Why we appreciate developer experience

Glitch is a home to many different types of communities. There are builders, students, artists, virtual reality enthusiasts, the list goes on and on. But we want to call to attention a specific community that we are truly grateful for: developer advocates. These are the folks thinking hard about developer experience and working every day to create more pathways, more possibilities, and more connections in ways that continue to inspire us!

Why is developer experience so important to us? That’s sort of a trick question when it comes to Glitch because we believe that everyone can build something online – you just have to create an environment that empowers and encourages people to experiment with code.

Which is why developer advocates find a natural home at Glitch. We never really set out to attract teams of developers creating and sharing code on Glitch, yet through their own efforts, teams from Microsoft, Twitter, Google, Stripe, Slack and so many others have chosen Glitch to build demos, apps for testing, or just apps replicating errors and possible solutions. Those aren’t the only things they build either. Some developer teams, like Stripe’s have built out entire platforms based on Glitch to better enable their audiences to understand the inner workings of Stripe’s systems.

And it’s not only teams from big companies taking advantage of the opportunity. Open source software (our favorite kind!) communities have also embraced the openness of Glitch to build demos, or better yet—entire playlists of the best use cases for their code. The virtual reality, augmented reality, or what we like to call, WebXR world has a strong presence on Glitch, with teams from TensorFlow, A-Frame, Needle Engine, and P5.js building out demos and showing the world how they can jump right into creating with WebXR in a few clicks.

Creating a good experience for folks to get started with is not only great developer experience, but it’s fantastic community building, which is something we spend a great deal of time thinking about. Building the open web means creating space for lots of different types of people to use tools, so those tools have to be good. Encouragement is key after that, because having a coding experience where you succeed pretty quickly is a very positive experience, and who doesn’t want more of that?

Mix all of these factors together and you have the building blocks for what Glitch is all about: enabling everyone to create, building together, success that is celebrated, and lots and lots of learning. Learning builds connections, and those connections more often than not, create community. So, to the folks out there writing the demos, thinking about the README phrasing, breaking down tough concepts so others can understand, thank you for all that you do and we salute you and we’re always happy to share what you’re building!