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Melissa McEwen for Glitch

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Glitch on Dev.to

At Glitch we gather twice a week for Appy Hour, where we share our most interesting Glitch experiments and projects. A bunch of us are huge fans of Dev.to and the vibrant Dev.to community, so we’re excited to share them here!

Glitch is an online code editor where you can build full stack apps on the web. Those apps can range from the serious (our React starter) to the silly (like longcat cursor). The best part is it’s easy to take one app and remix it to a new one. That makes your own copy that you can edit to turn longcat cursor into a lizard cursor.

Longcat cursor

Here on Dev.to we’ll share our strangest, coolest, and most enlightening Glitch apps, experiments, and hacks: Can I run Go on Glitch? What if I built an HTML5 game… for cats? How can I easily add thousands of trees into my virtual reality world? Can I remix the lizard cursor into a vegetable with a face?

To start some of us on Dev.to put together this list of some of our favs:

Generative placeholders: If you make design mockups you probably need placeholders. For years I just used boring black rectangles, but these are so much cooler!
Alt Text

Are you a wife guy? - A brilliant take on the meme (and maybe even a useful quiz for… some of us out there). But the thing I love most about this app is how easy it is to remix for your own quick quiz or searing commentary.

I love this Gif Photobooth! It was built in Javascript by a developer for his wedding reception, and totally tanked productivity at Glitch for a whole afternoon as we all played with it! The team loved it so much that we made our own remixes for Glitch events like our Appy Hour at XOXO and our booth at Capitol Royale.

This Screenreader tutorial is fantastic. It’s such a great concept, and helpful way to understand how to use a screenreader for accessibility. At my last role we all used it as an intro for accessibility training, and it was so exciting to realize it was created by a Glitch employee!

We hope to inspire you to get out there and play with code. Making something awesome on Glitch? Let us know in the comments.

Top comments (13)

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington • Edited

I'm loving that GIF Photobooth — could easily see that one tanking my productivity, haha! Gonna just have to save it for later. 🙂

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

It... takes four pictures and then doesn't really do anything with them. I'm not sure I understand kids these days.

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

Haha! Well, it does mostly what I'd expect a GIF Photobooth to do — but I could see a little creativity going a long way here. Would be fun to try and take your photos in such a way that they'd interact... maybe you could pass yourself something.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

Oh wait.
It's four separate gifs.
I thought it was doing some kind of tweening or something, so I did four static poses, but it's designed for people to wave or move. Phrasing it like "pose" is a little misleading!
I see it could be more fun.

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melissamcewen profile image
Melissa McEwen

I'd love to see a remix with cool effects like the Purikura Japanese photo booth.

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Melissa McEwen

We remixed it for the XOXO conference and added some cool bells and whistles (like sends the pics via SMS) glitch.com/~star-platypus

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

I've been seeing Glitch on DEV for a year.
My old brain can't make sense of it.

Is it just CodePen but more tooling around it so instead of being a scratchpad / sandbox's for ideas its personal projects that can be for production but not having to worry about infrastructure?

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Melissa McEwen • Edited

Codepen is a bit different, personal I use Codepen mainly for just front end examples (CSS/JS user interactions). Glitch is full-stack so it's ideal for things like building your own API or entire web app. The Glitch container is Linux so you can run a lot of stuff on it (as long as it doesn't require sudo permissions or such). And there is a command line interface/terminal. A good example is tokimeki-unfollow.glitch.me/ which is has a DB for storage, Twitter API integration/login + a front end.

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

Thank you for that. Maybe at some point I'll make video tutorial on its utility.

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Clive Da

oooh i like the placeholders

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osde8info profile image
Clive Da

but why are 6 NPM dependencies already out of date on the placeholder @glitch repo ?

could glitch autoupdate dependancies before publishing demos ive had the same problem 8 times now

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Melissa McEwen

Which project? The hello-express one? We're in the process of updating it. We don't auto update because it can break people's projects but on the package.json page it notifies you what modules can be updated and you can click to update

screenshot

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osde8info profile image
Clive Da

yes that one and most of the other demos AND "placeholder" @glitch