Forem: Glitch

Autopost to Bluesky and Mastodon by API

Sue Smith — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 16:14:14 +0000

Last time we learned how to verify our accounts using a domain with a free Glitch website – this time let's set up a simple app to crosspost some automated content to Bluesky and Mastodon using their APIs.

We'll set up developer credentials for both platforms, pop them into Glitch, and post some daft text including random emoji. We'll also discover a more complex example that posts links and images, in case you want to continue building!

Remix the Glitch project

We're using a Glitch project with a lot of the code setup already so go ahead and remix it to get your own copy:

~social-poster

⚠️ Glitch project hosting shuts down on 8th July 2025 so you won't be able to remix this project anymore – you can find the source code on Github if you'd like to deploy it somewhere else!

The app uses Node.js and Axios to make connections to the Bluesky and Mastodon APIs, but don't worry if you aren't familiar with these frameworks, you'll be able to pop in your details and get postin' easily!

If you like you can take a minute to browse the project. There are instructions in the README as well. We'll mainly be working in these files:

.env where we include our credentials
src/client.js where we connect to the APIs
server.js where we call our client methods and manage scheduling

The content we post by default is in the postTxt variable in src/client.js so change it if you want to post something different – the code initially only supports plain text content, but you'll find detail on posting media below.

These example posts demonstrate the default content:

Get your developer credentials

To post from somewhere outside the official Bluesky and Mastodon apps, we're going to use the APIs. APIs are interfaces platforms provide to allow you to access their features using code. In order to gain this access, we'll need to authenticate with both platforms – this keeps the user data on the apps and websites we use safe.

Bluesky app setup

For Bluesky, we need an app password for the account we want to post to. In your Bluesky account, navigate to Settings > Privacy and Security > App Passwords:

Click Add app password
Enter a Name for your app password, like "Glitch poster"
Copy the password and click Done
Paste the password into your Glitch remix in the .env file as the APP_PASSWORD variable
While you're in the .env, enter the handle for the Bluesky account you want to post to

Mastodon app setup

For Mastodon, you'll need a token to authenticate your requests. Log into your account (you'll need to be in a browser rather than a mobile app). Navigate to Preferences > Development, and click New application.

Give your application a name, like "Glitch poster"
For Application website, include the URL of your Glitch website, which will end .glitch.me
Leave the Redirect URI with the default content
For scopes, make sure you check write:statuses and write:media if you want to be able to post images
Submit your application
Copy the value of Your access token
Paste it into your Glitch project .env as the MASTODON_TOKEN variable

💡 You can also add your Glitch website as a verified link in your Mastodon profile – include a link in index.html back to the Mastodon account, with rel="me" in the anchor.

In your Mastodon account, it's also a good idea to check This is a bot account in Settings > Profile.

Post!

That should be you all set to post! Your Glitch remix includes code to run the posting on a schedule, but you can also post manually. In the preview, click into the address bar and enter one of the following:

postBsky to post only to Bluesky
postMasto for Mastodon only
postAll for both

Open the Logs to find any details or errors.

Check your accounts to find the posts.

Examples posts on Bluesky

Example posts on Mastodon

Check out the code

The code for Bluesky and Mastodon is slightly different, so let's break it down so that you can tweak and use it elsewhere. We'll be exploring src/client.js for the API connections.

For Bluesky, we need to start a session and save the token:

const session = await bskyClient.request({
  url: "/com.atproto.server.createSession",
  method: "post",
  data: {
    identifier: process.env.HANDLE,
    password: process.env.APP_PASSWORD,
  },
  headers: {
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
});
bskyToken = session.data.accessJwt;

We can then use the token in subsequent requests. Next we post the post:

const post = await bskyClient.request({
  url: "/com.atproto.repo.createRecord",
  method: "post",
  data: {
    repo: process.env.HANDLE,
    collection: "app.bsky.feed.post",
    record: {
      $type: "app.bsky.feed.post",
      text: postText,
      createdAt: date,
    },
  },
  headers: {
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    Authorization: "Bearer " + bskyToken,
  },
});

It's a bit more complicated if you need more than plain text – to include links you need facets, and to include media you need embeds. You'll find examples of both in ~wtf-poster.

For Mastodon we need just one request:

let data = {
  status: postText,
};
const postResponse = await mastoClient.request({
  url: "/v1/statuses",
  method: "post",
  data: data,
  headers: {
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    Authorization: "Bearer " + mastoToken,
  },
});

Mastodon handles links automatically, but you'll need more processing if you want to upload images – the media endpoints let you add and link to uploaded files. Check out ~wtf-poster for an example.

Schedule posts

In your Glitch project server.js file, you'll find scheduling code around line 25. Uncomment the code out if you want your account to post automatically on a schedule – you can tweak the timing!

Ready for more automation? Remix or copy from ~wtf-poster to post links, images, and content from a third party API... 🎢🎡🛸

🪩🛼🌈 Share your cool autoposters in the Glitch forum!

Verify your Bluesky or Mastodon account on your own domain, with a free website!

Sue Smith — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 17:46:38 +0000

Setting up your own domain for a website and social media is easier than you might think! I love domains, I have a few pointing at Glitch sites and in my social profiles. In this post I'm going to run through setting up another website and domain, and add it to Bluesky as a handle for a new account, and Mastodon as a verified link.

Grab a Glitch remix

We're going to make a website in a few minutes:

Remix ~my-social-website!

⚠️ Glitch project hosting shuts down on 8th July 2025 so you won't be able to remix this website anymore – you can find the source code on GitHub if you'd like to deploy it somewhere else!

The project will open in the Glitch editor.

Click Preview at the bottom and Open preview pane.
That's your new website! It's already on the web at your-project-name.glitch.me – you'll find the link above the preview.

You can make changes now or later, but personalizing the site literally takes minutes.

Open index.html to change the content of the page.

Edit the heading in the h1 element.
Add text to display in the page like the <p> content.
Add other content like images and links – check out the tips in the HTML..!
Change the site style in style.css.

If you like you can change your Glitch project name in Settings > Edit project details which will change your site address on Glitch.

You can keep going in your Glitch project or come back to it later – it's a lot of fun!

Get a domain

Here's the thing, you could just use your .glitch.me website address as your handle and verified link on both Bluesky and Mastodon, but it's much better to have your own domain and is easier than most people think.

Use Domainr to find a domain by searching for keywords like your name or a project you're working on.
When you find a domain that you like, click it to see the available registrars. Check a few to find out the prices they're offering – you can get domains for a few dollars a year.
You can go ahead and buy the domain from here, or if you already have a preferred registrar, just search the domain on their site and buy it there (I find myself using Porkbun a lot because I like the experience even though I am a vegetarian lolol).

Once you have your domain, your registrar will provide access to the DNS records for managing it. You'll need these to point the domain at your Glitch website.

Point your domain at your site

Now you have a domain you can use to send people to your content on the web and to verify your identity on social platforms. To point it at your Glitch site you'll also need TLS to keep it secure. We're going to use Fastly to get this for free – we go over these steps in a lot more detail in this other tutorial, below is the TL;DR version.

Set up a Fastly service

Sign up for a free Fastly developer account (that's right, you're a developer now whether you knew it or not 🚀).
In your new account, click Create service and choose CDN.
Enter any Name you like.
Enter your new domain, with www. at the start, like www.sue.wtf.
For your Origin > Host enter your Glitch website address – grab it from the Glitch editor by clicking the three dots above your preview and copying it. It should look something like this (no https or slashes): suewtf.glitch.me
Click Activate!

Get a free TLS certificate

Now let's grab a TLS certificate for the domain:

In Security choose TLS Management then click Manage certificates and Get started to secure your domain.
Enter the www version of your domain and click Add.
Leave Certainly selected.
Submit your new certificate.

Fastly will provide the details to verify that you own the domain – click Verification options.

Copy the ACME DNS challenge CNAME – it will be _acme-challenge followed by your domain name.
In the account where you bought your domain, navigate to your DNS settings. Add a new record, with CNAME as the type, and the value you copied from Fastly as the Host (usually the first text entry).
Back in Fastly, grab the verification address by clicking the little clipboard – it'll be some letters followed by fastly-validations.com.
In your DNS, add the value you copied as the second text entry in your new record (usually called address, data, or content).
Save your new record.

It'll look a little different depending on your registrar, but here's an example in Squarespace:

Back in Fastly, your domain should soon pass verification, then your certificate will be issued within a few minutes.

Point your DNS at your service

OK now it's time to point the domain at your site through Fastly.

In Fastly, browse to Security > Domains and find your certificate. Under TLS configuration and DNS details click View / Edit.
Copy the CNAME record address which will end .sni.global.fastly.net.
Back in your DNS account, add another new record, CNAME again, this time with the www version of your domain, and the sni text you just copied as the value.
Save your new record.

It may take a while to update but with any luck (usually within an hour) you'll be able to visit your domain and land on your new Glitch website.

💡 I usually set my DNS to redirect the apex version of my domain (the one without a subdomain) to the www version – steps vary by registrar but it's usually pretty straightforward.

Use your domain for your social profiles

I'm going to use my new domain as a handle on a Bluesky account and a verified link on my Mastodon account. Luckily the Glitch remix already has some of this set up for me.

Bluesky

Let's do Bluesky first (you'll need to set up an account with a default handle before you can switch to using your own domain):

In your Bluesky account, choose Settings > Account > Handle.
Click I have my own domain.
Enter your domain, like www.sue.wtf.
You can set it up by adding another DNS record with the values in the popup, or you can set it up inside your Glitch project as follows:
- Choose No DNS panel.
- Copy the did value.
- In your Glitch project, create a new file by clicking the + icon on the left above the filetree and entering .well-known/atproto-did.
- Paste the value from Bluesky into this new file.

Bluesky will verify your domain and update it as your new handle.

More detailed guide to using your own domain in the Bluesky docs

💡 Remember to update the link to your Bluesky profile in your Glitch project HTML!

Mastodon

Now for Mastodon, we'll use the domain to add a verified link to our profile:

In your Glitch project, update the link to Mastodon near the end of index.html to your own Mastodon profile.
The link already has rel="me" in it – you need this to verify it on Mastodon.

In your Mastodon account, edit your profile, adding a link to your new domain that you have pointed at your Glitch site. It should verify fairly quickly!

You can see the example accounts I used for this tutorial here:

That's it!

🚀 Next try remixing an app that automates Bluesky and Mastodon posting..

🛟 If you hit any issues ask for help on the Glitch forum!

Fancify your website user experience with edge computing

Sue Smith — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 10:51:59 +0000

⚠️ Update: Glitch project hosting shuts down on 8th July 2025 so you won't be able to remix the projects in this post anymore – check out our GitHub Codespaces project for learning how to code for the edge instead!

Over the last few months we’ve been bringing you ways to take your Glitch sites to the next level with free services from Fastly. Well we’re back with more – this time we’re using edge computing to enhance the experience you give your users.

Watch the video to build and deploy a Fastly Compute app for a Glitch website in a few minutes.

Deploy a Compute app from Glitch with one command

The ~learn-edge-computing project shows you how to spin up a Fastly Compute service inside the Glitch editor by entering a single command in the Terminal. Just grab an API token from your Fastly account and pop it into the .env first.

At the origin glitch.me site, the page content includes an indicator of where it’s hosted. In the Fastly deployed edgecompute.app version, we change the style and include the user’s location info. If you follow the steps in the project README, you can also make a delightfully obnoxious bonus screen appear to your users during one hour of their day:

The Compute app runs on the Fastly network, so it sits between your website and the user, and it can manipulate the request and response. It changes the stylesheet request path and adds geolocation information to the response in the form of a cookie that the website client side code writes into the page.

Add functionality to your site at the edge

We also have a more comprehensive app for enhancing your site UX at the edge in a few additional ways. The ~fastly-compute-starter project includes examples of password protecting pages and building synthetic content, to respond to errors from your origin Glitch site, and create HTML from structured JSON data.

Check out the difference in the behavior when you click the links in the origin and edge versions of the site:

The Compute app lets you customize what happens when users visit your site, so you can use it to tailor the experience to their location or preferences, as well as making it more reliable and consistent.

🛼 You can follow the steps in your own remix of the Glitch project or in our Fastly docs tutorial.

You can also deploy the same Compute app from your local developer environment using the starter kit – try it on a different site by changing the backend value during deployment!

Learn Compute starter kit on GitHub

Don't stop there

There are so many more ways to make your Glitch sites even better with edge computing:

This is the last Glitch newsletter I am posting here (not clickbait)

jenn schiffer — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:56:14 +0000

Welcome to the August newsletter. I was looking up some inspiration on how to open it and found a sketchy website that said that the official animal of August is the starfish which is a sign of renewal. That could be totally made up but, whatever, this is a time of renewal for a lot of you: students and teachers going back to school, folks getting back to work after summer vacation, and I imagine starfish are feeling a renewed sense of relief that they were not collected on the shore by said vacationers (note: I’m a computer scientist, not an ocean scientist).

This is a time of renewal for me, too. After serving as your community leader for the past 7.5 years (21.4% of the average lifespan of a starfish, according to a less sketchy website called Wikipedia), I’m leaving Fastly at the end of this month. You and I are in such good hands with the rest of the Glitch team – without them, we’d not be on the path we are to deliver on the strategy I laid out earlier this year, and I wouldn’t feel as good about my decision to leave this job as I do today. I can’t wait to see them grow the platform and community and help us all share and discover the best parts of the web. Please be kind to them, as they work so hard for us and love Glitch as much as I do.

So, this post heading wasn’t clickbait. Going forward you’ll be hearing from the rest of the incredible Glitch team. As for me, I’ll be reading those newsletters, chatting with you in the forum, continuing to enjoy your cool apps, taking part in code jams, and maybe even finishing some of the hundreds of Glitch apps I’ve started through the years. I can’t wait to share what I create with you! In the meantime, the rest of this newsletter is full of, you guessed it, cool apps and blogs you shared over the past month.

See you on glitch.com

@jennschiffer, #1 Glitch community fan, not a starfish 👽

On the blogs ✍️

Check out some of the apps you shared on the web in the July community roundup that will help you generate wishes, generate waves, see the moon, and - yes - make it seem like Kamala Harris likes your favorite band.
Sue has more resources to get you started with Glitch on Fastly - especially if you want to set up a custom, secure domain for your Glitch app. Check out the video on the blog and her great and comprehensive intro to edge computing on the Fastly dev.to - you’re going to want to follow that blog because it’s rich in helpful, informative content!

Let us know what tutorials and guides you’d like to see to help you supercharge any of your projects using Fastly!

Here are some blog posts from the community that we loved!

At least 112 blogs and news sites, according to my research, have shared their versions of Kamala Holding Vinyls. By far the most iconic, though, was from the Charles Mingus estate - whose record started it all.
I often prefer reduced motion, and you can learn about what that means and how to oblige me and others’ preferences in Google Chrome’s web.dev article about it.
Soon-to-be-fellow Glitch alum, Keith, made a wave generator for our code jam last month!
One thing I’ll never stop doing is collecting and giving out Glitch stickers. Andy gave us a lot of love on his blog after I sent stickers out to them and our external sites beta testers.
I wasn’t at PragueJs but I loved reading Jan’s talk about the web we’ve never lost. Glitch got a shout out but it was really cool to see Stefan get the spotlight for his bot work that just happens to be on Glitch.

Have you written about your Glitch apps on a blog, a conference talk…anywhere? Let us know and we’ll feature it in the next newsletter!

On the forum 📣

Check out what the Glitch community is sharing and discussing:

From the Gallery: @MilesWK explores local storage and tells us all about it, @okerew builds an editor like legends do, @haizibliek continues work on a browser extension for autocompletion on Glitch, and more!
Say hi and share what you’ve been working on in the latest Community Open thread or in The Gallery!

The Glitch Community Forum is the best way to ask the community for help, share what you’re making, exchange friendly banter and get to know your fellow friendly Glitch creators. See you there! 😎

Haven’t gone Pro yet? New subscribers can sign up for Glitch Pro with the code JUSTDRAW and get 25% off. You’ll get 100% of the superpowers Glitch Pro gives you – like project access controls, always-on apps, and more!

Use your own domain for your Glitch website

Sue Smith — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:43:07 +0000

You can use your own domain for your Glitch site for free with Fastly and get a performance, security, and site analytics boost out of the box. Follow along with this ten minute video to set yours up!

Read on to find out about the other goodies you can get your hands on when you try this out...

Custom domains on Glitch

When you remix a Glitch app, it's instantly available on the web at a glitch.me address. You can change your project name and the URL for your app updates automatically. This is super handy for sharing your projects, but what's even better is having your own domain to point at your site.

📣 There are lots of reasons you should have your own domain!

Being able to use your own domain for your Glitch websites has always been important to us – it's part of being a true open web platform. A while ago, the third-party integration we were using to let people set up custom domains for their Glitch projects was shut down, and we had to press pause on the custom domains feature in the editor.

The good news is that Glitch is now part of Fastly, a platform that conveniently gives you the ability to use your own domain with your Glitch site for free, with a few extra benefits thrown in.

In the video we walk you through the process:

Setting up a Fastly service
Getting a TLS certificate
Updating your DNS records

DNS is one of the most notoriously confusing parts of the web, so part of our goal is to demystify it – it's an incredibly important part of owning your own web presence!

Gone viral? Nice!

One of the benefits to using a Fastly service with your custom domain is that if when your app goes viral, you're far less likely to encounter rate limiting errors. Fastly is designed for this very purpose – it caches your content on its global network of servers, which reduces the number of requests going to your origin (your Glitch site). This is why many of the biggest sites on the web use Fastly, and why it sets your projects up to be truly scalable when you hit the big time. 🤩

Under attack? No problem!

Your Fastly service includes security measures by default, like DDoS mitigation. There's nothing worse than your app getting popular then suddenly finding yourself under attack! The Fastly network automatically blocks DDoS attacks, filtering malicious requests at the edge (the Fastly network of PoPs – Points of Presence around the world) so that they never even get near your website.

🌍 Check out the cool globe on the Fastly developer site – it shows requests being delivered for popular open source projects like Mastodon in realtime.

Want to know how many hits you're getting? Done!

Of course you want to know how many people are visiting your beautiful websites. In the past you basically had to roll your own analytics for your Glitch projects (OK so we briefly had analytics for teams but it didn't quite work out). When you set up a Fastly service, it includes metrics through Observability dashboards that start populating as soon as you send your domain traffic through Fastly.

Find out how many requests you're getting, which regions visits are coming from, spot any errors or performance issues, and gain all sorts of visibility into what's happening with your site traffic.

All free 🤑

It bears repeating! All you need to bring with you to use what we've talked about in this post is a domain of your own. Everything you need from Fastly to point your domain at your Glitch site and access all these other benefits is completely free. It would be daft not to take advantage tbqh.

How we use Glitch to support learning at Fastly

Sue Smith — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 14:30:30 +0000

Glitch is an empowering platform in so many ways. It enables people to bring creative visions to life by eliminating much of the friction you face on a typical web development pathway. It has been a source of immense joy to me over the years to show people who have never made a website how to build one in Glitch. The delight people feel at being able to make a site appear online never gets old. This year I’ve had the pleasure of bringing that experience to my coworkers at Fastly.

This is for everyone

In the first part of 2024, we ran a new type of employee product training within the company. The goal was to enable employees with product knowledge, use this to refine the public learning experience we give our users, and open a channel of UX feedback that would inform our efforts to make Fastly easier for everyone.

We decided to prioritize making the training accessible to absolutely everyone who works at the company, regardless of their knowledge level or role. Constraints included no expectation of developer skills, no requirement to download or install dev tools or environments, no accounts with dev platforms like GitHub.

Scheduling realities at a company like ours also meant we had a one hour time slot to get everyone in each session to a point where they’d achieved something valuable and that would act as a foundation they could build on. How could we achieve such a thing – to the Glitch fans among us the answer was obvious!

Making the web can be fun

When I watch people embark on technical training, the point at which they first experience Glitch is always visibly impactful. By removing barriers like setting up local environments or figuring out how to deploy your site to get it online, you can jump straight into the activities that are meaningful to most people – like making a thing appear in a web page.

The aesthetic choices in Glitch also create a sense that you’re in a friendly, safe place – it tells you this is indeed for you, and not only that, you might actually enjoy yourself. It’s impossible to overstate how much of a game-changer this is when you’re trying to get people to try coding for the first time.

If you want to learn, teach

Being able to facilitate a shared, live learning experience was invaluable in helping me understand how to teach Fastly. Getting feedback in the moment meant I could identify the points at which people get stuck or confused. Most importantly, teaching a varied audience helped me figure out how to articulate the value and purpose of our tech in a way that would make sense to more people.

As an educator I’ve been a Glitch superfan since long before they were daft enough to let me work there. As the years pass and technologies change, my belief in the power of this magical platform only continues to grow.

🎒 There are lots of ways you can use Glitch projects to teach coding skills – check out ~teach-in-glitch for some of them and join in the monthly community code jams!

Deliver your Glitch site through Fastly

Sue Smith — Thu, 23 May 2024 15:24:04 +0000

We’ve been working on a series of Glitch projects to help you learn how to make your websites faster and more reliable using Fastly. In the two years since Glitch became part of Fastly, we’ve been finding ways to unlock opportunities for our community through Fastly’s powerful platform. We’ve also been exploring how to make technologies like CDNs and edge computing accessible to a wider audience using Glitch!

A new learning project

The new ~learn-website-delivery app walks you through the process of setting up Fastly CDN for your Glitch site and putting your own domain in front of it with free TLS. Using Fastly with your site gives you a performance boost beyond what you can achieve through Glitch alone. In a few short steps you’ll have your site traffic running through Fastly at your own domain, and you can customize your service config in the Fastly control panel at any time.

We developed this project for inclusion in the Fastly documentation site, so it has a companion tutorial walking you through the same steps. We’re taking inspiration from the many developer experience exemplars around the industry who use Glitch projects in their docs to onboard users!

Dogfooding Fishfooding?

We developed the website delivery learning resources through employee training within Fastly. We used Glitch to enable our coworkers inside the company to get started using Fastly, by giving them a Glitch website to use with the CDN. Glitch empowered people across teams to get stuck into our technical product, engaging hands-on regardless of their role or background. Using the project for employee training allowed us to test and refine the learning material, hopefully making it more effective for everyone.

The steps in the guide also show you how to get started measuring performance for your websites. Using your browser tools, you can gain insights into what’s happening in the network when someone visits your site. You’ll also be able to see the detail of how Fastly delivers your Glitch project assets like images automatically through the CDN.

Try it now!

If you want to try Fastly but without using a Glitch website you can do that! The steps in the tutorial will guide you through the flow for your own setup. And if you don’t have a domain you want to use, that’s fine too! You can use a test domain courtesy of Fastly, to discover the performance benefits of caching your site at the edge.

🗞️ Stay tuned for more apps showing you the many ways in which you can enhance your Glitch website UX with Fastly.

📣 If you have feedback on the project or the experience of using Fastly with Glitch, please share in the forum!

Hi, it's Glitch, and this is your May newsletter

jenn schiffer — Tue, 21 May 2024 15:15:48 +0000

Happy May! Does it feel like the seasons have changed for you yet? It definitely feels and sounds like summer (in NYC the summer sounds like jackhammering and street construction). For many of you, the feeling of the season is probably the anticipation of classes ending. Clearly I’m just trying to come up with a segue about learning so I can tell you that the Glitch Community Code Jam prompt this month is “teach a thing.” See, I did it.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on on Glitch to distract you from taking finals, grading papers, and discovering new outdoor allergies - like big updates to the Glitch preview, working on the next season of Glitch Jams Live (give me your feedback, hopes, dreams and nightmares!) and a lot more that will be more visible in several weeks. But right now, you’re reading this, so I invite you to keep scrolling and check out what happened on Glitch last month.

See you on glitch.com

Jenn, Director of Community 👽

P.S. Fastly’s next Xcelerate is in London on June 18th! It’s free, packed with engaging technical sessions, and it’s a great opportunity to network with others who care about instant and secure web apps. Sign up today.

On the blogs ✍️

Our roundup of your projects from April is full of places, spaces, buggies and more.
Here’s a new creator profile, but not a new creator by any means: meet Khaleel Gibran, who has Rick Rolled me more than anyone else on the planet but pleeeeease that is not a challenge!

Here are some blog posts from the community that we loved!

One of the best e-essayists out there imho, Robin Rendle, gave a shout out to terminal-based e-essay, ~all-about-computer-love.
To no one’s surprise at all, Maps Mania put out quite a few bangers in April - in particular their fine art take on geoguessr and the slim city clicker game.
Ryan aka “That Virtual Boy” gave a great, exhaustive walkthrough of their generative wallpaper app that uses Glitch as a server. It’s a great case study to taking an app idea to execution and all the things they learned along the way.

Have you written about your Glitch apps on a blog, a conference talk…anywhere? Let us know and we’ll feature it in the next newsletter!

On the forum 📣

Check out what the Glitch community is sharing and discussing:

Fresh from The Gallery: Pufferfish101007 created a Rust version of our Hello Compute starter, andypiper aggregated Glitch posts from the Fediverse, and more!
Say hi and share what you’ve been working on in the latest Community Open thread!

Haven’t gone Pro yet? New subscribers can sign up for Glitch Pro with the code TEACHATHING and get 25% off. You’ll get 100% of the superpowers Glitch Pro gives you – like project access controls, always-on apps, and more!

What is worth learning?

Sue Smith — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 20:04:05 +0000

AI-assisted coding is lowering the barrier to making software. It’s also increasing the complexity of managing it. You can make applications with less upfront knowledge than before, and organizations are having to figure out how to handle the ensuing unpredictability and risk. So it’s getting easier and harder.

Building software became unnecessarily difficult over the last few years in my opinion. We switched to frameworks that closed a lot of the doors to opportunity we’d seen open in the earlier years of the web. Now there’s a widening divide between those with the skills to make software “properly” and those who are no longer prevented from participating by this gatekeeping. Then we have the threat of jobs being eliminated because some executives think AI removes the need for engineers. It's a bit of a mess.

Working in developer education, I often ask myself if I’m teaching the right skills, the ones that are worth learning. It’s getting harder to make reliable guesses about which topics will enable people to make the web and get paid doing it.

For most of us it isn’t about the tech

I recently set up a local developer environment for a project I wanted to contribute to. It was painful and I resented every minute of it lol. The actual contribution was easier than installing the tooling.

In spite of essentially being paid to learn coding skills so that I can teach them to others, I find it incredibly hard to motivate myself to learn if the subject doesn't interest me. A lot of what’s involved in setting up local environments falls into that category. Compatibility between libraries, reciting the correct incantations of path and environment variables, that type of thing. These are not the parts I care about.

The same frustration kills the motivation to learn. For a new developer to spend hours configuring an environment before they can make a change to a web page that they can see in the browser is a big problem when it comes to learning. The motivating part is where you achieve something visible, tangible, significant to you – that’s what builds momentum as you feel you’re making progress. Exasperating setup experiences tell the person “this is not for you” and most quietly go away.

The best motivator to learn any skill is a goal that is meaningful to you and that the skill is helping you to achieve. For most people, setting up an effective developer environment does not constitute such a goal.

If it does for you then congrats, but I believe you're in the minority! In the developer community there’s a wholesome passion for technical elegance, but unfortunately it’s frequently accompanied by an alienating disdain for those who don’t share the interest or understanding.

It shouldn’t need to be hard

Earlier this year I ran employee training for my Fastly coworkers. I wanted to teach them to use our technical product in a way that absolutely anyone could engage with. Some colleagues feared this might be impossible, but for me, removing the expectation of prerequisite knowledge is a useful constraint – it helps me make learning experiences that are better for everyone. So I gave myself ground rules like no local environment, no dev platform accounts or tooling like GitHub. And it was surprisingly successful!

This is part of why I’ve always loved Glitch – and how we got those employees to use our technical product by the way. It lets you jump straight to the parts of a project that are intuitively valuable and resonant to most people. I’d rather spend my time learning how to create the functionality or the experience I want to give users than installing the toolchain that only gets me to the starting line for that work.

If I never had to set up a dev environment again I simply would not. 💅🏻

Motivations do not need your validation

Today’s coding tools are abstracting away parts of software engineering that will invite many more people to the party and create significant challenges around maintenance, security, performance, and more.

However attached we are to notions of correctness, of what people should know in order to create software, the reality is that most will not invest in something they don’t consider worth learning. You better believe people will flock to the tools that enable them without judgment or the expectation of virtuous toil! We can’t complain about this while insisting that the painful, exclusive alternative is the only valid one.

If we want software that is reliable, safe, and inclusive, we need to provide paths that empower a wide representation of people to build it. That means accepting the motivators they bring with them.

Our goals determine what is and isn’t worth our time, and for most of us the technologies that help us get there are largely incidental. Those choices are driven by the opportunities each person is trying to unlock.

What makes something worth learning to you?

This month we're snug as a bug under a Glitch-powered rug

jenn schiffer — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 18:10:38 +0000

Happy April! I recently got back from speaking at the Community-led Summit in Boston to a room full of other professionals who also have “community” in their title. Who manages the community when all the community managers are in a hotel conference room? For Glitch, the answer is “the rest of the Glitch team.” They’ve also been working hard on updating containers and deploying newness to the Glitch preview, so this email is dedicated to them for all their hard work and enabling me to take a couple of days off to tell the Glitch community story to the rest of the world.

In case you missed it, this month’s Glitch Community Code Jam prompt is “cool bugs”. And now that I’m back in town, it’s a good time to get started if you haven’t already: you can join me this Friday at 2pm on the Glitch Jams Live stream and we can work on our submissions together! Until then, the rest of this email has a lot of links to cool apps and blogs that should keep you busy.

See you on glitch.com

Jenn, Director of Community and Bugs 👽

P.S. Speaking of live shows, my pals on the Dev Rel team here at Fastly run a monthly show on Youtube featuring demos and live coding. If you like or hate 😏 bots, you’ll want to subscribe and catch the next one!

On the blogs ✍️

Our roundup of March projects from the community will take you on a journey through breathing exercises, screensavers, the terminal, and so much more. Also on the Glitch blog....

A few weeks ago, Glitch turned 7. I blogged about it, yee-haw.
Anil wrote in celebration of a student-built game, using Glitch, that was up for an independent game award. Anything about digital pets is a winner to me.
Upon his last day on the Glitch team, Keith blogged.

Here are some blog posts from the community that we loved!

Web Curios opened this issue with a huge shout out to the beautiful console essay (and recent Glitch App of the Week) ~all-about-computer-love.
Zach Leatherman joined me on Glitch Jams Live last month and wrote about it! That was a really fun interview, I love how the name Eleventy is an homage to his grandma.
Our Culture Mag did a profile on artist Qinru Zhang, who used Glitch to explore AI generation of art based on handmade drawings with ~future-wonderland.
Stefan Bohacek analyzed some Fediverse data related to followers of his bots for his blog.

Have you written about your Glitch apps on a blog, a conference talk…anywhere? Let us know and we’ll feature it in the next newsletter!

On the forum 📣

Check out what the Glitch community is sharing and discussing:

Fresh from The Gallery:
- @Pufferfish101007 updated their Rust-ified version of our Compute starter
- @Samme used Phaser to make a flappy-birdish game
- @MilesWK has jokes, and so much more!
Say hi and share what you’ve been working on in the latest Community Open thread!

Haven’t gone Pro yet? New subscribers can sign up for Glitch Pro with the code COOLBUGS and get 25% off. You’ll get 100% of the superpowers Glitch Pro gives you – like project access controls, always-on apps, and more!

March on Glitch goes in like a lion and out like...an app. Yep, that’s the one.

jenn schiffer — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 16:14:32 +0000

Happy March! The NYC weather last week was in the 60s (F) and sunny and this week it's cold and windy – I swear, if it snows soon I'm going to send myself into orbit! I’ve been thinking about snow a lot, as one does in March, because I’d been agonizing over what the screensaver I’m making for this month’s Community Code Jam should be. On the one hand, I think it would be cool to have snow falling like the old JavaScript code snippets we used to add to our websites 20 years ago, but also a generative artwork based on the time of day would be really fun and dynamic.

If you have any great ideas, say it to my virtual face this Friday at 2pm Eastern on Glitch Jams Live. While you wait, there’s plenty of awesome community projects and content in the rest of this email to tide you over.

See you on glitch.com

Jenn, Director of Community and blog enthusiast 👽

P.S. If it’s your job (or hobby, even) to care about performance or security, and you can be in the San Francisco area on April 4th, you should check out our conference Fastly Xcelerate. There’s no better opportunity to share space and network directly with the Fastly community as well as my colleagues who are responsible for making it all work. It’s free and you can register here today!

On the blogs ✍️

Check out our February community project roundup on the Glitch blog, featuring apps race horses around New Jersey, the difference between “former” and “latter”, sort emoji alphabetically, and more!

Here are some blog posts (and a podcast!) from the community that we loved!

I love Naive Weekly, and it’s not uncommon to come across a Glitch app here and there, like ~httpoetics and ~all-about-computer-love
Bluesky is open to the public and some of the tools to help you get started live on Glitch, like ~bannerizer
Semaphore makes the case for using Vite, listing Glitch (see you starters!) among other platforms that are all in on my personal favorite on-demand building tool.

Have you written about your Glitch apps on a blog, a conference talk…anywhere? Let us know and we’ll feature it in the next newsletter!

On the forum 📣

Check out what the Glitch community is sharing and discussing:

Fresh from The Gallery:
- @allo showed us how to connect a database to the Perchance generator platform
- @n.hieda shared a work-in-progress dance-tech performance based on an interactive Hydra app on Glitch
- and @derekahmedzai made it easy to share your Letterboxd faves.
Say hi and share what you’ve been working on in the latest Community Open thread!

Haven’t gone Pro yet? New subscribers can sign up for Glitch Pro with the code SCREENSAVERS and get 25% off. You’ll get 100% of the superpowers Glitch Pro gives you – like project access controls, always-on apps, and more!

Last month on Glitch was weird and wonderful, let's blog about it! ✍️

jenn schiffer — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 22:50:02 +0000

Happy February! I know that January is the start of the year, but for me it’s always February that feels like a fresh beginning - it’s both my birth and Glitch anniversary month, and that’s why I look for any way to make everything about the things I enjoy. That’s why the prompt for this month’s Glitch Community Code Jam is “welcome to my blog.” I love blogs - always have, always will, and the turbulence that social media is going through is lending itself to a sort of renaissance of blogging. This is just to say, I want to read your blogs OR I want you to start one if you haven’t already AND you should submit them to our jam.

Before you scroll to see some very cool blog posts and projects, I want to remind you all that February 28th is our deprecation date for versions of Node < 12, and this week we’re removing Chromium from containers. All of this is in service of getting Glitch up to date - and to combat activities making it difficult for the community to create cool stuff.

See you on glitch.com

Jenn, Director of Community and blog enthusiast 👽

P.S. Fastly is running a developer meetup in our new NYC space on February 27th - if you’re in the area, we’d love for you to join us for an evening of refreshments, activities and conversations about computing at the edge. It’s also a good opportunity to get some Glitch stickers that I’ve been hoarding at my desk! Save yourself a spot for this free event before they run out.

On the blogs ✍️

If you loved Last Year on Glitch, you’ll love our monthly roundups, with this year starting off hot with the Last Month on Glitch, January edition. This issue includes:

A browser for…toasters
Most flavors of Mountain Dew
Slime (or goo)
Lots of geographic trivia

…and so much more! Check it out for yourself and be sure to add our blog to your RSS feed readers which I know you have if you’re a sicko like me.

Here are some blog posts (and a podcast!) from the community that we loved!

The New Stack wrote about (and even interviewed some of) the Last Year on Glitch 2023 creators.
Maps Mania keeps challenging our knowledge of cities in wildly challenging ways like with their recent game, 25cities.
Google’s Sam Dutton goes deep into what the parts of a URL are. See if you can list the parts before clicking through.
Glitch alum and pal, Danilo Campos, was on the Screaming in the Cloud podcast!

Have you written about your Glitch apps on a blog, a conference talk…anywhere? Let us know and we’ll feature it in the next newsletter!

On the forum 📣

Check out what the Glitch community is sharing and discussing:

Fresh from The Gallery: @n.hieda shared shapes and textures from Taiwan using leaflet, @raulibaper updated their Chat-GPT-facilitated Time Timer app, and @24amesquir served us some 2D jelly.
Say hi and share what you’ve been working on in the latest Community Open thread!

Haven’t gone Pro yet? New subscribers can sign up for Glitch Pro with the code WELCOMETOMYBLOG and get 25% off. You’ll get 100% of the superpowers Glitch Pro gives you – like project access controls, always-on apps, and more!