6 Awesome Ways to Code Together

Real time collaboration is the norm today, it is to be expected from the services we use - whether that's video chat, voice, or real time editing in documents or code. Below is a small list of places where you can do some real time coding with others. Note: I am not sponsored by any of these services. Enjoy!

VS Code Live Share

If you're using VS Code Then I highly recommend you use Microsoft's own live share extension. It works remarkably well and my friends and I have used it a number of times to work on the project together.

CodePen collab mode

If you have used codepen then you might be surprised that the Pro version actually has a collab mode that you can use. In collab mode, you can do real time pair programming similar to google docs. It's great for conducting interviews or just a random one-off script you want to work on together. I like it because you can see the results of the work in realtime like any other codepen!

It also has a professor mode for live coding sessions you need to do with multiple users.

jsFiddle Collaborate Mode

jsfiddle, like the others, also has a collaborate mode. Similar to codepen, you can see the realtime edits like you would any other tool. It also has the ability to do voice chat and regular chat as well. Underneath the hood it uses togetherjs to get the realtime collaboration features.

togetherjs

Want to create your own realtime collaboration platform? Then take a look at togetherjs! Togetherjs doesn't provide the edit state that you would need to implement on top of this however, but it does give you a quick library for doing WebRTC right away. Check it out!

repl.it

Repl.it stands out among all of these in my opinion. It works with many languages, you get the integration with GitHub, the realtime collaboration, and you can run just about anything you can think of. Many of the samples, such as for Python for instance, is running a full web server! Fantastic resource, highly recommend this!

codesandbox

Code sandbox is another great online ide. It has loads of cool features like letting you import from a github repo, collaborative real-time editing, and you can even embed the results on your site. Very neat!

Conclusion

On occasion I've used a few of the fiddle / code snippet resources online for one-off javascript projects. I've used VS Code a number of times when I'm working locally on something and I need my coworkers' opinion on something. repl.it however stands out among these IMHO. This list certainly isn't comprehensive and if you have suggestions please feel free to leave a comment below.

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