By Glitch Team

June 4, 2018

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.

Image

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.

Image

Glitch does a few things nobody’s pulled off before:

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:

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!

Image