He also serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation 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

Think about the first time you heard a song that sampled another, and thought “whoa.” For me, it was hearing the Four Season’s “Beggin” revived by French DJ Pilooski. The art of taking something known and making it anew for a brand new audience is one that we keep coming back to, like with Casey Kolderup’s Postmarks project. A fresh take on social bookmarking, but built for the fediverse, and more importantly—the individual user—which definitely made me say “Whoa.” Thankfully Casey is a staff software engineer for Glitch, and Glitch is all about *remixing*, so I was lucky to be able to chat with them amid the buzz Postmarks has been generating. 

Jenn: You’re no stranger to Glitch, but how did you first learn about it?

Casey: I’ve followed along with its launch under previous names but was in my “writing Ruby in vim” era at that point, so I hadn’t used the platform all that much. I started using it in earnest in early 2021 when the new React starter launched—I had been working exclusively on backend development for a while and wanted to catch up a bit with frontend trends. Three months later, by some weird twists of fate, I found myself applying that knowledge to Glitch.com as a contractor, helping out with updates to the site itself.

What is your favorite thing about the internet?

For me it’s the opportunity to broaden your horizons, learn about the things that are important to other people, and decide what those things mean to you. On the internet I’ve made lifelong friends, learned about entire branches of political and philosophical thought (for better AND worse), become a fan of bands who only had a few dozen supporters, and discovered the joy of both 6-second Vines about road signs and 6-hour Youtube video essays about Japanese video games.

How is making an app that’s designed to be remixed by others different from making an app just for yourself?

There’s a lot more pressure to make it work before you tell anyone about it, that’s for sure! I found myself having to think more about the specifics of how Glitch (cleverly– I can say that because I wasn’t there when they thought this stuff up) uses things like the .env file and the .data directory to make each remix different. I had never made it this far before on a project that was designed as a remixable object first, but now that I’ve done it I want to think of more.

We haven’t seen new bookmarking apps in several years, what made you want to revisit the idea?

I’ve been using online bookmarking platforms since the days of del.icio.us; a couple years ago I had an idea for something I wanted to do with the solution I was using at the time and found that their API felt really difficult to use, to the extent that I started thinking about how I could probably build the solution I wanted from scratch more easily. 

I got busy with other things and shelved the idea for a bit, then started working on a new Rails app that was built around having small-group conversations with specific URLs as the subject, a sort of “URL book club”. As I built things like User Accounts, Login, Privacy Controls, etc. it all felt sort of tedious, to be building another closed platform and having to spend time on all of these things I’ve written a dozen times with slight variations. Some programmers would take that as a cue to design their own framework; instead I just went back to playing Nintendo Switch. Despite that, though, both apps kind of remained stuck in the back of my mind.

What were your community inspirations for building on the fediverse in this way?

I had been trying out various ways of being a user on Mastodon ever since its first big migration in 2017; some public, some private. It had never occurred to me that the ActivityPub protocol was something I could build a working server on until Darius Kazemi started re-promoting some work he had done to make exactly that process more approachable, and I was particularly interested in apps that weren’t just different microblogging implementations– I’m glad people are building those, but it wasn’t for me.

I thought “maybe I should make my URL book club work on the fediverse?”, and in the process of thinking through the implications of that, I landed on this simpler idea.

If you were to have one, what’s your ActivityPub wishlist?

I’m still learning more about ActivityPub and its associated specs, but I will say that I’ve felt challenged from the start to provide good interoperability with dominant platforms like Mastodon–figuring out how to make Postmarks “play nice” with other implementations seems like a tricky line to walk, and I’d love to learn more about how true that is for everyone versus my own lack of understanding.

What makes Glitch a great platform for building Activity Pub apps?

When I first set up Postmarks and wanted to test that it could publish Notes that something like Mastodon could read, it occurred to me that there would be no way to do the handshake of requests that go in both directions to make many ActivityPub operations work successfully if I was running the app on my own computer.

Building on Glitch gives you a unique hostname that’s publicly accessible from the rest of the internet immediately. There are other tools that would let me do that by creating a tunnel from my computer, but getting new names for each remix is easier than any that I’ve seen.

On the internet I’ve...discovered the joy of both 6-second Vines about road signs and 6-hour Youtube video essays about Japanese video games.

As a fellow not-frontend-engineer, what were the challenges in building a light-weight, responsive site with minimal JS? How did building on Glitch make that easier or harder, and what can we do better to support or encourage that sort of work?

I take a pretty critical eye to a lot of the Glitch platform but I think the Glitch Editor is currently a good place to build a node.js app with Express and Handlebars that accesses sqlite files on disk: not the newest, flashiest architecture; but one that’s certainly well-worn and familiar to a lot of people.

The biggest difficulty I found was related to syncing my changes back and forth between Glitch and the Github repo I set up, especially once I had multiple remixes of my own, so I guess I’d say that regardless of your framework choices it would be great if we could find some time to revisit that workflow and think about how to improve it.

What’s your dream pull request to get from the community of people who are now exploring Postmarks?

The response I’ve already had from the open-source community has been beyond my wildest dreams. In the first two weeks I’ve had so many PRs I’ve barely been able to keep up, and they range from bug fixes in my handling of ActivityPub details to implementing entire features like adding the ability to search your bookmarks. Everyone has been helpful, kind, and barely said anything about some of my more embarrassing lines of code.

I try to keep the GitHub Issues up to date with things that indicate the general direction I’m hoping to take the project (as well as all the known bugs that I or other people have noticed), so taking a look there and speaking up about something that looks interesting is certainly a good place to start.

More Postmarks, hopefully! When I was working on the project by myself I was happy with a number of ways things were designed to be easy for fellow coders, but the response to the launch has made it clear that people from a lot of different backgrounds and skill sets are interested in this already.

While I’m proud of how easy the initial setup process by remixing on Glitch and walking through the README, getting updated versions into your remix while safely preserving your data is something that still has a ways to go, and I hope to feel like I’m supporting people who don’t want to do things that I take for granted like manually managing SQLite databases soon.

I try to put all my projects on https://casey.kolderup.org, but I also blog about them on https://motd.co and socialize with people on Mastodon at https://sharetron.com/@casey!

The art of taking something known and making it anew for a brand new audience is one that we keep coming back to, like with Casey Kolderup’s Postmarks project.

Bringing fresh fun to the fediverse: A Q&A with Casey Kolderup, Postmarks creator

What made you first fall in love with the web? I’m trying to remember my first impressions, but as far back as I can recall, each new discovery made me excited for the next one. First it was email, messages I could send to my (other sixth grade) friends without mailing a letter or passing a note! Then, designing my own site on GeoCities – a space that was completely up to me to decide how to decorate, or express myself. Around the same time, ICQ gave me rapid real-time messaging with new friends from around the world. Each time the world got a little more accessible to me.

We have it all now. So, what makes you excited about the web now? What are you looking forward to next? I’m really bad at predicting the future, but I’m pretty great at loving all the ways the web makes us excited, inspired, and delighted. I know one thing for sure, the Glitch community continues to create projects that make us smile, help us out, and capture countless ways to inject a little more fun in the everyday. 

~town-names by @mapsmania explains the meaning or origins of the names of the biggest towns and cities in the United States. Some of them might surprise you! 

~random-horror-movie by @cfjedimaster can either serve as your own spooky season movie scheduler OR you can remix it to build a generator with Cloudflare workers.

~florentine-real-ease by @hello-smile6 and @mna4 is a multiplayer drawing website that uses a Discourse forum for authentication and was inspired by a discussion in the Glitch forum!

This colorful dataviz app was shared in a recent interview with Gissoo Doroudian that you can read here. 

~open-lab by @n.hieda is an interactive graph using Cosma that maps the common interests of students in their cohort. Remix it and see what interests match your friends!

~chord-search by @jtf4 just put notes into this app and search for chords that match. It’s perfect to use with studying music theory or writing music.

~landschaft-sound by @n.hieda is an app that transforms a camera image to sound using choo and p5js, try it out!


~tenmile by @jpf, @rndmcnlly, and @ktuite offers folks the ability to create and share playable quotes (your favorite parts of the game) of Game Boy games.

~committy by @11BelowStudio is a collaborative card game where you create the cards, created during a recent Itch jam! ✨

~nothcom by @jooooooon inspired by notpron, this site features a Windows XP-themed game that will haunt you. 

~sumptuous-crystalline-palm by @AvinashSharma converts your random color library to the nearest matching Material or Tailwind color for each of your existing colors.

~tree-text-editor created by @EricLewis is a simple tool that lets you create a list in the text editor and render as a tree!

~well-maize-howler created by @obafunsoadebayo17 helps you generate copy for social posts about your choice of topic!

Try this tutorial to see what you can send around the globe with Fastly! Created by @triblondon. 

And that’s a wrap on another amazing month for the Glitch community! Follow us across the open social web 🌐 

You can still send your projects and playlists to us via the community forum, or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~mxstudio, who created the site for their collaborative design agency led by KT Duffy, using Glitch. 

What made you first fall in love with the web? I’m trying to remember my first impressions, but as far back as I can recall, each new discovery made me excited for the next one.

Last month on Glitch, the August 2023 edition

When I first discovered Summbot, Summer Anne Burton’s magical mixtape creator, I knew I had to reach out to her and find out the story behind it. I love mixtapes so much (RIP “burning” cds), and the one Summbot created for me hit me so hard: 10cc, Etta James, Yo La Tengo and Vince Staples??? It’s one of the most intriguing and joyful experiences I’ve had on the internet in a long time, which is one of the reasons Glitch exists – as an outlet for everyone to build experiences for others to delight in. Thankfully, Summer agreed to chat with me about her experience being online through the years, Glitch, and even everyone’s favorite topic: AI. Please enjoy our conversation, and definitely get a playlist from Summbot!

Jenn: How did you hear about Glitch and why did you use it instead of other options out there? 

Summer: I’m a longtime internet explorer of sorts, who first made a personal website in the mid-90s, but I had long left behind coding in favor of working in social media and digital media. I was familiar with Anil Dash’s work and had followed Glitch’s mission with interest from afar for a longtime. At BuzzFeed, I worked with a talented young writer, Anjali, who had an interest in coding and later recommended her to Anil for a job at Glitch and was happy to see that come through (she’s now an engineer at Etsy). I had remained interested in coding but when I finally came back around, Glitch instantly rose to mind as the “easy place” to go. 

Have you ever tried to code (or learn to code) before? What got in your way?

I coded HTML obsessively throughout the ‘90s and then let those skills totally deprecate as I became more obsessed with social platforms like Livejournal and Myspace. I wrote a bit about my autobiography-by-way-of-platforms for BuzzFeed back in 2014 for anyone else for whom this is a special interest, but suffice to say I have always been interested in tech but I gravitate more towards “soft skills,” potentially because of my total lack of technical education (I was unschooled after third grade). I’ve always been an autodidact, which works for coding, but I’m also sometimes someone who quits when it gets hard. 

I just like all the places where people go to express parts of themselves to each other and leave something behind of who they are. I think we’re cute. 

I’m pretty impatient. As an artist, writer, etc, I’ve always been someone who favored quick processes and mess/chaos. That’s why I’m a better cook than I am a baker. That hasn’t always felt like it worked well with code. I have a ton of ideas. I always wished I had a best friend who was a technical whiz and wanted to implement all of them for me. When I started messing around with GPT-4, it sort of unlocked that fantasy for me. I was able to describe an idea and get code generated. Then the code wasn’t perfect, and I ended up having to hunt down tutorials and gits and read API documentation and basically halfway learned to code while fixing its mediocre code. But for me, that process was much much easier than starting from scratch.

Where did you come up with the ideas for Mixtape Machine and The Five Minute Poem?

I am most interested in software that unlocks human creativity. I grew up playing text based RPGs, including early multiplayer online games where you build things together, and I always loved character creators and engaging with non-player characters in improv. These are just the things that are fun to me! I guess when I’m coding, ever since I was a kid, I’m just trying to entertain myself. 

Anyway, with the Mixtape Machine and the Poetry Generator both, I was interested in exploring the uses of OpenAI’s chat bots in a different mode than most people use them — to prompt human creativity, in the case of the poetry game, or to collect thoughts in a sort of dreamlike way, for Summbot (the mixtape machine). 

For the poetry generator, all the prompt questions in the input box were written by GPT-4. I used some reference names such as Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and David Lynch, and provided some example questions, to get at the kind of weird thing I wanted to prompt. It’s meant to just be a little private exercise to unstick yourself. 

Summbot the mixtape machine took a lot longer and was a much bigger idea. I love making people custom playlists — when I was younger they were physical mix CDs or tapes — and I think it’s such a warm and important human thing that would be totally lost in a “metaverse world” the way some people imagine it. I also always want to share music with people, but find I lack the expertise/authority to just be a critic type figurehead. I’d much rather flirt with everyone in the world and then give them a few songs that remind me of them. So that’s what Summbot is designed to do. 

I made the images of “Summbot” in Midjourney, but they are mostly combinations of Midjourney outputs “blended” with my own original artwork and selfies. There’s like 300 of them and they reload when you reload the page. After you chat with Summbot, she makes you a mixtape that’s based on a giant playlist of mine, filtered by keywords from your conversation. She also creates a title and a cover, which she generates by making a Dalle prompt based on your convo. Every once in awhile something goes wrong, but I think it’s pretty fun and addictive. One friend called her a “Manic Pixie Summbot” and that’s probably pretty accurate. 

I love my old colleague Ryan’s newsletter Garbage Day, and I think he has the sharpest POV on the changing internet and AI stuff out there. I am an obsessive reader of Casey Lewis’s After School substack on youth trends — both because it touches a lot of my day job work as a Creative Director at a communications agency, Praytell Strategy, and also because I’m always trying to stay cool as I get older. And — not coding related, but feels like I would be remiss not to mention I’m a huge Jokermen podcast universe fanatic. I mostly lurk in their Discord but it is one of my favorite online communities. 

What site or tool do you wish everybody knew about?

I’m a huge fan of Glitch and letting everyone know how easy and fun it is to use lol (not paid to say this). I also think Canva and Notion are great tools with great free levels and fairly priced paid plans — they help my not-organized and not-clean brain do better work. Lastly, shoutout to JMPerez’s Spotify DeDupe tool, which helped me clean up my Summbot playlist.

I just like all the places where people go to express parts of themselves to each other and leave something behind of who they are. I think we’re cute. 

I’m @summeranne on ig, spotify, and twitter for now (anyone have a bluesky invite I can have?). If you are interested in working with me, get in touch summer.burton@praytellstrategy.com through Praytell Strategy — my interest in AI was spurred by my work there and we are always open to collaboration! <3 

Summer Anne Burton is the creative director at Praytell Agency, as well as a drummer, DJ, writer, illustrator, and Glitch creator!

“I am most interested in software that unlocks human creativity...I guess when I’m coding, ever since I was a kid, I’m just trying to entertain myself.”

5 minutes with Summer Anne Burton, creative director and mixtape magician

Did you know that the “dog days of summer” begin in July? If you’re anything like my dog Maggie, the dog days should be more about bothering people to let you outside so you can eat bees, and less about heat and lethargy. See also bothering the cats just to entertain yourself. Speaking of entertainment, we have a full roster of cool apps the Glitch community created during the last 31 days, but before we get to that I want to tell you about a new feature on glitch.com. 

Last month we introduced a new feature called App of the Week. Each week we’re selecting projects nominated by the community to be featured on the glitch.com website — maybe including yours! 

To submit your app (or your favorite app) to be featured, just fill out this form, or share your app in the nominations thread on the community forum. We can’t wait to see what you choose! 

~iphonespacergif by @mikker helps you declutter the homescreen of your iPhone with a handy gif. 

~zippy-inky-radar created by @shmen-shmen is a productivity app with the ability to increase your productivity to scary levels…

~wagtail-starter created by @Scotchester is a Glitch-hosted starter for the open source CMS written in Python and built on the Django web framework.

~ocrop by @admin46899,  finally a way to pull the text you need out of the mess returned by OCR. 

tiddly.packett.cool is a storage and sync solution for TiddlyWiki that turns it into a modern offline-first web app with client-side encryption! 

~2d-ocr by @ckolbeck aims to enable folks who rely on alt text to navigate through things like images of tables.

~juegosdevestirgratis by @anticristo-666 is an art project, or maybe a game, but even if I tried to describe it here, you wouldn’t believe me. 

~aframe-spatial-ui by @dmarcos is a multi-layered WebXR experience that even features one of our faves: Hayao Miyazaki, built with A-Frame and Glitch! 

~misc-calcs by @dtcwee is a collection of useful JavaScript created calculators

~scammersworld by @joinity is a project dedicated to exposing NFT scammers and giving back to the community. 

~musical-tarot by @adam.czibere45080 lets you draw a card to get your reading and an accompanying musical recommendation to inform your vibe for today!

~aramzs created by @AramZS is a new glitch in bio (seeing these in the wild never gets old to us)!

~blueridge by @dschep  is a little art project inspired by the Blue Ridge Mountains. (Hint: these mountain ridges are different on each load!)

~creating-with-data.glitch.me/connecting-atlantic/index.html created by @digitalWestie is a great animated visualization of the progression of trans-atlantic undersea telegraph cables

~newtons-disc by @rowan-m is an online optical illusion that slightly differs from the IRL optical illusion, can you tell??

~tanzaku by @koya.drill lets you create a digital wish on a coloured strip of paper called tanzaku and hang it up on bamboo to celebrate the Tanabata Star Festival.

~storehouse-a created by @bookwormgirl910 and @stsche is a text and typography-based virtual exhibition showcasing interactive visual poetry inspired by the lexicon of NetHack.

~curator-and-the-machine created by @stefan is not a new project but was recently added to fediverse, so we’re happy to feature it again! Try out curating now or read the blog post behind this generative art project. 

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~futureroom by @blippypixel is like if Geocities was a virtual room. Look for the lava lamp! 

Did you know that the “dog days of summer” begin in July?

Last month on Glitch, the July 2023 edition

Webster’s Dictionary defines “April” as being the month when the dictionary was officially copyrighted by Noah Webster on April 14, 1828. There’s probably some other stuff in there too but instead of reading the dictionary, let’s take a look at what the Glitch community created during THIS April, instead. 

SPOTTED: The first Glitch app we’ve seen using the AT Protocol and Bluesky, created by @gsajith.

~monoclejs, created by @Utopiah, this tool was created to assist with creating a mobile developer experience using the Monocle! 🧐

~permutation-groups, behold, one of the fundamental atoms of symmetry, present in the mathematical fabric of all possible worlds …but in a format you can play with, created by @tesseralis.

~hello-deno-fresh, created by @pb.oliver.mcloughlin - we truly love to see a community-created Deno starter!

~shema-permutations randomized and represented all of the possible permutations of the Shema—approximately 68,000,000 unique prayers—and was created by @dluxemburg. ♥️


Hide your secret messages inside of the glitchy noise of this DCT station, created by @ffd8.

~random-garbage, created by @ryan.broderick, for Garbage Day fans, press the trash can button and it opens one of the 135 random links pulled from previous issues of Garbage Day in a new tab. 

~nice-typhoon-kiwi, created by @SummerAnneBurton lets you chat with Summbot for a while to get a custom mixtape made for you! 

~stop-chinatown-jail, sign up for a templated way to demonstrate your objections to a megajail being built in the Manhattan area of Chinatown.

~a-fountain, created by @SerenaShen, is a beautiful and creative take on the “Choose Your Own Adventure“ style of games. 

~the-speaker-zine, Enjoy listening to the very first issue of this new audio zine, created by @fg-j.

~keyboard-bashing, created by @christianp, finally gives us the answer to the question “Who among us would not want to bash a keyboard for fun?“

~american-treasure-map- is another @mapsmania hit….with potentially life-changing consequences for treasure hunters!!!

Creator @benjamin.hills94 used ChatGPT to create “Luna's Big Adventure,” a cute game based on his girlfriend's dog! 

Did Mark fool you? We loved this writeup about how the team at Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange used Glitch and GPT-3 to create a human-curated, AI-published bot for content curation and sharing. 

~unnotable-people.glitch.me, created by @mapsmania was their fun April Fools prank in which ChatGPT shares the most unnotable people in America's biggest towns and cities.

~pretty-impartial-daemonosaurus, created by @EvanMarie is a to-do app built with Glitch and ChatGPT.

And that’s a wrap on another amazing month for the Glitch community! Follow us on the fediverse at @glitch@mastodon.social where you can share Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature! 

You can still send them to us via the community forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~cultured-wooden-krill, created by @herbst which combines fun RPG-esque gameplay with Unity, Needle Engine, and Glitch.

Webster’s Dictionary defines “April” as being the month when the dictionary was officially copyrighted by Noah Webster on April 14, 1828. There’s probably some other stuff in there too but instead of reading the dictionary, let’s take a look at what the Glitch community created during THIS April, instead.

Last month on Glitch, the April 2023 edition

One Glitch use case that we absolutely love to highlight, is the situation that occurs when folks play around with Glitch to figure out creative solutions to problems. Which brings me to Nat Alison, a software developer and one such Glitch creator. If you’re anything like me, when you see graphs and x-and y-axis points, your eyes go wonky and you get flustered. Not so for Nat, who introduced me to a totally different world of solving interesting problems with math—and Glitch. Please enjoy our recent conversation, hopefully, as much as I did. 

Nat: I honestly don’t remember! It’s either

I heard about it from Jenn Schiffer or another Glitch person at a conference, or

I saw a thread from Anil talking about Prince.

Do you have a favorite project you’ve seen on Glitch?

I think it’s less of a specific project and more of a sense of joy whenever I see a Glitch project pop up in the wild! It’s always something quirky or interesting, and reminds me of the good ol’ StumbleUpon days where the internet wasn’t just four websites recycling content. I try to carry that spirit in my work, and I think Glitch does a good job at it too.

Why polyhedra? What do they signify for you?

Do you have a favorite addition to CSS in the past year, and is there anything not-widely-supported that you're hoping will be soon?

Oh man there are so many! Container queries, “:has” selectors, new color spaces. I just checked and they’re adding trigonometry to it. CSS had gotten so powerful recently it’s amazing! The problem is I can’t legitimately can’t tell you which features have been “added” in the past year or which ones are still not widely supported. I was going to answer offset-path but it turns out everything but Safari implemented it in 2020 or earlier!

Is there an unsolvable puzzle out there that haunts you? 

The Classification of Finite Simple Groups. “Groups” are abstract objects that represent symmetries, like the moves of a Rubiks Cube, or the rotations or reflections of a polyhedron! These symmetries can be broken down into “atoms” called “simple groups”, just like molecules, and by a lucky coincidence there are 18 infinite families just like in the periodic table!

Oh and there are 26 of them that don’t fit into any family, the largest of which is called The Monster and lives in 196,883 dimensions. Like if there were just 26 random atoms made out of strange and charm quarks and one of them was almost as big as the observable universe. Oh and the proof takes more than ten thousand pages. And it has something to do with the most efficient way to pack spheres into 24-dimensional space. And the fact that eπ√163 is almost an integer. Why are they there?? It’s all extremely Cursed Algebra.

Where did you come up with the idea for a permutation group visualizer?

Honestly it was kind of a joke! I was studying the sporadic groups–those 26 groups that are just there for some reason? I plotted one of them to see what it looked like, and let’s just say, the results are not very aesthetically pleasing. Why does it look like that? If this is one of the fundamental atoms of symmetry, why does it look so un-symmetric? I knew I had to make something interactive to show others how baffled I was. Later I found a “prettier” representation of the same group, but my fascination still stands!

This is my introduction to permutation groups - what’s there to know and what's done with this knowledge?

Permutation groups are ways to represent ways to rearrange objects, like a deck of cards or people around a table. They’re the most tactile way to represent a group, whether it’s the transformations of a square or the arrangements of a Rubik’s cube, and it’s often easier to “see” the underlying object they represent. For example, for the symmetries of a square, you can tell the permutation group represents turning and flipping a square. It’s harder to do that with, say, a matrix representation. When I’m looking at something more abstract that doesn’t have a real-world equivalent, it’s a fast way to get a “feel” of how a group works.

Some people’s perception of work in mathematics/abstract algebra looks more like dense research papers and static diagrams—do you consider clean, accessible, interactive work like this to be something to like... fight that, or is there a cohort/movement that you’re working within that deserves more exposure to outsiders?

Definitely! I think, at its core, mathematics is play—exploring abstract concepts, asking weird questions, yeeting numbers—but the notation or the way it’s taught gets in the way of a lot of people getting to enjoy that.

As for cohorts, I’m part of the Explorable Explanations community, which is a group of creators combining play and learning. If you like my stuff you should check out other stuff on their page!

It seems rare to find tools useful for mathematicians that are so fun to click around, is this on purpose?

Haha, I don’t think there’s a secret cabal of mathematicians going “we need to keep math BORING.” I think it’s more that a lot of math tools are meant for research, and so the focus is on utility rather than style. It’s harder to make fun visualizations for a lot of higher level, more complicated math, both because it’s rarer to find someone with UI/UX knowledge that the material and there are usually more prerequisites so it’s hard to convey the point across to the layperson! …though that doesn’t stop me from trying!

What JavaScript dependencies make building stuff like this on the web possible?

I’m using React because it’s what I’m most familiar with but honestly it’s more important to find a toolset that’s right for you and just start making things. 

Speaking of the web, what is your favorite thing about the internet?

It’s really hard to say, especially since so much of the Web has been gutted in recent years. Flash is dead, forums have been abandoned for closed off message boards, even your freaking parking meter wants you to sign up for an app… But you can still make a Geocities-style website, or a blog, or a weird math app! And there are places (like Glitch!) that make doing it super-easy now. I remember in college wanting to make an online puzzle game of sorts but was so confused on how to make a website that I… just did it over Google Forms. It’s also the most accessible place to share what you’ve made. I love making web apps because I can show them to anyone on their phones without them needing to download an app, or buy it from a Steam page or what have you.

I want to make more math apps! There are more cool things in abstract algebra I want to visualize. My dream is to figure out some way for people to even get a bare glimpse of comprehension of something as complicated as the 196,883-dimensional Monster, and I’m going to do it one math toy at a time.

I’m also looking for a Renaissance-style Patron to fund my strange artistic endeavors (or you know, a normal job would be fine too).

My personal website is https://tesseralis.site. All my socials are there, but I’m mostly (somehow) on Twitter at @tesseralis.

Software developer and ride or die for polyhedra, Nat’s previous work explores the relationships between math, puzzles, componentry, and Pokémon. 

5 minutes with Nat Alison, polyhedra enthusiast

Right now it feels like there is so much going on around the web! It might seem like it’s getting harder to keep track of all of the things, but taking a break is always okay. Studies show that taking frequent breaks in general keeps you more relaxed, more productive, and my personal favorite: more creative. So roll back your shoulders, unclench your jaw, take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth, and enjoy what the Glitch community created during the month of June. 

In case you missed it, way back at the beginning of last month, we gave glitch.com a makeover, so it could reflect all of the cool, intriguing, and inspiring projects that you—the Glitch community—create! Take a look sometime, you might just see your own app. 😉 Plus, if you’re at all curious about the new Apple Vision Pro, you can start building for the XR future now on Glitch!

Oh! And another thing. Glitch celebrated its seventh birthday recently, making it a Gemini (making the fish, in fact, twins)! Shoutout to those of you who remember it way back when it was HyperDev. 

One of the least-known, but coolest things about modern web apps is how you can easily install them on your phone or laptop or tablet to run just like any other app. Here are some of the latest glitch apps you might want to install, all based on remixing our ~glitch-hello-installable starter that lets you make apps like this for free:

What2Eat, created by @bangorip, is a meal-planning app that pulls in quick recipes for you using basic styles

~jungle-pwa-webusb, created by @florent.vibert, @griffaud, and @gilles.riffaud is a demo of an installable Progressive Web App with WebUSB capability.

~leomessi, created by @saachidhaliwal is a site focused on dark matter and dark energy for all your dark astrophysicist needs. 

~mayfly, created by @somi is an ephemeral notepad where your notes last 24 hours…seems like this would be great for venting. 

~terrific-jumbled-lock, created by @Pufferfish101007 is a JavaScript Compute starter app for Glitch to port to Rust created during the Glitch Community Testing Program! 

~testing-hill-shading, created by @Pomax is a tutorial that shows you how to turn a height map image into a nice looking 2D map

~skitter-luminous-heaven, created by @lita.doolan, is a feminist wellness chatbot that encourages you with suggestions on how to relax

~florentine-glen-piccolo, created by @atog is a script that will show others what you're listening to via last.fm

~yyna, created by @yynaa is a cute site full of mini-games to play

~you-see-the-moon, created by @identikitten is a microfiction site they made to not let echo anxiety defeat them—or you!

~alignments, created by @vanessa-vasquez is an app that allows you to create and share alignment charts with your friends. Finally, an app that shows if you’re more of a Jenn Schiffer or Jenn Turner type of Jenn. 

~stupendous-aluminum-citrine, created by @lyzleong is a collection of skies from friends scattered all over the world using spreadsheets to create it!

~flexispot-sit2go-fc211, created by @sgidon is a 3D rendering of FlexiSpot Sit2Go Model FC211, for all you ergonomic workstation fans.

~needle-apple-vision-pro, created by our pal @herbst from Needle Tools, answers the question who renders the renderer??

~storiesinmotion, created by @federica.ballardini is a site dedicated to the collaborative investigation of rights violations at the Franco-Italian border of Menton and Ventimiglia. 

~wide-calm-silk, created by @sammy.mcmillion is a very pretty portfolio page in one of our favorite colors 💕

~vague-but-exciting, created by @giulia.laco were the very words used to describe Tim Berners-Lee’s March 1989 proposal.

~switzerland-rainforest is another fascinating app created by @mapsmania that lets you compare the size of Switzerland around the globe.

~newleafradio is a really cute online radio of Animal Crossing: New Horizons songs with custom weather!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~melding, a nicely made clone of the 2048 game created by @AndrewHanson that you can download to your phone right now!

Right now it feels like there is so much going on around the web! It might seem like it’s getting harder to keep track of all of the things, but taking a break is always okay.

Last month on Glitch, the June 2023 edition

Right at the beginning of 2022, we launched an all-new editor for Glitch, with the promise of lots of improvements to come. So we’re excited to talk about how Fastly is powering some of the coolest new features.

If you don’t know Fastly, they’re a super popular, super powerful platform for delivering sites and apps more quickly, reliably and securely. So we started with what Fastly is best known for — their content delivery network, or CDN. Now, when you upload assets in the all-new Glitch editor, they’re automatically delivered by Fastly’s super-fast CDN, and you don’t have to do any configuration or additional deploy process. (It even works great with assets like 3D objects, which are newly supported in the Glitch editor!)

But what’s even more exciting is the possibilities this opens up for the future. Fastly has a really clever new edge platform called Compute@Edge that is lightning fast and will let you build smarter, more dynamic sites more easily than ever. We’re gearing up for being able to publish your Glitch projects to Fastly — including the long-awaited desire to have separate dev and production versions of your app, with deploy as simple as a click. When it all comes together you'll be able to publish lightning-fast static sites and Compute@Edge will let you build more sophisticated Glitch apps that scale infinitely — with 100x faster code execution startup times than other serverless solutions!

You can try out the fast new assets in the Glitch editor today, and then sign up to join the waiting list for the exciting beta preview to come!

We’re building an all new integration with Fastly's Compute@Edge that lets you build dynamic sites without the overhead of managing a server and lets you build more sophisticated Glitch sites that scale infinitely – we're talking 100x faster code execution startup times than other serverless solutions!

Taking your apps to the Edge: Fastly x Glitch

New for 2022, it's the biggest update ever to Glitch's editor. It's faster, it's easier to use, and it will take you to all new dimensions with 3D asset handling. Our editor is the heart of the Glitch experience: it’s where coders spend the most time, and it’s essential to your creative success. We’ve been working hard to make your everyday experience of creating on Glitch more fun and expressive. The creation experience on Glitch is smarter and swifter than ever, in large part thanks to your suggestions. Check out what we’ve got for you:

The first thing you’ll notice: Everything is just faster. A lot faster. Editing files, navigating through your project, changing your settings, and accessing advanced features are all lightning-quick.