Do you remember why we named this thing Glitch?

Oh man, this is probably the longest we’ve gone without blogging since Glitch launched. This is the most classic category of blog post, the “sorry it’s been so long since I updated” blog post, and always basically for the same reasons: we’ve been so busy, and the longer it’s been, the harder it seems to get things going. So, what’s up over here?

In some ways, all the usual cool stuff. People are still always making amazing and inspiring stuff on Glitch, and a little while back we had put up Last Year on Glitch highlighting all the amazing things people built over 2024. But there’s also a broader thing we’ve been thinking about as a team, that’s probably the subtext any time a team gets quiet about this stuff, which is basically “hey, where are we headed?”

I’ve been a community member in other situations like this, and when things get quiet, my worries always basically boil down to “is this a bad sign?” and my answer here is, “no, not really”. There are things we’re wrangling with, but they mostly seem pretty normal. Glitch has been around for almost 9 years since its earliest beta forms (this is hard for me to believe!) so there’s technical debt, of course. And with millions and millions and millions of apps on the platform, there’s basically every conceivable kind of edge case to accommodate there.

Then at the other end of the spectrum, there’s the speed that the developer ecosystem evolves. We made a really good choice many years ago in Glitch being a “yes code” platform when the rest of the industry was thinking a lot more about being “no code”. So, for example, when many people started using tools like AI coding assistants, that code could work fine with Glitch. But as a lot of devs on the platform have seen, we’ve been slower at updating some dependencies or infrastructure because it’s a lot more complex to do so, and so newer platforms have been able to get a fresh start and build amazing new experiences since they have less legacy to wrangle. Just like we were inspired in our early days by peers like Codepen and CodeSandbox, we’ve really been inspired in watching platforms like valtown and Fly.io and Deno and Railway take ease of use and creation in interesting new directions. (When we talked about adding the ability to share apps made on other platforms on your Glitch profile last year, this was a big reason why!)

But being heads-down on working on fixing things, while watching newer platforms work on the kind of cool stuff that we wish we could be doing, and that we used to do on Glitch more often… well, that’s how you end up being quiet on your blog. There’s a way out of it, though. We want to reconnect with all of you in our community, and talk through how we’re going to focus on what Glitch can do uniquely well, and how we might reflect on the current big picture of what developers care about and make sure our work going forward is really aligned with where we can be most useful for the most people. There’s going to be some change and evolution, and we don’t quite know exactly what it is, but we trust you’ll help us figure it out.

To answer the question that I started this post with, the reason we called this place “Glitch” was basically a reminder that it’s okay to make mistakes, and that it’s okay to be imperfect sometimes. The single biggest reason people get writer’s block — whether that’s with words or code — isn’t usually because they don’t have an idea. It’s because they’re worried they might do something wrong with that idea. So maybe we’re going to try to worry a little bit less about getting it wrong, and have a little bit of faith that all of you in our community will be patient with us on the way forward, even if we have a few glitches. ✨