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.