscape of Node web servers, there was a clear choice: Fastify. The speed gives us the ability to serve more pages, faster, from the glitch containers. It’s also great how easily extensible Fastify is. Having validation built-in didn’t hurt. We are really excited about what Fastify will allow us to build going forward and how to leverage it for Glitch users; plus, we can build Glitch-specific plugins to interface with our asset management, fully-powered terminal, etc., in the future. There isn’t a lot of boilerplate needed to instantly create an API, so we were able to keep both the opinionated and minimal versions of the Node.js starter fairly straightforward.

React + Generated Static Sites

We’ve had trouble in the past getting the React development process to be performant on Glitch servers, so solving the speed problem was the #1 priority. Fortunately, our team didn’t have to do much of the work here and instead could rely on Vite to do the heavy lifting. It starts immediately, supports TypeScript and JSX, and has hot module reload enabled by default. That significantly reduced the surface area we needed to build ourselves to support a lightning-fast React workflow.

One way Vite achieves these incredible speeds is by bundling all of your dependencies (in ~glitch-hello-react they are: React, Wouter and react-helmet-async) with ESBuild. ESBuild is *an extremely fast JavaScript bundler written in Go. *Most likely you aren’t changing your dependencies nearly as much as your code, so it can do that once and only build again when you add a new dependency or upgrade the version.

When you close the editor and stop working on your site, it runs the Vite build process in the background which creates an optimized bundle with Rollup. That means you can take advantage of the wild world of Rollup plugins. We serve this fast production bundle at your free glitch.me domain until you start working in the editor again.

Eleventy + Generated Static Sites

Static site generators are all the rage today, and for good reason. Eleventy cares about speed, ease of use, and—most importantly—the experience of someone browsing your site. When you run the Eleventy build script, it takes all of your files and creates a bundle that can be loaded by those still using AOL dialup. (Please let us know if you are still using AOL dialup!)

The Eleventy starters list is a scoreboard with Lighthouse scores, pushing Eleventy builders to make a performant site that anyone on any connection can view. As website bundles get more and more bloated, Eleventy pushes for as little JavaScript as possible, and uses it only where you need it.

Our ~glitch-hello-eleventy starter has support for blog posts in Markdown, beautiful styling, and instructions for adding more complexity if you need it. The minimal template was built by the Eleventy team.

Along with support for Eleventy, we’re supporting all of the Eleventy projects that others have built. Want a high-performance blog with image optimizations and analytics? Check out eleventy-high-performance-blog. Something a little more designed, that uses Tailwind CSS and a JS framework (Alpine.js)? Try 11ta.

**Everything else **🎉

These are just our starters using the new generated static site functionality. You can apply the same concepts to a Vue site, or Svelte! Any code you can run in the build script that outputs to a build folder can take advantage of this new functionality. Just add this configuration to your package.json:

That will tell Glitch to treat your project as a generated static site so you have a development environment when you want it, and a production site on your glitch.me domain when you’re done.

**So, why not remix one of these starters and create a new project right now?

Coding for the weekend, a q+a with Sunday Sites creator John Bengtsson

Around a year ago, I had come across a number of super clever, little apps on Glitch that appeared to be from some kind of hackathon. I assumed it was from a one-off event, but then it kept happening! I found that they were coming from a small community of creative coders working off of prompts from a project called Sunday Sites, led by a graphic designer and web enthusiast from Sweden, John Bengtsson. After spending hours looking at all of the past submissions, I reached out to John to learn more about this really inspiring and surprising community and project.

Jenn: What is Sunday Sites and how/why did it get its start?

John: Sunday Sites is a community built around creating hand coded websites in a playful manner, and it welcomes people from all skill groups to join. Around once a month, I send out a newsletter with an invitation to a so called “session” that I organize over video chat. In these sessions (always on Sundays), we create websites for two hours, using only HTML and CSS, and then spend the next hour or so talking about our creations. Each session is guided by an “instruction,” a prompt which I often keep pretty vague, just to help with generating ideas. The sites are then showcased on SundaySites.cafe, which functions as the hub of the project.

Sunday Sites started as my graduation project in January last year (I graduated Beckmans College of Design last spring and am now working at a design agency in Stockholm). For a very long time I’d been fascinated by early internet art and the way that relatively simple tools were used to explore new ways of interaction. Other themes I was interested in were collective creativity, online identity and internet culture in general. I combined my points of interest with inspiration from HTML.energy (by Laurel Schwulst and Elliott Cost) and Ritklubben (a graduation project by Beckmans alumnus Emelinn Heikkinen) and started forming ideas for what would become Sunday Sites.

*~dingbatday, a Sunday Sites submission *by @lina.reidarsdotter.kallstrom

What is it about Glitch that made you choose it as the recommended platform for hosting projects from these sessions?

First of all because it’s so easy to use. One of the goals of the project is to sort of democratize creative coding, and to show how easy it is nowadays to build yourself a home on the web. Glitch is a really good tool for that as you don’t need to know how to upload anything to a server, mess around with DNS records or think about which text editor to get. It’s also great for making websites come to life fast, as everything updates in real-time, so it’s easy to share your site after the two hours of coding is over, or if you want someone’s opinion on something during the session.

What were your expectations when you scheduled the first session, and what was the outcome?

The first few sessions were only joined by me and some friends from school, and I hoped for maybe two or three other people to join after a while so I could continue organizing a few sessions over the summer. However, early on I posted a link to the project to Special.fish, and that link then had a life of its own on other platforms on the web, which lead to an unexpected increase in newsletter subscribers. So, after realizing that people seemed to like the initiative, I set up plans for making it happen at least once a month, and since then it has grown slowly but steadily.

It’s been over a year since the first session. How has the project changed, if at all, since then?

In some ways it hasn’t changed at all – the structure of the project is still very much the same. At the same time, as more people join and bring their energy into the project, it has started to feel more and more alive. If anything, the format just has become more distilled as time has passed and I’ve removed unnecessary components to be able to focus more on the act of making websites together.

I love how discrete and simple the prompts are! Where/who do they come from and what do you think makes a great creative coding prompt?

I often start with a vague idea of a website I want to make or a theme I want to explore, and then I write down the most important aspect of my idea so it can be interpreted in different ways. I think a good prompt needs to be concrete enough to guide the participants through the start of the process, but at the same time it should be open-ended enough for them to pick it up and turn into something of their own.

The tone of my prompts is loosely based on Fluxus poetry, like Yoko Ono’s “Grapefruit,” where actions with varying levels of absurdity are described in a very dry and precise way. They often act as scripts for surreal performance pieces, and I thought that would be a good fit for a project about making artistic websites.

What are some of your favorite submissions so far?

*Hover over John’s own app ~colorfulplant for some beautiful movement!

Are there any trends (content, code or aesthetic) that you’ve seen with submissions over the past year?

The marquee tag turns up every now and then, and most of the sites use standard web-safe fonts, but other than that I can’t really think of any strong trends among the sites. That would probably be easier to spot for someone with an outside perspective.

What do you plan to build next?

I’ve had plans for a long time to build a website for everything that doesn’t fit on my portfolio site – like code experiments, writings and more abstract kinds of design. I’m excited to start working on that when I have the time. I also have some super secret plans on how to expand the Sunday Sites project a bit, and I wish to make those plans reality soon as well.

Shouts out to John, as well as the Sunday Sites community! To find out when the next Sunday Sites session is, subscribe to the Sunday Sites newsletter. And if you build or see an app on Glitch that you want us to feature, let us know! Email community@glitch.com or tweet @glitch. 😎

*The project featured in this post’s header image is of Sunday Sites submission, ~day-friend, by @fishthursdays.

Last month on Glitch, the May 2021 edition

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.

Developer tools 🛠️

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.

Fun and games 👾

~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.

Art and design 🎨

We absolutely love this notation editor because it seems like the start of something incredibly useful to music writers.
~fluid-expressions, by @sharma.sas, is an artwork that “takes the form of a work of online speculative fiction centered around the design and craft of an object called a memory capsule.”
~css-ch-typography, by @equinusocio, is a short, sweet, but super informative tool for understanding what "ch" units in css typography are.
We love how @celalexis makes a photography portfolio interactive with ~nurraihan. Meta apps 🖥️

Apps for blogging or using Glitch, featured on the Glitch blog.

You have to check out the Glitch In the Wild app, created by @khalby786, which is a really awesome list of tools available for developers on Glitch and was crowdsourced by the wonderful folks in the Glitch support forum!
~oregano-blog is a little blogging app created by @aTylerRobertson powered by Markdown, Express, Showdown and Pug.
Created by @SteGriff, the app ~thats-no-moon enables you to build your own Glitch-y loader.

~datapointe by @ipen is a MOST CLEVERLY named data visualization project about ballet 🩰

**Dataviz and crypto, two peas in a pod? **

Data of New York is a Twitter and Mastodon bot, built by @stefan that tweets maps created using data from NYC Open Data and Mapbox. Want to read more about it? Check out this short write-up.
~hen-worlds is a cryptocurrency hackathon project (specifically for hic et nunc) that explores what a metaverse for hic et nunc would be. It embeds (from our understanding) NFTs from IPFS within an a-frame virtual world. And just like that, we’re into a new month. Thank you so much for all of the wisdom, surprise, and delight that you bring to Glitch! We can’t wait to see what you come up with next month. 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 - You may just end up in our next roundup! ✨

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~laboratoriomedusa, built with Hydra, the live coding visualization library, by[ @tacacocoding](https://glitch.com/@tacacocoding) as a visualizer for their friend’s album.

Trying to end "Stack Anxiety"

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.

There’s got to be a better way! #

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.

What do we mean by "simple"?

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?

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.

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.

Data-driven full stack apps — running instantly!

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!

Last month on Glitch, the June 2021 edition

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.

Music and Games 🎶

~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.

Dev Tools 🛠️

~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.

**Miscellaneous and necessary! 👽 **

~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.

Dive into the new Glitch data starter apps

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.

All of the above ✅ #

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.

Hosted data with SQLite #

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.

Blank apps for easy reuse #

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.

Take what’s useful and leave the rest #

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!

Glitch.new (and improved!) shortcuts

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!

New Anything

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!

Last month on Glitch, the July 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.

Let’s play a Game 👾

~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.

Art & Music 🎨

~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.

Miscellaneous and necessary!!

~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.

Cool tools 😎

~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.

Last month on Glitch, the August 2021 edition

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.

Art, Music, and Games 🎨 🎶 👾

~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.

DataViz and Tools We <3 📊 🛠 ❤️

~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.

Introducing Playlists, the best way to curate and share Glitch apps!

Today, we’re introducing Playlists to Glitch — bringing all the power of organizing, sharing and discovering new apps, in a way that’s as familiar and fun as the playlists you use to manage music, videos, or anything else. (And good news: we’ve migrated all existing Collections on Glitch to be playlists, so there are already over 100,000 to explore!)

Let’s take a look at Playlists

Remember making a mixed tape? Or burning a CD with your favorite songs on them? Or—what’s the modern-day equivalent—creating a playlist on your favorite streaming app? Playlists are as fun to make as they are to receive. Both activities are labors of love and creativity. Most importantly, playlists are an instrument to help our community’s projects reach the people who would most find joy in using them.

Glitch is built around an important idea, that creating and sharing apps is as important as creating and sharing photos, documents, videos or anything else. So of course it should be just as fun and easy! So that’s why we’ve created playlists. Borrowing from the familiar metaphor we’ve all come to know, playlists of apps make it easy to share a collection of apps or projects while adding useful context, for yourself or for others.

The first thing you need to know about playlists is you don’t need to know how to code to create and curate playlists. In fact, being a playlist curator is a great way to be a creator on Glitch, just like making apps is. You get all the same joys of sharing creativity with the world and doing something helpful for the community, and the opportunity for others to thank you for sharing.

Each playlist features newly styled project cards stacked vertically in the order of your choosing. To the right of the cards, curators can add notes on any app in a playlist, to explain why the app is useful, or just to help you remember what you liked about a project you saved.

Don’t forget to give your playlist a title. You can also add a description at the top, to help describe what colleagues and community members can expect from your playlist. Maybe it’s a themed playlist, or a series of tutorials, or just a collection of your greatest hits!

Play mode: To make it even easier to discover apps in playlists, we’ve made a playback mode where you can walk through all the apps in a playlist. It’s perfect for learners who want to step through a list of related apps, or just to check out a series of projects for inspiration.

Playlist curation is a great way to organize your profile, collect apps from the rest of the community, and share Glitch apps with others. That’s why we wanted to make it even easier to highlight creators. At the bottom of each playlist you curate, people will be able to see other apps and projects you’ve built. And it’s easier than ever to show the love! You can thank playlist creators right from the playlist, just like you can thank app creators everywhere on Glitch. It’s a nice way to make their day brighter, and yours too!

If you poke around Glitch.com, you’ll see some other updates.

Creating playlists is one way to update your Glitch profile, but we wanted to make it all look snazzy. Each individual project page has been updated to reflect the new card styles presented in playlists, as well as highlights the additional apps or projects a project creator has built, making it even easier to surface great apps from the Glitch community. The new cards style for projects also now show up in search results. Lastly, on keeping things cool: As always, we care about keeping Glitch a friendly and welcoming place for everyone, so we’ve made it simpler than ever to flag things on Glitch that might be potentially troublesome. Click the report abuse button to flag anything that’s not up to our community standards.

Some cool and new playlists

In order to spark creativity or maybe just pique your curiosity, we’re sharing some playlists the Glitch team put together to help get you started.

Tools to make your meetings better
I’ve been meaning to learn that API!
Hang these on your wall, they’re art But that’s not nearly enough examples, so here are some playlists from the Glitch community we think are pretty great.
#tinydemos from the team at Stripe
AI and Creativity from @monolesan
Things to make and do with Vue.js by @stegriff
Six Superb Sunday Sites by @jhnbngtssn – Read our interview with John to learn about Sunday Sites - maybe your app will end up on this playlist!
Art or math? by @rowan-m poses (and possibly answers) the most important question in computer science. There’s more to come

There’s a lot more in store for the Glitch community this fall, but we’re very excited to see what you’ll do with playlists. Playlists give us at Glitch an opportunity to showcase more of your creations to the rest of the world, too, including on /create-project and even in search results! So get out there and create some playlists, friends, and share your favorites with us at community@glitch.com, on Twitter at @glitch, and on the Glitch forum. ☺️