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.

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

February may be the shortest month, but it has the most personality (biased Aquarius here!). That personality has definitely shone through the apps you all were creating and sharing over the month.

Our community not only loves collaborating and creating with each other, but it loves to build tools to facilitate collaboration and creation.

~coolzone is a multi-user drawing/writing tool by @crafah where anyone connected can communicate. Remix it and make one for your next virtual hangout!

If you prefer communicating through sound, then fresh from The Gallery is ~one-hand-band, which is like ~coolzone but for making music. @hatandbread built it so you can create your own room or join an existing one, and it's a progressive web app!

@high_byte created ~digital-pottery so you can make pottery without the mess *and* be able to share your models with others.

Many of you were building and sharing apps to celebrate Black History Month and the landing of Perseverance on Mars. By the way, please don't send me to Mars. I can enjoy Perseverence from here thanks to @AngelFQC, thanks.

@jeffrey.rivera created ~knowledge-of-space as a 3D educational...space to float around while you learn.

A class made this informative site, ~bhm-website, to add to as they learned throughout Black History Month, including interviews and useful resources.

Mariame Kaba's ~blackphotobooth (design by @netanoir) is a beautiful zine of found photo booth portraits of Black people. 

Here's a terminal to make it look like you're working

I'm excited to see how this fake terminal by @louh evolves! Here are some other apps that are inspiring me away from my work :)

~spline-isometric-room is a demo of a Spline export hosted on Glitch. Read more on the support forum about how @khalby786 made it!

~birdfolder is a landing page for a new project by @hootalex that I can only best describe as "sweet" and "🕊".

All the way to outer space and back in a single blog post, look at us! If you have Glitch projects you built or love and want us to feature, 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 A Very Long Walk, which is currently about halfway on it's journey from Russia to Portugal 🚶‍♂️

Last Month on Glitch, the February 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!

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

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

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

Our users told us that setting up bots had a bit of a learning curve, so we created a Discord starter bot with an interactive install guide that walks you through every step of the process. Now you can go from idea to bot, faster. It's perfect whether you're a Discord fan who wants to explore the world of bots, an aspiring coder, or both. Through this guide, you'll learn about the tech that makes bots work: APIs, Javascript, Node.js, Botkit, Discord.js and more. But it's only the beginning of your bot journey. This bot was born to remix.  Remixing on Glitch means you get your own copy of the bot to customize as you like.

Steph at Glitch remixed our Starter Kit twice to make two new great bots. The first is Gritty Bot, and features Gritty, the adorable, scary, hairy Philly Flyers mascot.

Want to bless your Discord server with a Gritty gif? Gritty Bot can do it! NHL stats? Gritty Bot is on it.

Want to start a business? Just ask Bizbot for an idea.

This bot has cool ideas like: “The new hot app is all about fixing the in-law's WiFi. Designed by toddlers for toddlers.” Even if that's not a viable business, the real magic is in the fact that it gets data from a Google Sheet. That means you can add stuff to your bot and nosy people looking at your company will think you're working. And maybe you are.

Bizbot and Gritty Bot are remixable, so you could turn Gritty bot into a Phanatic bot (that's the green muppet-like mascot of the Phillies). More tips for customization are in each bot’s Readme.md file and code comments.

No matter which bot you choose to remix, let us know what awesome bot creations you’ve made by tweeting your app to @Glitch.

Discord Bots Starter Kit: Making your first bot, easy

Whether you just discovered Glitch or you're a long-time user, here's a rundown of five features everyone should have on their radar. We try to keep things simple and fun, but there's a lot of power under the 'hood that enables all kinds of creators, from beginners to experienced professionals.

You might have already discovered Rewind, Glitch’s version control system, but did you know that a Glitch project is also its own Git repo?

And it gets better - in addition to giving you a commit system, you can import/export to Github. Import a project from Github for a great starter project experience. Then export your Glitch project to Github if you need an external repository for your code.

Need console access? We’ve got you covered.

Fire up your Glitch project in the editor. Click the “Tools” button located on the left side of the editor to reveal the Tools menu. Then, click “Terminal.” Presto - a fully functional console ready for your commands.

You’ve probably discovered the Glitch editor’s built-in “Format This File.” We use the fabulous Prettier library for this, and have the default options applied. 

Want to do even more? Use a .prettierrc JSON configuration file in your project to set your own preferences.

Hosting a project with API tokens, passwords, or other sensitive information? You can (and should!) store private data securely inside the .env file. It’s a secure environment config section of your project, and only invited collaborators are able to see the contents.

If you need help using Glitch or want to see a new feature added, head to the support forum where you'll find some of the friendliest, most creative coders on the web. And after you've made something awesome, share it with us via email or tag on on Twitter @glitch. 

Get the Most out of Glitch with These Four Pro Tips

We’re excited to announce some new updates that will have you building even faster with new starter apps, support for generated static sites, and a clean new look that makes the Glitch experience faster and fresher than ever.  

Get from idea to “Hello World” in seconds with our new lineup of starter apps, along with new and improved support for generated static sites

We’ve created new, fresh and fast starter apps to get you building websites and Node apps in seconds. In addition to a refresh of our static website and full-stack Node app starters, we’re improving our FREE static sites to support generated static sites, too! This was something our community has been asking for, so we’re excited to give you the benefits of fast and free static sites with the power to configure how your sites are built. 

Try it out by remixing our brand new React and Eleventy starters or updating your app’s package.json file. 

We picked a powerful set of tools to help you create full-featured apps on Glitch. 

There’s so much anxiety about which JS framework or build tool to pick, so we made some really good default choices for you. Our new Node starter now uses Fastify to give you a faster, extendable developer experience when writing Node. We chose React and Eleventy for their versatility, documentation and the wealth of developer content created by their communities. And we harness the powers of Vite to further improve the development and build experience in our React starter. 

You get all of the benefits of these tools without having to do any setup. But if you do want to configure your app or use other tools, go for it! Glitch won’t lock you into the platform or abstract away the code that is powering your idea. Don’t forget the rewind feature is always there if you need to backtrack—mistakes are welcome and encouraged!

Build a web app in less than a minute on Glitch.com

Syntax highlighting support for more file types

With this new update we’ve added support for syntax highlighting to make your code as clear and concise as possible. Open your Glitch editor to see syntax highlighting in action for the following file types:

These updates can help you go from idea to app in seconds, or serve as an introduction to a whole new world of frameworks. Don’t see your favorite framework listed right now? Our community is already collaborating to make the next wave of super-easy starters for Glitch. Join them and let us know what you want to see next.

Our newly updated “Create Project” page is available for everyone now, featuring our new official starters as well as Github import. Watch this space for more useful starter apps, as well as projects curated from and by our community!

There’s always something new to inspire you at Glitch

Whether you’re just beginning to experiment with Glitch or a remixer extraordinaire, we are excited to introduce—or reintroduce—what Glitch is all about to everyone. Yes, you can use Glitch to go from idea to site in seconds, but not just any site: a reliable, performant, accessible site (or app!), backed by some of the most powerful tools on the web. These updates and features are the result of a lot of careful consideration for our amazing community of explorers, dreamers, and builders, resulting in a Glitch that is faster and fresher than ever. 

If you have any fun or interesting projects you’re building using our new starters, feel free to tag us on Twitter, share in our support forum gallery, or email community@glitch.com so we can share with the community! In the meantime we’ll be hard at work making the Glitch experience the most reliable, intuitive, and friendly place to build the web. ✨

Take your apps to the next level with a Pro account

Glitch is the fastest way to go from code to deploy. You can build anything from small static websites to complex full-stack apps for free! All Glitch users get our powerful and collaborative in-browser editor, with Github import/export and Prettier support. Static sites come with free always-on hosting; full-stack apps sleep to save resources but wake on demand. Upgrade to a Pro account to get all of that and more: access controls, private projects, and the ability to Boost 5 full-stack apps for more disk space, memory, and always-on status. Check out our pricing page to learn more and subscribe!

Get a React or Eleventy app up and running in under a minute with the fastest, most powerful upgrade to Glitch ever. Now, it’s quicker to build a real website on Glitch than with a no-code tool.

Remix a whole new Glitch

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

We asked co creators Richard Yee and Alex Tomlinson to share the story behind their new variable font, Whirly Birdie. This fun, flexible, and retro-inspired typeface launched a few weeks ago and it’s just getting started. As one of the most whimsical sites we’ve seen built on Glitch this year, this project should delight web developers and designers alike.

What was the inspiration for this project? How did you take this from concept to launch? 

A: We wanted to make a website as fun as we think the font is. Our idea was to create a “whole world” out of a font, and I think we got pretty far! There’s a clock made out of a font, a bookshelf, and we even hijacked your cursor- so that’s a font too! And, of course, our process involved Glitch at every step! Almost every element on the page began as a separate sketch on Glitch. I guess you could say our process was creating a whole bunch of neat little sketches utilizing the font, and then seeing what made sense together.

R: Yup, we wanted to make something cool combining each of our specialities. Alex is always drawing fonts. I'm always tinkering with weird web tech. We both use Glitch day to day, so this collab was bound to happen at some point! This project was a “playground” in the truest sense of the word. While we started with a loose plan, I think our multiple tangents on Glitch have allowed us to make something super fun.

What stack did you use to make the project? Tell us about the tools, libraries, and frameworks you used. 

A: I think it was all Glitch and Svelte. Unless there is something Richard isn’t telling me about!

R: Svelte was a real gem of a find this year for me as a developer. Just its base configuration was super powerful. Didn't need a separate state manager nor an animation library. Svelte had most of them ready out of the box. It was also very versatile. I could utilize all the powers of a framework without forcing Alex to adopt it when collaborating. There's nothing wrong with vanilla javascript, and I'm glad we could keep some of that workflow with Svelte.

How do you explain what a variable font is and its benefits for web developers and designers? 

A: I think the best way to explain variable fonts to web developers is simply: they're fonts with variables! Depending on what a typographer has drawn in their font, you can use variables to output different weights, sizes, or even animations from a font. The main benefit for designers is the creative freedom. They basically get to co-pilot a font’s design. The main benefit for developers is the ease of using variable fonts. Not much has changed in the CSS, except now you only have to import a single file! You do have this new "font-variation-settings”. Maybe Richard can convince developers better than I can?

R: I definitely expect variable fonts to mature in the near future. The major draw would probably be cross-browser compatibility and stability. Chrome has seen some weird glitches, no pun intended, with how it renders variable fonts. Edge cases for sure, and I'm sure their teams are doing their best to fix all bugs coming in. We actually submitted a variable font bug we found while developing this website and they rolled out a fix last month! 

That said, by baking animations directly into variable icon fonts, it removes the need for a library like lottie.js just to create animated SVGs. It's a super powerful spec, and most importantly, it was super easy to animate! 

What are some of your predictions or favorite trends in web development and design? 

A: I predict that Whirly Birdie and Whirlybats will take over the web, and you won’t be able to read a sentence without seeing an animated airship or UFO. My favorite trend in web design is DIY web design. Anything where you can tell someone designed or coded something themselves and didn’t just defer to some Bootstrap theme or Material Design generator.

R: I definitely feel there's a trend for more bespoke gestures and performance that you would typically find in a native app. That said, I'm a big fan of progressive web apps, which are just websites that you can launch from an icon on your mobile homescreen. It frees you of the browser frame, giving you something that really does feel native. Needless to say, I have whirlybirdie.com installed on my phone. On trends in development, I'm a fan of what Svelte is doing to change up the JS landscape. Having most of the work done on the compiler and not the client is a nice shift in philosophy. 

What’s your best advice for creators looking to make something and sell it online? Any lessons learned the hard way or best practices to share? 

A: Sell it yourself! A big part of the reason I decided on creating a standalone website for this font is that so many “graphic design marketplaces” are abysmal and depressing places. “Products priced 90% lower than yours are more likely to sell!” and “We are now taking 50% of your sales, because we are so devoted to making our service the very best for you! :)” are the sad realities of selling your soul to those places. As for lessons learned the hard way: we had the purchase button in low-contrast pale blue color when the site launched and we switched it to a nice green—and I swear it has impacted our sales. 

R: Market your work and be confident about sharing! Whether it be on social media channels, aggregator sites, or even the @glitch twitter account, I think it's important to be active in seeking out specific communities that would be excited for your new product/website/project. Sharing process work is also a good way to generate interest. Alex was fairly on point promoting Whirly Birdie throughout our development cycle. 

What’s next after Whirly-Birdie? Are you working on more fonts or projects? 

A: That implies Whirly Birdie ever ends! I like to think of it as a living, breathing project. Since launch I’ve stealthily added at least 5 Whirlybat icons, and likely even more by the time someone reads this! As for future font projects, I think there is still so much to explore with variable fonts.

R: Would love more font collabs and maybe branching out even further. For now, I'm headed back to more experimental tinkering. I'm currently making a face-tracking web app for virtual live streamers. Hope to launch it early next year!

We asked co creators Richard Yee and Alex Tomlinson to share the story behind their new variable font, Whirly Birdie. This fun, flexible, and retro-inspired typeface launched a few weeks ago and it’s just getting started. As one of the most whimsical sites we’ve seen built on Glitch this year, this project should delight web developers and designers alike. 

What does it take to create and launch a font? A Q&A with the Whirly Birdie creators 

To get everyone in the holiday spirits, we asked Nicolas Grenié, a Developer Advocate at Typeform, to write about the really cool puzzle he put together using different technologies to surprise his wife for the holiday. We hope you enjoy the tale as much as we did ☺️

As we are entering the Holiday season, and everything around us is starting to adorn itself with red, white, and green, I want to take a moment to tell you a modern Christmas tale. But first, call dibs on grandma’s rocking chair, place it near the fireplace, tuck yourself in your favorite plaid, and pour yourself some hot cocoa. You can even drop some tiny marshmallows in it. It will be our little secret.