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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Dive into the new Glitch data starter apps

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. 

~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.

~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.

~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. 

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.

Last month on Glitch, the June 2021 edition

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!

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.

Data-driven full stack apps — running instantly!

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:

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.

We took an uncharacteristic path for Glitch: We chose both.

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.

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?

What do we mean by "simple"?

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.

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.

Trying to end "Stack Anxiety"

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.   

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.

~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.

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. 

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 🩰

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 as a visualizer for their friend’s album.

Last month on Glitch, May 2021 edition

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.

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...

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?

https://tiana.computer/sunday_sites/word.html

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.

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.

Originally a graduate project, Sunday Sites has evolved into a community of creative coders building the most interesting things on the web.

Coding for the weekend, a q+a with Sunday Sites creator John Bengtsson

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

"glitch": {
  "projectType": "generated_static"
},

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? 

Glitch engineer, Keith Kurson, discusses the tech stack and opinions behind our new lineup of Glitch starter apps

A closer look at the new Glitch starter apps

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. 

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!

~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.

~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.

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. 🦬

Last month on Glitch, the April 2021 edition

He also serves on the boards of Stack Overflow and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

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