6 ms·

Welcome to Glitch

52 points by icey 10y ago

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
why do these guys keep rebranding the same thing over and over and pretending it to be some new launch? Once I can understand, twice it just feels disingenuous. This is like third time they changed the name. Hyperdev to Gomix to Glitch.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dethos 10y ago
  Indeed, 3 names in a relatively short time, all of them announced like a new thing. This strategy is a little bit weird.
  - GarethX 10y ago
    We'd love to claim this is some awesome growth strategy where we're renaming to juice the press. In reality, we switched from HyperDev to Gomix because the feedback we got was that the mention of 'dev' made people think it's a tool only for full-time developers, and we're trying to create something more accessible. And we're switching from Gomix to Glitch for the reasons hDeraj mentions, plus we just think it's a better name. Also each time we've introduced something new - with Gomix we had completely rewritten the backend with a writable filesystem. With Glitch we've greatly enhanced the community site.
    - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
      "Glitch" means "Ugly Bitch" according to http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glitch&defid=10868133 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glitch&defid=... Are you ok with this? It's pretty offensive to me.
      - notriddle 10y ago
        Everything has an offensive definition on UD.
- hDeraj 10y ago
  I don't know the reasoning for the first change, but they explain the need to change it again in the article: "If you’ve been following along, you know Glitch is a new name for our community; our beta launch last year was under the name Gomix. Why did we change the name (again)? Well, we heard from some members of our community that the old name evokes a hurtful slur in some Russian communities, and given our deep commitment to building an inclusive service, that didn’t sit right with us, even though people understand we didn’t mean to be hurtful. But then we realized that in fixing this slight, we had the opportunity to pick a much better name, one that makes it absolutely clear that we’re building a community for everyone."
  - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
    I'm not criticizing rebranding (although anyone would agree that rebranding this many times in less than a year of existence is abnormal). I'm criticizing how they pretend this is a new product launch.
    - anildash 10y ago
      [I'm the CEO of Fog Creek, which made Glitch.] I don't think we intended to indicate it's a new product launch so much as our community features and focus are new. It's a hard balance to strike without confusing people who've never heard of any of it. And yeah, the renamings are embarrassing because they're mistakes that were on me to catch. Won't happen again, but fortunately I have a team that is very understanding and I hope our community is, too.
  - christop 10y ago
    That seems reasonable, but the new name is already in wide use in software/hardware. Even outside, its dictionary definition is "a defect or malfunction in a machine or plan". That seems like an odd choice, though the blog seems to suggest it's because everyone will be fixing each other's bugs.
    - tedmiston 10y ago
      Well, Stack Overflow, probably felt like an odd choice at the time too.
kdamken 10y ago
"Create any app you can imagine, by remixing working code into exactly what you need." Well that just sounds like nonsense. "I was worried that I had no good ideas, but thankfully I was able to remix facebook with a little uber and snapchat and boom now I'm a millionaire."
- GarethX 10y ago
  Not really. It means more like 'I want to create a slack bot which sends my blog posts to channel x', so I find an existing slack bot which posts the weather on the Glitch community site, realise that it handles 90% of what I need my own bot to do, so I remix and change out the weather API calls with those to my blog and I'm done in a fraction of the time.
astrodust 10y ago
It's a neat idea, but requiring one of Facebook login (ugh, no) or GitHub login with rather generous permissions (hmm, nope) is sort of a deal-breaker.
- Yahivin 10y ago
  You can still use the editor and create projects as an anonymous user to see how the app works before committing to divulge your identity.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    It's not my identity I'm concerned about, it's that it demands access to every repository I have access to, public and private.
- dcre 10y ago
  Noticed this as well. Giving them read/write access to all my private repos is too much.
juice_bus 10y ago
I think watching a cursor and text dance across the screen that isn't me typing would be hyper distracting for my self. "{..} and less like the chore of reviewing pull requests." I would much rather review completed chunks of work than watch another developer trial and error through a days worth of work while I'm also typing away. Don't get me wrong - it is very neat idea - just definitely not for me.
- nydavidmiller 10y ago
  It is a neat idea, thanks. I work on Product at Fog Creek. Every time I get knocked offline or disconnected from the internet it feels like some part of my brain isn’t connected. I’ve come to use the internet in ways that make me smarter and more productive. Glitch is just another piece of the internet. You don’t have to use the collaborative features, you don’t have to mentor people, and, if we have any sense at all, we’ll figure out a way to have folks login that doesn’t scare or offend them - thanks for the feedback @astrodust. If you’re a commercial coder, the advantage that Glitch affords is that you don’t have to build every piece of tech that you use to make your life better. You can borrow, rework, or plain copy apps. that you don’t have the time or inclination to write, but would be happy to use. If you’re new to coding or new to a certain part of the Stack, Glitch apps can serve as guides to show you roughly how it’s done. If you don’t find anything on Glitch.com today, just bookmark it and swing through periodically to see if there's anything that’s useful to you. Glitch is running code, built by living, breathing people, it will grow and change. The hope is that as it does, people will benefit and contribute to this mutually beneficial conversation in code.
ferdbold 10y ago
Oh god no. I tried that same "realtime collaboration" feature with c9.io, and it quickly becomes a huge PITA when it's time to test your changes. If anyone is writing midsentence, you have to ask everyone to stop writing so you can test out your stuff, or you'll be swimming in syntax errors. It just doesn't work. Unless, of course, those guys here had an epiphany on to how to solve this problem. And of course, there's the obvious huge caveat of having other live cursors dancing around ruining your concentration. I like it when editing documents, but I feel like there's just no point in doing it on a source file.
- mshenfield 10y ago
  At the very least this would be effective for collaborating on HTML documents. Live editing the same code does sound painful. Stepping back a bit and just being able to see what someone was doing in a different part of the codebase as you worked could be helpful and fun: * See a collaborators changes show up as flashes of red or green highlights in the editor directory tree. * Warn you you and show a real-time diff if you are editing the same document. * Run a static analyzer on hypothetical combined output to show more potential conflicts.
Jimmie_Rustle 10y ago
We need way less people who just know how to make 'apps'.
tedmiston 10y ago
Glitch (formerly GoMix (formerly HyperDev))... Is it for professional devs? Is it a prototyping / learning toy? It's a cloud code editor and also a PaaS [but without git] and also a project discovery platform? Is all of that really still free? Well how free and for how long? The offering is so generous that it's hard to understand / believe it will last. It might have been the point of this post but I still don't understand who this tool is for and what software in a dev setup it will replace.
- etamponi 10y ago
  [I am one of the Glitch devs] The current offering is made to be always free. We might one day add a paid tier with additional options, but we don't foresee any charge for what we currently provide :) As "who Glitch is for": it is for anyone that enjoys coding and is bored of spending so much time with deploy-related tasks. How often you had an idea but couldn't manage to keep it going because it would be so much of an hassle to just see it running somewhere outside of your laptop? I've been in that situation a lot of times: Glitch wants to be the run-to place for this kind of situations. As such, its current focus is for newcomers that want to play and enjoy coding. On the other hand, we think that we should offer a compelling tool for experienced developers too. That's harder to achieve, but simply because there are already a lot of other tools for them. For new developers? Should they learn how to use git to publish a simple bot or a JavaScript game? We think we can do a lot for them. As our userbase grows and matures, we strive to mature with them and always remain the most enjoyable option to deliver their ideas to the world :)
CharlesW 10y ago
I know Anil's a smart dude. My feedback comes from a good place. > The friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. Thought #1: The one word for what Glitch is is "community"? A friendly community might be (aspirationally, at least) a nice part of Glitch, but the more I think about it the less I'm sure I know what that means. My feeling is that lots of people who might find this interesting will bolt when presented with the apparent requirement to adopt yet another community. Thought #2: I've had the pleasure/torture of hearing people's app dreams, and people will not be building the apps of their dreams with Glitch--and that's fiiine. What Glitch might be (assuming I kinda understand it) is A Place to Make Duct Tape for Internet Stuff, which seems like a great thing. > It’s even easier to use Glitch than it is to describe it… That is problematic. You invented an amazing thing (presumably) and you're not sure how to sell it to people who don't already get it, which is an unenviable scenario. I'd really like to see how the Glitch folks would fill out the classic "For (your target) who wants/needs (reason to buy your product/service), the (your product or service) is a (category) that provides (your key benefit). Unlike (your main competitor), the (your product/service) (your key differentiator)."
pbreit 10y ago
Is this a re-branding of http://gomix.com http://gomix.com?

52 points by icey 10y ago

why do these guys keep rebranding the same thing over and over and pretending it to be some new launch? Once I can understand, twice it just feels disingenuous. This is like third time they changed the name. Hyperdev to Gomix to Glitch.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dethos 10y ago
Indeed, 3 names in a relatively short time, all of them announced like a new thing. This strategy is a little bit weird.
- GarethX 10y ago
  We'd love to claim this is some awesome growth strategy where we're renaming to juice the press. In reality, we switched from HyperDev to Gomix because the feedback we got was that the mention of 'dev' made people think it's a tool only for full-time developers, and we're trying to create something more accessible. And we're switching from Gomix to Glitch for the reasons hDeraj mentions, plus we just think it's a better name. Also each time we've introduced something new - with Gomix we had completely rewritten the backend with a writable filesystem. With Glitch we've greatly enhanced the community site.
  - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
    "Glitch" means "Ugly Bitch" according to http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glitch&defid=10868133 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glitch&defid=... Are you ok with this? It's pretty offensive to me.
    - notriddle 10y ago
      Everything has an offensive definition on UD.
hDeraj 10y ago
I don't know the reasoning for the first change, but they explain the need to change it again in the article: "If you’ve been following along, you know Glitch is a new name for our community; our beta launch last year was under the name Gomix. Why did we change the name (again)? Well, we heard from some members of our community that the old name evokes a hurtful slur in some Russian communities, and given our deep commitment to building an inclusive service, that didn’t sit right with us, even though people understand we didn’t mean to be hurtful. But then we realized that in fixing this slight, we had the opportunity to pick a much better name, one that makes it absolutely clear that we’re building a community for everyone."
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  I'm not criticizing rebranding (although anyone would agree that rebranding this many times in less than a year of existence is abnormal). I'm criticizing how they pretend this is a new product launch.
  - anildash 10y ago
    [I'm the CEO of Fog Creek, which made Glitch.] I don't think we intended to indicate it's a new product launch so much as our community features and focus are new. It's a hard balance to strike without confusing people who've never heard of any of it. And yeah, the renamings are embarrassing because they're mistakes that were on me to catch. Won't happen again, but fortunately I have a team that is very understanding and I hope our community is, too.
- christop 10y ago
  That seems reasonable, but the new name is already in wide use in software/hardware. Even outside, its dictionary definition is "a defect or malfunction in a machine or plan". That seems like an odd choice, though the blog seems to suggest it's because everyone will be fixing each other's bugs.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    Well, Stack Overflow, probably felt like an odd choice at the time too.

kdamken 10y ago

"Create any app you can imagine, by remixing working code into exactly what you need." Well that just sounds like nonsense. "I was worried that I had no good ideas, but thankfully I was able to remix facebook with a little uber and snapchat and boom now I'm a millionaire."

GarethX 10y ago
Not really. It means more like 'I want to create a slack bot which sends my blog posts to channel x', so I find an existing slack bot which posts the weather on the Glitch community site, realise that it handles 90% of what I need my own bot to do, so I remix and change out the weather API calls with those to my blog and I'm done in a fraction of the time.

astrodust 10y ago

It's a neat idea, but requiring one of Facebook login (ugh, no) or GitHub login with rather generous permissions (hmm, nope) is sort of a deal-breaker.

Yahivin 10y ago
You can still use the editor and create projects as an anonymous user to see how the app works before committing to divulge your identity.
- astrodust 10y ago
  It's not my identity I'm concerned about, it's that it demands access to every repository I have access to, public and private.
dcre 10y ago
Noticed this as well. Giving them read/write access to all my private repos is too much.

juice_bus 10y ago

I think watching a cursor and text dance across the screen that isn't me typing would be hyper distracting for my self. "{..} and less like the chore of reviewing pull requests." I would much rather review completed chunks of work than watch another developer trial and error through a days worth of work while I'm also typing away. Don't get me wrong - it is very neat idea - just definitely not for me.

nydavidmiller 10y ago
It is a neat idea, thanks. I work on Product at Fog Creek. Every time I get knocked offline or disconnected from the internet it feels like some part of my brain isn’t connected. I’ve come to use the internet in ways that make me smarter and more productive. Glitch is just another piece of the internet. You don’t have to use the collaborative features, you don’t have to mentor people, and, if we have any sense at all, we’ll figure out a way to have folks login that doesn’t scare or offend them - thanks for the feedback @astrodust. If you’re a commercial coder, the advantage that Glitch affords is that you don’t have to build every piece of tech that you use to make your life better. You can borrow, rework, or plain copy apps. that you don’t have the time or inclination to write, but would be happy to use. If you’re new to coding or new to a certain part of the Stack, Glitch apps can serve as guides to show you roughly how it’s done. If you don’t find anything on Glitch.com today, just bookmark it and swing through periodically to see if there's anything that’s useful to you. Glitch is running code, built by living, breathing people, it will grow and change. The hope is that as it does, people will benefit and contribute to this mutually beneficial conversation in code.

ferdbold 10y ago

Oh god no. I tried that same "realtime collaboration" feature with c9.io, and it quickly becomes a huge PITA when it's time to test your changes. If anyone is writing midsentence, you have to ask everyone to stop writing so you can test out your stuff, or you'll be swimming in syntax errors. It just doesn't work. Unless, of course, those guys here had an epiphany on to how to solve this problem. And of course, there's the obvious huge caveat of having other live cursors dancing around ruining your concentration. I like it when editing documents, but I feel like there's just no point in doing it on a source file.

mshenfield 10y ago
At the very least this would be effective for collaborating on HTML documents. Live editing the same code does sound painful. Stepping back a bit and just being able to see what someone was doing in a different part of the codebase as you worked could be helpful and fun: * See a collaborators changes show up as flashes of red or green highlights in the editor directory tree. * Warn you you and show a real-time diff if you are editing the same document. * Run a static analyzer on hypothetical combined output to show more potential conflicts.

Jimmie_Rustle 10y ago

We need way less people who just know how to make 'apps'.

tedmiston 10y ago

Glitch (formerly GoMix (formerly HyperDev))... Is it for professional devs? Is it a prototyping / learning toy? It's a cloud code editor and also a PaaS [but without git] and also a project discovery platform? Is all of that really still free? Well how free and for how long? The offering is so generous that it's hard to understand / believe it will last. It might have been the point of this post but I still don't understand who this tool is for and what software in a dev setup it will replace.

etamponi 10y ago
[I am one of the Glitch devs] The current offering is made to be always free. We might one day add a paid tier with additional options, but we don't foresee any charge for what we currently provide :) As "who Glitch is for": it is for anyone that enjoys coding and is bored of spending so much time with deploy-related tasks. How often you had an idea but couldn't manage to keep it going because it would be so much of an hassle to just see it running somewhere outside of your laptop? I've been in that situation a lot of times: Glitch wants to be the run-to place for this kind of situations. As such, its current focus is for newcomers that want to play and enjoy coding. On the other hand, we think that we should offer a compelling tool for experienced developers too. That's harder to achieve, but simply because there are already a lot of other tools for them. For new developers? Should they learn how to use git to publish a simple bot or a JavaScript game? We think we can do a lot for them. As our userbase grows and matures, we strive to mature with them and always remain the most enjoyable option to deliver their ideas to the world :)

CharlesW 10y ago

I know Anil's a smart dude. My feedback comes from a good place. > The friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. Thought #1: The one word for what Glitch is is "community"? A friendly community might be (aspirationally, at least) a nice part of Glitch, but the more I think about it the less I'm sure I know what that means. My feeling is that lots of people who might find this interesting will bolt when presented with the apparent requirement to adopt yet another community. Thought #2: I've had the pleasure/torture of hearing people's app dreams, and people will not be building the apps of their dreams with Glitch--and that's fiiine. What Glitch might be (assuming I kinda understand it) is A Place to Make Duct Tape for Internet Stuff, which seems like a great thing. > It’s even easier to use Glitch than it is to describe it… That is problematic. You invented an amazing thing (presumably) and you're not sure how to sell it to people who don't already get it, which is an unenviable scenario. I'd really like to see how the Glitch folks would fill out the classic "For (your target) who wants/needs (reason to buy your product/service), the (your product or service) is a (category) that provides (your key benefit). Unlike (your main competitor), the (your product/service) (your key differentiator)."

pbreit 10y ago

Is this a re-branding of http://gomix.com http://gomix.com?