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.

Maurice Cherry is Glitch's creative strategist.

Incidents

The Workers Who Keep the Web Safe in an Unsafe World

Animal Crossing Helped Me Get Back to Real Life

New Rules of the Classroom: Remote Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever

Function with Anil Dash

Open World is a fiction anthology podcast about how science and technology serve as a backdrop for imagining a better future, helping us envision the positive influence that science and tech can play in a real future. 

Open World is produced by Keisha "TK" Dutes and hosted by critically-acclaimed podcaster Rose Eveleth, for Glitch. By speaking to the pressing concerns of our times through love, friendship, community, compassion, and sustainability, the host will help listeners imagine new ways forward into a future that is less scary and more positive, and something we can start working on constructively.  

Open World launches weekly episodes in Spring 2020. Want to contact the show? Email youropenworld@glitch.com.

Open World

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. We’ll talk to some of our top creators, explore cool apps, and even hear from the people who work at Glitch!

Shift Shift Forward

From idea to code in seconds, build and learn alongside the most creative coders on the Web

Welcome to the Glitch Blog ✨

— Glitch Blog

We’ve all experienced it before -- you go to your favorite website, but it’s not loading. Or you try clicking on a link to complete a transaction, but your browser times out and you get an error message. It can be frustrating to deal with outages and similar issues from a user perspective, but let’s see what it looks like from the other side. What happens when these incidents occur, and what does it take to get everything running smoothly again?

On this episode, we look at incidents from three different angles: infrastructure, support, and leadership.  Mads Hartmann, Cori Schlegel, Antoinette Smith, and Emmett Walsh take us through how their team fixes outages and other issues, while senior support engineer Tasha Hewett shows us how she gracefully handles support issues, and we end things off with a few words from our CEO, Anil Dash.

Looking for bonus content? Our app collection for this episode is where it's at, including links to Glitch apps, profiles, articles, and other information mentioned in this episode!

Executive Producers: Maurice Cherry, Keisha "TK" Dutes

Jacky Alciné:
This is Shift Shift Forward, a new podcast for Glitch that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. I'm Jacky Alciné and I work in a platform team. In this episode, we're taking a look at what happens when websites go down, including ours. We talked to Tasha Hewett, our senior support engineer, and learn what it's like communicating information to users during an outage or incident. Later, we hear from our CEO Anil Dash, who gives us thoughts on these issues from a leadership perspective. But first, TK sat down with some members of infrastructure team. They're the ones who not only get notified first when site issues happen, but also help identify and fix those issues to get things back on track.

Mads Hartmann:
My name is Mads Hartmann and I'm a site reliability engineer at Glitch.

Emmett Walsh:
My name is Emmett Walsh and I'm a site reliability engineer at Glitch.

Cori Schlegel:
My name is Cori Schlagel and I'm a site reliability engineer at Glitch.

Antoinette Smith:
My name is Antoinette Smith and I'm the engineering manager of the infrastructure team at Glitch.

Keisha "TK" Dutes:
What is the process of response for when an incident happens?

Antoinette Smith:
It really depends. When an incident occurs, typically, if it's something that we have an alert for, then whoever the person who is assigned to feed the pager holder is the first person that it gets alerted and that handles it.

Keisha "TK" Dutes:
About the pager, is there a literal pager that goes off or an email notification?

Antoinette Smith:
There is no literal pager. There's a site called PagerDuty and everyone has an account on PagerDuty. And then, you can download the PagerDuty app or it'll go to your email. It'll also go to our Slack channels, but no physical pagers.

Emmett Walsh:
When the page first goes off, I think maybe the most uncomfortable experience is if you're getting woken up three in the morning, I would say, my first response is just pure confusion. I don't know what's happening. It's happened before. You get called by PagerDuty. You have to answer the call to acknowledge it. It's happened before. I actually can't remember what a phone is or how to answer it for the first 10 seconds. Normally, it's just complete debilitation. And then shortly after that, it is normally cases like, "Oh, God, is this a bad one or is it a good one?" Because you don't really know until you get logged onto your computer, so it can be a minute or two of mounting trepidation where you're like, "Oh, is it going to be a sticky one or not?" Until eventually, you get stuck into it. And then, you very quickly try and figure out what the scope of the impact is. Is it something that's really urgent? Is it something that you can snooze both figuratively and literally, or is it something where you need to call in the cavalry and get more support?

Keisha "TK" Dutes:
What's the difference between a good one and a bad one? What's sticky? What's snoozable?

Emmett Walsh:
The kind of page I see and I'll feel relief is one that is narrow in scope, I understand it really well, and I've seen it before. It's a bit annoying that I'm being woken up to deal with something that we know is a problem, but we haven't had a chance to do a more automated fix. But, at least I know exactly what to do and I know I'll be able to get back to sleep very soon. A scary one is one where everything's down, so all users are affected and I don't know why. It's novel, it's unfamiliar, the signals I'm getting from it are confusing. We have different ways of measuring how things are doing. I think that's the case where it's a bit of a tricky one.

Cori Schlegel:
Once you get to the point where you know what the problem is and at least a possible solution, a candidate is something that we can try to resolve things. In some cases, it's still going to be hours and hours before we can recover. That's a little dread-inducing, right? Even if you're confident that you can fix it, but you're looking forward to the other eight hours of monitoring things and restarting services or restarting the hosts, restarting servers, which is one of the things that takes a long time at Glitch. We have a lot of servers. If something affects all of the servers that are serving user projects, that's a thousand servers that we have to recycle. We can't do it quickly. We can only do, I don't know what the rate is, but a few hundred an hour, so that's a 10-hour, an eight or 10-hour outage if it takes us that long to get to basically restart or recreate every single server that's serving a user project. Those make for very, very long days.

Keisha "TK" Dutes:
There's several different time zones across the team, so how do you all manage that? I'll go to you, Mads. When you're receiving the page, are you eating a sandwich or sleeping or what?

Mads Hartmann:
Sometimes, I'm definitely eating a sandwich when I get a page. The way that we have set it up at Glitch is that we have working hours coverage. That means I will take the page during my normal working hours, which is nice because it means that the Americans can sleep a little longer and hopefully don't get interrupted. But, we also have another schedule, which is primary. For that, I am on call at night or in the morning and for all the hours in a day for a week. That might wake me up. Everybody who's on the rotation has a primary like that where they will have to cover the night-time shift as well.

Keisha "TK" Dutes:
How does each person know their role in fixing the incident?

Mads Hartmann:
The way that we have it set up is that there is an initial person who will get the page and it's that person's responsibility to escalate if necessary. That person might initially have a look at it and see if they can fix the problem themselves and go back to sleep or back to work. If they can't, then they can escalate to the secondary on-call. If that person, when that person joins, they'll try to fix it together. If that doesn't happen, you start calling in the cavalry and just pinging everybody and trying to get as many people in who might be able to help.

Cori Schlegel:
There are some cases where even the working hours on-call and the primary on-call and the secondary on-call might all -- some of whom may be the same person occasionally -- will get on together at the same time and they'll be able to isolate where the problem is, but they're not a person who is equipped to fix it. And so, that's when we'll interrupt somebody or get somebody else on a different team, often, out of bed or out of whatever zone they happen to be in to join in and try to figure out what the best way to fix the problem is.

Emmett Walsh:
When we decide who to call, if you're the person who picks up the page first, things we have intention, we don't want to interrupt people who don't necessarily need to be interrupted because we want to keep shipping new features and bug fixes against the very massive concern. If it's the outage that users are being impacted by, then that's a pretty high priority. Normally, we will prioritize getting people off their normal work to address those things at least when we're trying to understand what's going on and maybe all the way through to resolution.

Keisha "TK" Dutes:
In this moment, you're fixing it and it's taking all day. How are you feeling?

Cori Schlegel:
How you feel really depends on what kind of incident and what phase of the incident. When you're in the nobody-can-access-Glitch state and nobody's projects are running because those are two different things. There's at least three different things. Nobody can actually create an account or create a new project. Nobody can edit their existing projects. Then the third type is the projects that everyone has already created. None of those are running. It's kind of three different categories, at least three different categories. When you don't know what's going on and everybody's affected in any one of those categories, that is fear-inducing and stress-inducing. Panic-inducing maybe is the right phrase, at least for me.

Cori Schlegel:
Once you've sort of figured it out or at least you have a little bit of a direction to go, then it can be a little...You might know that it's going to take you awhile to figure it out. But at least you have a pathway and you can feel a little more confident. There's still a lot of pressure. We need to try to fix this as fast as possible, but it's not panicky. It's just "Let's just see how we can do this quickly" rather than "I have no idea what to do", which is that those are the ones that it's...especially at 3:00 AM. I have no idea. I don't even know where I am because it's 3:00 AM. I also have no idea what's going on.

Mads Hartmann:
To me, at least, it is like you're feeling stressed throughout the whole thing, but it can also be quite fun. What you're doing during this incident response is you're trying to figure out what's wrong with the system. That means you're coming up with hypotheses of what might be wrong. Then you're trying to prove or disprove them together with the team. That is extremely challenging and extremely fun for the most of it, I think.

Mads Hartmann:
It's also where you learn a ton of stuff about your systems. You learn more about your systems when they're broke than when they're working just fine. I think that part is really fun and can be very rewarding. Finally, once you've gone through the whole incident and you figure out what's actually wrong with the systems and you fix it, then you're done. That can be extremely fulfilling. I think, at that moment, I'm feeling at least always extremely proud of the team that worked on the incident and proud of myself for dealing with it without breaking down. I think that is what makes it in the end worthwhile. Being on the on-call rotation is that it's not just threat and stress. It can also be very fulfilling and challenging and fun and a great way to bond with your teammates who are in it with you if you're trying to fix the systems.

Keisha "TK" Dutes:
How does the user know that the incident has been resolved?

Antoinette Smith:
Well, what's really helpful is more recently we have a support team. I mean, we've always had a support team, but we haven't had a support team that was actively involved in our incidents. That's been a process change over the past few months. We have a support team and when an incident occurs, they'll update status page at IO so that people will know that Glitch is down or some part of Glitch is down. They also handle communicating with people on social media, with people in our forums. They are part of handling the incident and their major task is making sure that people outside of our team and people that are the users that are interacting with Glitch know what's going on. Once things are resolved, once our team is like, "Oh cool, this is done. Things are looking good," then they say, "Okay, this is resolved." They let everybody know.

Emmett Walsh:
Maybe I could talk more generally about the process things.

Emmett Walsh:
When we have an outage or some dropping function out at Glitch, it's not over when we get things recovered again. The job isn't done. Afterwards, we have a follow-up process. We go through an instant retrospective. We first try as best we can to understand what happened. Sometimes we'll have a really good idea in the middle of an incident. Sometimes we'll never quite get to the bottom of it. Either way, we try to figure out the best we can. Then we get together everyone involved or people who are interested, who might have domain expertise, even if they weren't involved. We'll discuss what happened. We'll try and pick out things that went well in how we dealt with the incident. Be that from how we noticed it to how we dealt with it in the moment to how we communicated about it.

Emmett Walsh:
Likewise, we'll think about things that didn't go so well. Then we also think about where we just got lucky, which depending how you think about it might be a "didn't go so well", depending how cynical you're feeling. Then we'll try and come up with some actions. We try and not be hit by the same thing twice. We'll say, "Hey, in this case, the problem is the way we configure these servers." We change the configuration this way. We make sure this kind of problem won't happen again. Then we try and prioritize when we can get that work done alongside our normal work in shipping new features or trying to do maintenance reliability work.

Keisha "TK" Dutes:
Given all that each of you do on a daily basis to make sure Glitch isn't experiencing issues, running smoothly, what would you like the users to know?

Mads Hartmann:
Alright. One thing I would love the users to know is that sometimes incidents happened because we make mistakes. We ship bad code, we don't follow a process correctly, and it's totally our fault. We try to fix that as quickly as we can. Unfortunately, in other cases, people out to get us. They are trying to use Glitch in ways that is malicious, both for other sites of the incident, but also for Glitch. They might try to use Glitch to attack us or take down another site. In cases like that, it will look the same to you. Your Glitch will be down. The project will not work. But for us, it's very different. We're doing our best to also take care of those cases. It's not always easy.

Emmett Walsh:
When there's an incident and Glitch is down, I would love users to know that we really care and we really hate it when Glitch is down. We work very hard and very quickly to get it back again.

Cori Schlegel:
I guess, as far as what I'd like Glitch users to know, I'd second definitely what Emmett says. We care. We're Glitch users. When Glitch is down, it affects us as well. We do dogfood our own product. Most of us use Glitch for things that are not necessarily in our day-to-day jobs. Support has really engendered this across the board -- Glitch is pretty stable. We don't have a lot of really big incidents. I'd like for users to remember that it's unusual for Glitch, especially Glitch projects, to be down and not responsive.

Antoinette Smith:
I guess what I would like users to know during times when the site is down or some key functionality is down is that Glitch is a really small company still. Our team that are handling these incidents are very small. In addition to shipping features to make Glitch better, on top of that, the team is also handling these incidents. Everyone is working, I feel, as hard as they possibly can. We want Glitch to be stable. That's the thing that we want the most. We're getting there, but it will take us time.

Antoinette Smith:
And we're getting there, but it will take us time.

Jacky Alciné:
When the website goes down, our support staff is right there on the front line. Next up is Tasha Hewett, our senior support engineer.

Tasha Hewett:
Incident response is a team effort, but more specifically, it's like being part of an orchestra because everybody has their own part to play. And while we all know what each other's role is, we might not necessarily know how they physically play their part. So we have to sit back and let everyone play their own instrument. You have to leave alone the people who are fixing the actual issue, let them do their thing, while still paying careful attention to what's going on and then playing your part when it's your turn.

Tasha Hewett:
So basically what that turns into for me is a whole lot of lurking and slack, just watching the wheels turning, the suggestions for how we're going to fix it come up, and letting the engineers who are responding do their thing. And then my part in the orchestra is like the gong player. I don't play much, but when I do, it's very important and the audience is going to hear it. So I have to sit and wait and wait. And when is it my turn? Okay, here's my turn. I'm going to do a status update, or I'm going to post on Twitter. And it has to be at the right time and it has to be accurate. So it can be a lot of pressure, but it's an important role.

Tasha Hewett:
My name is Tasha Hewitt and my role at Glitch is senior support engineer. So that makes me responsible for making sure that users are getting the help that they need quickly and consistently, also representing the Glitch community when features, policies, and processes are being worked on. During an incident in particular, my responsibilities are making sure the community is informed about what's going on, making sure that anyone who is experiencing a problem directly related to the incident is getting the help they need. And also letting the rest of the incident response team know about any user-facing issues that they haven't already identified.

Tasha Hewett:
When I hear about an incident, I immediately am going to vet the issue that's been reported. I'm going to see if I can replicate it myself. I'm going to see how many reports are already coming in from users. Our users are really great about detecting things because they're using our site all the time and letting us know if something isn't working.

Tasha Hewett:
It is stressful because for me in particular, being the gong player, you don't want to mess up the whole orchestra. You don't want to hit that gong or send a message at the wrong time, and that can be stressful. But when incident response is going well, and when you have a really good playbook for how these things play out, you know what your part is. You have a good idea of what you need to do and when you need to do it. And when you do it well, it feels really good to be able to give that information to your users. Even if it's not what they're looking for, if we're not saying, "Hey, look, this issue is still happening. We're still looking into it. It hasn't been resolved yet." Just to be able to let them know we're there, and we're seeing what they're seeing, feels really good and makes all the pressure worthwhile.

Tasha Hewett:
Once an issue has been resolved, it's really important for support to verify that that is true. And then we need to communicate that to our users. Really important is to be honest, don't over promise anything. If we've made a mistake, for example, if we said things were resolved too soon and they weren't, we need to own up about that. We need to be transparent, because that helps you build trust between yourself and the users.

Tasha Hewett:
The really important thing is never gaslight your users. So if you're going to say things are resolved, make sure that you can say that or make sure you're prepared to say, "Whoops, that was a mistake." Because the last thing you want to do is pretend like everything's okay when your users know it isn't.

Tasha Hewett:
Users can be more disgruntled about issues depending on the severity or type of the incident. But I think it's more related to how the particular incident directly affects the user. If you have a user who is repeatedly telling you that something is wrong and we unintentionally decide it's user error or make them feel like it's user error, that can be really frustrating to them. So it's always important to pay attention to your users and listen to the things they're saying regardless. Always vet their issues. Always check with them to see if what they're seeing is something that we can see too and investigate it. When users realize that you care specifically about how they're being roadblocked by an incident, they will have more trust in you to fix it for them.

Tasha Hewett:
When an incident happens, we'll receive reports from our users via social media and also our forum and email, and the thing I want to communicate to them, and the most important thing I want them to know, is that we care. We feel for them, we know it stinks to be in the middle of working on something and suddenly have to stop for reasons that are out of your control, and for them to know that we are looking at it and we're not going to stop until it gets fixed. Sometimes that happens in 15 minutes. Sometimes it can take a day to really sort out, but we will not forget about it. We are going to make sure that we can get all our Glitch users back on the platform and working on the apps of their dreams, instead of wondering what the heck is going on.

Jacky Alciné:
When incidents happen, it affects all parts of the company, including leadership. Now here's a word from the person at the top.

Anil Dash:
Hey everybody, I'm Anil, and I'm the CEO here at Glitch. And whenever we have any downtime, incidents or problems, it's ultimately my fault. But we always try to say that we are a blameless culture. We try not to point the fingers. And so people are very kind not to point fingers at me. But you know what? I think everybody at Glitch feels that way. If there's ever a problem, if there's ever an incident, if there's ever a downtime, I think everybody takes it so seriously and personally, because we just all feel that responsibility and that obligation to keep everything working. We love the apps that people build. We love everything people make on Glitch.

Anil Dash:
And so any minute where you can't get to it or access it or do your work or make your project is stressful. We feel it. And it's odd because everybody in tech has this issue. There's no website you've ever used, even Google, even Facebook, they have all gone down at different times. They've all fallen over some time. And so it's a universal experience, but everybody acts like it's totally outrageous. It never happens. It's really rare. It is not.

Anil Dash:
... outrageous, it never happens, it's really rare. It is not rare, and it's wild because it even can become part of the culture of a site. Like I go back in time and I look at, seven or eight years ago, Twitter used to not be able to handle its traffic load all the time.

Anil Dash:
I mean, who could blame them? They had gone from nowhere to everywhere in, like, five minutes and it's hard to keep things running. But it would be especially true when there was a big event, awards show, or a news event, or something like that. You would get this error message that had a drawing of a blue cartoon whale on it, and they called it the fail whale, that was when Twitter fell over. It was sort of like this running joke that every time you would go to check out Twitter during something important, you would get the fail whale.

Anil Dash:
I talked to people that helped fix it there and they felt really terrible about it, and the truth of it is, look, if people are, well, hooked enough on your service that they get mad when it falls down, that's probably a good sign. But you don't feel that way at the time, you feel like you're letting them down.

Anil Dash:
I think it's easy to forget that it's just humans. There's just people that are running around, probably frantically trying to keep this thing running, and that's a perspective that's easy to lose unless you really think about the human part of it.

Anil Dash:
We spent some time at Glitch trying to do that towards the end of 2019. It was a huge year for us. I think we went from a million apps on the platform to probably 5 million. I mean, it was just outrageous. We also saw the first big spam attacks, people trying to use the site to build lots of spam apps or things like that.

Anil Dash:
So it was hard. It's hard to scale anything. It's hard to grow anything. I mean, we had growing pains in every part of the company, and the technology infrastructure was no exception to that. Even though we had this incredibly brilliant tech team, you still have incidents and outages and downtime.

Anil Dash:
So I think by the end of the year, people were really feeling it. They were kind of feeling the pressure of it, and I wrote about it a little bit publicly, which was frankly kind of scary, because I wanted to make it more clear that we're just people trying our best, and that we're going to try and make everything great and bulletproof, but we're not always going to succeed.

Anil Dash:
I mean, our name, Glitch, means a problem. It means a bug. So hopefully that helps people feel more comfortable with the fact that sometimes things are going to break, and hopefully everybody who creates on Glitch sees, one, is there's people that really, really care and are really doing everything to try and make sure that everything you build is there, and works, and is fast and reliable and all that.

Anil Dash:
But also, people create on Glitch all the time and are like, "Oh, man, my code is bad, and my app broke, and ... " You know what? Us, too. It's no different. There's always somebody who's just on the other side that is trying to keep things running and make this thing work, and they really, really try, and that's inspiring.

Anil Dash:
The other part I look at is the community, and I'm like, don't worry if it's not perfect every time and it falls over sometimes, because, like I said, that happens to us, too.

Jacky Alciné:
That's it for this episode of Shift Shift Forward. Visit us online at glitch.com/ssf. Follow us on Twitter. Our Twitter handle is @glitch, and let us know what you think about this episode by using the hashtag #shiftshiftforward.

Jacky Alciné:
If you really liked the show, then subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Leave us a rating and review. Shift Shift Forward is produced by Maurice Cherry and Keisha "TK" Dutes, with editing by Brittani Brown, sound design by Keisha "TK" Dutes and mixing by C. Special thanks to the entire team at Glitch.

Jacky Alciné:
Here is what's coming up on Shift Shift Forward. We are watching a lot of movies and TV these days, and it's interesting to see how apps, websites, and other consumer tech are portrayed. Some directors set their entire production within desktop screens, mobile phones and webcam footage, and others use onscreen texting to show conversations and nonverbal interactions between characters. And yet, none of them really feel or look the like tech we actually use in our day-to-day lives. Why is that? We'll take a closer look and find out.

Games can be a great way to learn new concepts, spend time with friends, or just unwind at the end of a long day. And wouldn't you know it — games are actually a big part of Glitch's DNA!

For our first episode, we talk with Glitch user and software engineer Joe Gaffey about his history with game design, hear from our engineering lead Keith Kurson about fun games to play and remix on Glitch, and we have a roundtable conversation with CEO Anil Dash and other Glitch team members where they talk about our history with games, and mention some of their favorite games of all time.

Looking for bonus content? Our app collection for this episode is where it's at, including links to all the Glitch apps and other games mentioned in this episode and much more!

Executive Producers: Maurice Cherry, Keisha "TK" Dutes
Editor: Brittani Brown
Engineer: Keisha "TK" Dutes

Game On!

Hosanna Tolman:
My top number one video game of all time is Link’s Awakening, Legend of Zelda.

Steph Monette:
So, my favorite game right now is backgammon.

Zainab Shah:
So, my favorite game is called Ludo.

Osmose Kelly:
So, my favorite video game is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

Tasha Hewett:
My favorite game is this pinball machine that’s called Total Nuclear Annihilation.

Jenn Schiffer:
One of my favorite games is Katamari Damacy. The designer, Keita Takahashi, ended up working on the game Glitch that then became the company Slack…and now we’re Glitch.

Maurice Cherry:
This is Shift Shift Forward, a new podcast from Glitch that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. I’m Maurice. I work on the marketing team here and as you can probably guess, this episode is all about games: the ones we love to play, the ones that inspire our creativity and the ones that make us want to create our own.

Maurice Cherry:
You’ll meet Joe Gaffey, a software engineer by day and a die-hard game creator in his spare time. Later, our engineering lead, Keith, clues us in on game apps on Glitch that anyone can play or remix. But first, let’s eavesdrop on a conversation about how hard we game at Glitch with some of our fellow team members. Software developers, Tim and Greg, our head of legal, Nkasi, and our CEO, Anil. Our producer, TK, kicks things off. Here we go.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
I had no idea people at Glitch were such extensive gamers. What are all your favorite games?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Oh my goodness. Okay. This is sort of for nostalgic purposes, but also because it’s one of the franchises that manages to keep bringing it. So, the first time I got really into video games was my sister’s eighth birthday when my dad, which he doesn’t like video games at all, surprised her with a Nintendo. Right? And the game that he bought was the Legend of Zelda in the, if anyone remembers, the gold cartridge. It was such an amazing game. And still Nintendo is putting out the hits with Legend of Zelda, like the last one on the Switch, oh my God, what was the name of it?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Breath of the Wild. So, funny story, I refused to start working at Glitch until I finished that game because it is such a gigantic time suck.

Anil Dash:
The truth comes out now. You were like, “I have some meetings. I can’t start right now.”

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Oh, yeah. Legend of Zelda. All of them. I even played it on the Game Cube, and it was Wind Waker on the Game Cube. So yeah, I would say that’s one of my favorite games, if not my favorite game game. Yeah.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
What about you, Tim?

Tim Kington:
Go’s a strategy game from Japan. It’s, I guess, originally China… It was brought to the US from Japan, but it’s like 4,000 years old. And it’s a one on one game like chess where you have a board, black and white pieces, and it’s a zero sum game. So, somebody win’s, somebody loses. The rules are extremely simple, and it’s really deep

Anil Dash:
And Go’s also how they test a lot of coding and testing AIs and things too. Right? Is it sort of like a common coding challenge as well?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Is that the game in Avatar: The Last Airbender?

Tim Kington:
Oh, Avatar. No, it’s not. It has the same flavor kind of, yes. Something Lotus, I think it is.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Yeah. Yeah. For like the Lotus tile?

Tim Kington:
Yeah. It feels like that kind of, but it’s not the same game.

Tim Kington:
Yeah. Go’s used as an AI challenge, and for a long time it was considered sort of the pinnacle of AI challenge. Chess had been knocked out 20 or 30 years ago, and Go was the next big thing. I thought computers won’t be able to beat professional humans at Go. So, I gave a Friday talk here about Go and AI and why it’s so hard, and talked about how it’s at least 10 years away. And then, I gave another talk about six months later saying a computer just beat a pro.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Greg and Anil, what are your favorite games?

Greg Weil:
Halo 3 because that had this whole custom game system, which was pretty new at the time, where you could to lay out stuff, make your own map, and then they had a separate game type system. And it was just a ton of fun playing like weird modes that people came up with where all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, everyone moves 10 times faster because there’s no friction and you’re at the bottom of a big slope and there are cars sliding at you really fast that the other team is in, and you just need dodge the cars because if they hit you, they win. But if they miss, they’ll fall off the bottom of the ramp and into the ocean.” Just really weird ideas like that, which were just a ton of fun to play.

Anil Dash:
A couple of quick ones. Back in the ’90s, Lucasfilm, George Lucas’s… like the Star Wars company, they had a company called Lucas Arts, and they would make games. And they were mostly like a star Wars version of whatever games were popular. And then, they did one game called Grim Fandango, that was themed around the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and it was like a a murder mystery, Noir thriller, adventure game with really heavy candy skull art. it was just beautiful and great world building, and I’d never seen anything like it. And I think that really changed my perception of what games were. I think in a similar vein, the first Portal game just blew me away.

Anil Dash:
It was like you felt your brain bending, it was thing teaching you as you went. That was actually in the first notes of when we were prototyping Glitch and stuff. The first thing I thought of was Portal was this idea of what’s possible changes as you use it? And you want something where playing it teaches you what you could do. I just thought that was masterful game design.

Anil Dash:
My all time favorite game is Mario Kart. Obviously, there’s the trash talking part and whatever, but the serious part was like, it was something where there was both immediately accessible to a normal person who could walk in and just button mash and do all right. And then, there was this infinitely deep finesse where the more you want to practice and you wanted to have your preferences… I like this character and this car and whatever. And I just really, really loved the blue shell, which was this idea… Everybody hates the blue shell, and what I loved about it was there was an intention to the game design, which was like, if you’re running away with it, and it’s not fair and it’s not going to be fun for everybody, the game is going to empower somebody to be like, “All right, let’s keep it close. Let’s keep this thing fun.”

Anil Dash:
So, there’s a whatever, a kid that’s playing for the first time, and somebody like me who’s been playing for 30 years or whatever can play together and still have fun. And I see that now all the time where I got a kid, I got an eight year old son, and he’s good. I don’t have to spot him. He’s doing all right. But even before he was, you could play something together and share this thing, and it’s the nostalgia aspect of like, “I grew up playing this and you grow up playing this.” But also, that intentionality, I think about all the time. Somebody made this technology, and you think about all the math behind it to get all these shapes up on the screen, and they’re like, “We’re going to design a system where people can sit together and have a good time together.” And that shows up in the work. And I just thought, “man, those people were doing good with their lives.”

Anil Dash:
Literally from day one, it was always gamers, but it was a lot of… Well, board games was a big part, so it wasn’t always video games. So, the DNA, the gaming DNA, of the company is deep.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
I heard there was a bridge game. Is that true?

Tim Kington:
It’s true. Yeah. That one got started because our former president, Rich Armstrong, was really into bridge, and I think I mentioned that I played bridge when I was here my first week or something, so he wanted to get a bridge game together. And we drafted a couple of people and made them learn bridge.

Anil Dash:
I came in, and I’d heard about the bridge game. It predated me. And I joined the company, I was like, “This sounds like…” I pictured like a dark room and everybody’s got those accountants visors on, and you’re just about to get… Like they’re going to run the table [inaudible 00:00:08:27]. They’re just going to [inaudible 00:08:28] you because they’re like the bridge experts. There’s Tim’s, who’s like the mathematical mind, and they’re like, “Oh, I’ll just teach you how to play.” Really, you’re just outmatched.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
I heard from a little birdie that also we had a connection to the folks at Slack or a connection to playing games on Slack?

Anil Dash:
Back in the day, they had started a game called Game Neverending. God, this was probably 20 years ago at this point. And it was beautiful and this great art, and a core base and die hard users, but then everybody else is sort of like, “This is like intense. I don’t know…” You wouldn’t casually go up to Game Neverending and start playing it., And then they built another game, and it was called Glitch, and it was the same as Game Neverending. It was like wild art, massively multiplayer game. Everybody’s in the RPG core base of die hard users, not a whole lot of people playing, and they had built a tool that helped them make the game, and that that tool was called Slack.

Anil Dash:
And then, again, they did the same thing. They were just like, “Nobody wants our games but we’re going to build the tool.” And then, they became Slack, and they’re now multibillion dollar company and I think all of those people have private islands or whatever. But I guarantee you when they’re going to retire, they’re going to be like, “Let’s build a game, and it’s only going to have a couple of users, but it’s going to be really cool looking.”

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
And then, you said we got our name was similar way?

Anil Dash:
Well, what happened was the team had built a prototype of what became Glitch, and we were like, “We need a new name for it,” or whatever. And I think just independently… Tim, you tell me if I’m wrong. My recollection is we came up with the name Glitch independently at one of the early meetings where we’re like, “That’d be a cool name.” But it was like, “Oh, but it’s taken.” And I was like, “Well, I bet they would do a solid.” So, because I knew them, I was just like, “Look, it’s not going to be bad. It’s going to be cool like your game.” And then, they were like, “All right, let’s do a deal and let’s get you the name.” And so, Glitch, for like the first, I don’t know, six months that Glitch was running, our site, our tools of Glitch were running, but one of the top search terms that would come in was Glitch the game because people were still looking for that old game in the [inaudible 00:10:26].

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Well, we have a programmer that makes games here. Greg, you were telling me over beverages, I don’t want to say what kind of beverages, because you’re here, you’re a web developer at Glitch, but on your off time you make games. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Greg Weil:
I like making games a lot because whenever you’re making one, you end up touching a whole range of different skills, I guess, where you start out where it’s just, “I’m going to code up some movement. I’m going to focus a lot on just making it feel responsive and fun to play.” But then all of a sudden it’s, “I need some sprites for the character moving around, and they need to look good. And also, they need to still fit the gameplay and all the other different kinds of things.” And all of a sudden you need sound effects, and then all of a sudden you need the ability for multiple people to play together. And all of a sudden, it feels like you’re doing like 20 different skill sets but just a little taste of all of, which is a lot of fun to work on.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
For you guys that make the things that we love so much, what are my game options on Glitch?

Greg Weil:
There are a couple games on Glitch that are kind of surprising and a little tricky to find sometimes. I saw one on the forum just like a week ago that was pretty neat. It looked like an online World War II bomber kind of thing where different players are… It’s massively multiplayer, everyone goes into a single world, and you’re flying around planes in the top down perspective.

Tim Kington:
There’s a Snake game out there that’s a clone of the old Apple II, Snake Byte, the grandfather of the Snake game on your phone.

Tim Kington:
Yeah. And that one has clones of all the levels. So, there were like 20 levels in that game, I think, and it has different walls in different places and gets harder as you go along. I kind of enjoy that one.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
That’s classic. I’m going to jump over to Nkasi because I don’t think people think that the office’s legal counsel is going to be out here organizing a whole Mario Kart tournament. Can you talk about that?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
During my interview, and Neil, I don’t even know how it came up, but he’s talking about Mario Kart and how he was awesome at it. And I was like, “Oh man, I need to confirm all the boasting that was going on in this interview.” So, our onsite came along, and I was like, “Do you know what? This is the perfect opportunity. This is the perfect opportunity.” And so, actually, I got together with Greg and another engineer here, Victoria, and we created the Mario Kart tournament. It was actually really easy. Maybe we accidentally indexed for it, but a lot of people really know how to play Mario Kart, like serious, serious know-how. Like brought their own controllers, like, “No, I want to use this specific controller because then I can actually fly it into things.” So, yeah.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Playing games at Glitch sounds like inviting singers to karaoke.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
I mean, I guess. That is definitely true. I did come to [inaudible 00:00:14:00], but I didn’t think about it. I was just like, “Oh, maybe there’ll be three or four people that would be interested in that.”

Greg Weil:
Yeah, yeah. All the quiet folks all of a sudden got real loud. It was good.

Keisha “TK” Dutes:
So, with that being said, all of y’all, and especially Nkasi, any plans firstly for another Mario Kart tournament or any plans for any other game nights at Glitch?

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
What I would really love to do, and whether it’s a game… I think you could consider it a game, but I love Rock Band. Love it. Love it. Love it.

Anil Dash:
Now that I hear that, that’s the most surprising thing I’ve ever learned about you. I’m like, “Yes, that fits.”

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
I don’t know what you mean by that. We’ll have a discussion later.

Nkasi Okafor Wilken:
Offline. But that’s something I’ve been floating around in my head because, then, you can have people at the same time singing some amazing tunes. And I’ve learned a lot of different rock songs through Rock Band, that I had never heard of, and now are there on my iPhone playing it all day. So, that’s what I’m kicking around in my head for the next onsite.

Maurice Cherry:
Next up, meet Joe Gaffey, a telecoms enterprise software architect by day and a gamer and creative coder by night.

Joe Gaffey:
Yeah, I was into games and coding from quite a young age, actually. I remember seeing arcade machines probably in the early ’80s in local fast food restaurants and such places and thinking these were the best things ever. So colorful and loud and so different from anything else that was around at the time. And these were actually the first computers that I interacted with. Later on, we had an Atari 2600 in the house, and that got lots of use too. Then when I was a little older, I found some coding books in the public library, and I used to read the program listings before I even had access to a real computer. I got my first computer, then, from my parents for Christmas around the age of 10 or so. It was an eight bit era. Commodore 64, one of those ones with the cassette player for loading software. Took about 10 minutes to load 64 [inaudible 00:16:13].

Joe Gaffey:
So, I started coding basic games like Pong and brick breaking games and so forth, and Commodore PET BASIC. Then whenever I was playing commercial games on a C 64, I was always really trying to understand the game mechanics and looking for glitches and insights into how the game worked under the hood. Then once I discovered all of the mechanics of the game, I usually got bored and moved onto the next one or maybe try to recreate something from it in my own code.

Maurice Cherry:
With his love of old school games, some programming knowledge under his belt, and a desire to code, Joe got competitive.

Joe Gaffey:
Yeah. Get Up game off competition turned up with retro gaming team. I taught it. It was really a good opportunity to bring together some of my different interests. I was originally thinking of of Asteroids, a clone of Asteroids, perhaps with a mix of like Lunar Lander mechanics thrown in. But then I thought about those old, colorful, and loud Galaxian and Galaga machines. I thought it would be a great example of a retro gaming game to show my kids and hopefully get them into interested in coding as well. To make it a little more interesting for modern audiences, I added some original mechanics like the [up 00:17:24] red pills, the destruct orb, smart bomb, and the wingman assist, and of course the end game boss battle. If you use one of the destruct orbs just at the right time, you can take out an entire wave in one shot, so there’s a little tip. A [inaudible 00:17:39] in the game off that year, which I was very pleased with.

Maurice Cherry:
Here, Joe weighs in on how he used Glitch to make Galaxeroids.

Joe Gaffey:
Well, I really key benefit for me was portability. I did not much free time when he’s working on Galaxeroids, so I was taking every opportunity to get some coding done using whatever device I had to hand. And having the web based editor made this really easy of course. I actually coded it the whole thing and produced all of the art assets such as they are in the browser as an experiment to see if it all could be done that way. Gethub integration was also a great help, so I could easily create snapshots and forks as needed. Example, for releasing into different app stores. I actually published Galaxeroids into the Microsoft store and the [inaudible 00:18:22] game store as a progressive web app. T. Then making Galaxeroids a PWA on Glitch, I was able to test on any mobile device I can put my hand on, and I was able to send beta links to friends, to family to test some their devices and then make changes on the fly so I could test the fixes immediately.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s no secret. Joe loves retro gaming, but he’s really got his eye on the future.

Joe Gaffey:
I like to play simple games with my kids like platformers, like Mario Bros. and Tetris, but I’ll give most genres a go. So, I’ve done some other experiments with games. In another experiment on Glitch, I built a Guitar Hero/Rock Band clone called Rockstar, which uses the web MIDI and web Gamepad APIs. [inaudible 00:19:07] playing along with MIDI tunes using the actual Rock Band instruments, guitars and drums. It actually worked pretty well in the end. Needs a little bit of UX tidying now, of course. More recently, I’ve gotten into driving simulators in VR, and that’s a whole different experience. And my latest splits experiment, which I called WD-40 for some reason, comes from that interest, and so my first real attempt at 3D programming on the web.

Joe Gaffey:
It’s a physics-based driving simulator based on three.js with ammo.js physics. And it’s pretty basic right now, just extends one of the ammo.js code examples. But my idea is to use it to experiment with upcoming web standards like the upcoming USB web hitch ID, human interface device API, so I want to see if it’s possible to build a full driving simulator where USB-based steering wheel and pedal controls, including full force feedback, just using web standards and technologies running in the browser. I eventually, I’d like to experiment with WebXR, as well, and mixed reality. Maybe driving an RC car remotely on the web over WebRTC, that sort of stuff. Like somebody [inaudible 00:20:24] experiments, I try to push the boundaries of what’s considered feasible to do with web standards technologies in the browser and keeping the source code as open and accessible as possible at the same time, and Glitch is really perfect for that.

Joe Gaffey:
I’m quite passionate about the open web and the idea that anybody can look under the hood of a website and see how it works just by clicking on the view source option. Unfortunately, that’s not so easy to do these days with modern web frameworks, but you want to be able to take advantage of JavaScript and create this rich experience that offers, especially for games and demos, but ideally to do it in a way that supports open and accessible coding. I think in this way, platforms like Glitch shows there’s a real opportunity to realize the vision of the social rewrite web as originally described by Tim Berners-Lee in the early days of the web.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, let’s talk to a member of the team to get the lowdown on some glitch apps that anyone can code, use, or remix for themselves.

Multiple Speakers:
Welcome to the App Review.

Keith Kurson:
Hi, I’m Keith Kurson. I’m an engineering lead at Glitch. I run what is now called the Dotcom team. So, we make everything on Glitch that isn’t part of the editor, so the front page, collections, user profiles, all of that.

Keith Kurson:
One of my favorite is called Figma Pacman, and I use this tool called Figma which is what our designers [inaudible 00:22:01] use and a lot of other designers to build layouts. It’s sort of the design tool at the moment. But we’ve seen some really interesting uses of Figma and other tools that aren’t traditionally used for this on Glitch. And so, Figma Pacman is an example of an app where you, in Figma, draw a little maze like what Pacman runs through, and then Glitch users can plug in that URL and then play Pacman on that maze. And so, it’s a really cool combination of two different tools. And people who aren’t that technical… So, it was made by a designer who uses Figma all day and doesn’t get a lot of time to do programming, and so anyone can jump in and make their own maze without really needing to know how to program. And I think that’s really cool and shows off what Glitch games can look like.

Keith Kurson:
And then, the second one that I really, really love, that I’ve played a bunch of times, is called PowerSlides, and you’ve probably seen some version of this in the city that you live in performed live. But basically, it takes a bunch of random slideshows from all over the internet, so government slideshows, weird marketing slides, things like that, and combines them into one huge database. And when you start the game, it chooses 10 of them randomly and you have five minutes to give a South by Southwest style presentation with these totally random slides that could just have a picture of a dolphin and say, “Think of the dolphins,” or a text line that just says, “iPhones for dogs,” and you have to give a presentation like you’re trying to sell this thing. And that is really fun to watch people do.

Maurice Cherry:
Want more gamer goodies? We made a collection filled with bonus content where you can play the Glitch apps mentioned in this episode, see a list of the team’s favorite games, and check out a game related articles and more on Glimmer. You’ll find a link to the collection in the show notes. That’s it for the first episode of Shift Shift Forward, a show about everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. Our website is glitch.com/SSF, and our Twitter handle is @Glitch. Let us know what you think about this episode on social media by using the hashtag #shiftshiftforward. And if you really liked the show, then subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

Maurice Cherry:
Here’s what’s coming up on Shift Shift Forward. A lot of us are sheltered in place and adjusting to the reality of living and working from home for the foreseeable future, and technology is a big part of that. So, who is considered to be in tech these days? 

Maurice Cherry:
Shift Shift Forward is produced by Maurice Cherry and Keisha TK Dutes, with editing by Brittany Brown and sound design and mixing by Keisha TK Dutes. Special thanks to the entire team at Glitch.

A year ago, we launched Glitch to the world. Since then, over a million people have become part of the community, creating amazing apps, bots, websites, art projects, virtual reality experiences, interactive infographics and much more.

But we wanted to take a moment to clearly explain what Glitch is about, and why we think it’s a place that everybody on the web will find valuable. This is Glitch:

A community where you can find cool apps and websites you can’t find anywhere else. Think of it as being like YouTube or SoundCloud, but for apps or bots or VR experiences instead of videos or songs.

The most innovative, powerful collaborative platform for creating, remixing and hosting apps. We’re evolving “developer tools” into a set of creative and expressive tools that people of any skill level can use to create the web.

An effort to make the web into a creative medium where We’re an independent company that cares deeply about making tech more accessible, more inclusive, and more empowering, and Glitch is how we’re doing that.

Now, those ideas can mean a lot of different things, whether you’re a person looking for cool VR experiences to check out, an artist who wants to use the web as another outlet to express an idea, an educator who wants to teach a room full of students how to create an app, an experienced coder who wants to launch a new startup without dealing with the drudgery, or an activist who needs to share essential information that others can quickly reuse.

All of those people, and more, are who we’re making Glitch for—and we’re just getting started.

What is Glitch?

Just as important as the technology that enables Glitch are the principles that make Glitch special. We hope you’ll take a look and offer your feedback on how we can put them to work as we build Glitch with you.

Glitch is for everyone. Simple: We want Glitch to be welcoming, friendly, useful and safe for anyone, anywhere to use to create or share or discover. Whether it’s for your personal project, your community or organization, or for your business, Glitch wants to help you create.

Start from something that works. This one’s not so obvious: When you create things on Glitch, you start by remixing a project that already works. That means your odds of successfully creating something are much higher than if you just started with a pile of parts. We want to increase the chance that you’ll start with something other people can see and respond to, and not get frustrated just getting things to work.

Your bug is your bug. This is related to “start from something that works”— if your Glitch project or app isn’t working right, it’s because you made a mistake. And that’s okay! Everybody makes mistakes. But the point is that you should know it’s because of something you did, not some mysterious problem that you can’t see or solve.

Defaults express values. The choices we make should, by default, help the most people share the most ideas, in a way that’s safe, predictable and expressive. In technology, usually everything is possible, but lots of things aren’t easy. We want the settings you get out of the box to be the ones that are most likely to yield delightful results.

Coding is creative and expressive. Our reference points in creating Glitch are the tools people use to create art and literature and films and music — the tools of creation. This is because we think expressing oneself through code is as valuable and powerful as any other form of expression. (And if the thing you want to express is a simple tool to solve a boring problem, that’s cool too.)

We don’t work alone. This is one of our core values at Fog Creek Software, the company behind Glitch. It manifests in a lot of ways, the simplest being that Glitch lets multiple people create code at the same time, in the same place. But it’s a principle that goes much deeper, to the philosophy that all ideas start by building on the work of others, and all innovation happens in the context of communities sharing ideas and inspiration.

Everyone is a newbie all the time. Because tech culture in general, and programming culture in particular, has often erected too many barriers to too many groups, we want to be explicit that Glitch is about tearing those barriers down. And a key insight is that, whether you’ve been coding for one day or for decades, part of the delight of technology is that we’re all learning new things every day. So no matter your level of experience, you’re a newbie in some way, and Glitch is designed for newbies of every skill level.

Learning is fun! Most technology platforms, especially those used to make websites or apps, talk about how they “don’t force you to learn” when you want to create something. But we think learning is fun, if it leads to real, meaningful results, and isn’t just drudgery that isn’t relevant to the topic at hand. So with Glitch, we solve the annoying or frustrating parts of building an app or website, so you can focus on just learning the good stuff.

You own your stuff. This should seem obvious, but these days on the Internet, it’s not: You should own what you create. With Glitch, you do own it. That’s true at the legal level—you choose the license for your work, from standard copyright to completely public domain to any open source license you want. But it’s also true philosophically, because Glitch has no lock-in, so you can export your code and run it anywhere you want. You’re in control.

Sustainability matters. Finally, we care a lot about making Glitch a meaningful platform for the long term. Our company is 18 years old — that’s ancient in Internet terms. And we’re independent, privately held, have no outside investors, and care about being transparent and open in our business model and business processes. All of this matters for Glitch because we want our community to be as invested in its long-term, sustainable success as we are.

Much of what we’ve captured in the Glitch principles are things we’ve learned from some of the core ideas that have made the Internet so powerful, principles like Postel’s Law (“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”), the Principle of Least Surprise (“In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.”), and key insights from the Unix philosophy.

But just as much as we reference any technical precedents, we look at everything from urban design to artistic movements to efforts to advance justice or equity, and we see those as influences on how Glitch will grow and evolve.

Most of all, we find our inspiration in our community, from the new and surprising things you create, and the ways you push us to bring Glitch to even more creative people. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Anybody who’s ever made something they’re proud of can tell you: People do their best work in collaboration with other creative people. That’s a lesson that is especially important when it comes to making new technology. And that’s why we made Glitch. It’s a brand-new community where anybody can build the app of their dreams.

Glitch (formerly Gomix, see below) is the culmination of a few years of work from our team, focused on a simple goal: making the easiest way for coders to create and collaborate, whether professionals or novices. Glitch works like this:

Create any app you can imagine, by remixing working code into exactly what you need.

Invite your friends and colleagues to collaborate with you, so you can code together in real-time.

Your app is automatically running and ready for the world to use.

And behind all that is a smart and inclusive community of creators, who’ll help you when you get stuck, and collaborate with you to make your ideas real.

But what Glitch does is unique. You haven’t seen anything like this before.

If you’re already a coder: Glitch makes every other development environment feel lonely and old-fashioned, as coding starts to feel more like simultaneous editing in Google Docs and less like the chore of reviewing pull requests. Everything you create is automatically deployed in realtime onto cloud servers, so there’s no provisioning of servers or management of infrastructure, just the joy of creating.

If you’ve Glitch is the place to start. We’ve got a friendly and welcoming community (we don’t tolerate people being jerks) and you start by remixing apps that already work, running on real web servers that you don’t have to learn how to manage. If you do get stuck, anyone in the Glitch community can come in and offer to help, just as easy as raising your hand.

If you care about where tech is headed: You know that people are more frustrated than ever about the sense that people are being left behind or excluded by today’s tech industry. Our company, Fog Creek, has a history of setting the standards of where programming (and tech overall) is headed. With Glitch, we’re firmly saying that tech is headed to a place where everyone can participate and create the apps we’ll be using together.

Today, as Glitch graduates to a full-fledged community, we’re ecstatic to welcome  as Glitch’s community engineer, where she’ll be a dedicated public voice for Glitch, working along with you to build the community. Jenn’s been a stalwart of the JavaScript community, a passionate and hilarious public speaker, and has an incredible background in educating coders of every kind.

But you don’t have to take our word for it; you can read for yourself what Jenn had to say about joining the Glitch team. (Be sure to read through to the end for a must-watch video.)

It’s even easier to use Glitch than it is to describe it — give it a try now and you’ll have your first app running in a minute. We think you’ll immediately see how it’s different than any other coding environment that’s come before.

Even though Glitch is fun and easy, these are real apps, hosted on the same cloud infrastructure that runs the biggest sites on the web. You’re not using a toy when you’re part of the Glitch community, you’re just taking advantage of the easiest way to make real apps.

If you haven’t checked out Glitch in a while, or have never seen it before, you’ll be especially excited about some of the newer features we’ve built into the community:

There’s an awesome  of apps and bots that already work with many of the most popular web services and developer frameworks. With the notorious well-respected Jenn Schiffer as our community engineer, we’ll regularly have new projects, events and articles explaining how anyone can use Glitch.

Glitch now works on almost every device so you can even edit code on tablets or phones, and your app will automatically update when you make those changes.

It’s easier to bring your code into Glitch — there’s slick new support for importing and exporting GitHub projects, including a button you can put right on your project’s GitHub page that will let new users run it on Glitch with just one click.

Because all software has glitches, and we’re going to fix ’em together! Well, okay, that’s not the only reason.