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Tips for safer social repl development

Wed May 18 2022 by J Malcolm

Replit makes coding into a social activity, in many different ways. You can easily share your repl with our vibrant developer community to receive feedback, tips, and kudos. Our multiplayer features allow you to write, review and debug your code together with buddies. And with access to the full power of the Internet and dozens of powerful programming languages, you can even write code that brings other users into your repl in real time.

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Template Jam 2022

Mon May 16 2022 by Replit Team

Since we introduced templates, many of you have asked to get in on the action. We have some amazing community templates already, but we want to get everyone involved.

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Automating Minecraft on Replit

Mon May 9 2022 by Lee Fleming

Replcraft is a library that allows you to automate parts of your base on a Minecraft server using code, directly from a repl. Replcraft allows you to get and place blocks, check for entities, move and craft items, read redstone, and more.

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Winning projects of MadeWithReplit

Fri Apr 22 2022 by Replit Team

Whats #MadeWithReplit?

MadeWithReplit was our first ever ReplCon hackathon! Participants had the chance to win amazing cash prizes, share their work with the world, and hone their coding skills.

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How Do You Do, Fellow Teachers?

Tue Apr 19 2022 by David Morgan

Hi everyone! I'm David Morgan (@LessonHacker), I'm stepping into the Teacher + Customer Success role and am ridiculously excited to be working at Replit and being part of this amazing community. I have been working as a secondary school Computer Science teacher in the UK for the best part of two decades, and am passionate about making CompSci education frictionless and accessible for all.

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Your New Replit Profile

Mon Apr 18 2022 by Søren Rood and Omar Abdul-Rahim

You may have noticed that the "My Repls" and "profile" pages look different. We decided to combine these surfaces into one unified page. The new profiles are fresh, more social, and more customizable than ever before.

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We Built a Search Engine

Thu Mar 31 2022 by Søren Rood and Lincoln Bergeson

For the past few months, we have been building a Replit-native search engine. It is remarkably powerful, and we are really excited for you all to try it out. We believe that you should be able to find anything on Replit in less than 30 seconds.

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Build a Speech-to-Text App with AssemblyAI on Replit

Tue Mar 29 2022 by Arek Nawo

Transcription, or speech-to-text (STT), is a very helpful feature for various use cases, from AI assistants to video captioning. You can use it to create immersive virtual experiences and accessible interfaces unlike ever before. It’s no wonder STT-driven apps and services are in high demand.

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Build Your Own Livestreaming Service with api.video

Sat Mar 26 2022 by Rahul Banerjee

With the recent shift in the popularity of remote work environments, the demand for livestreaming services has increased. Even prior to the shift, many global companies have used livestreaming services for their organization’s all-hands meetings. api.video provides APIs and SDKs that make it easier to build your own livestreaming service and host it on your website. Additionally, they also provide solutions for uploading videos, encoding videos, video delivery, and video analytics. Here are some of the specific features of api.video:

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Making a Real-Time Chat App with Supabase on Replit

Wed Mar 23 2022 by Arek Nawo

Firebase is arguably the most popular backend as a service (BaaS) offering. It’s created by Google and comes with almost everything you’d need to create a great app, including a database, file storage, user authentication, and real-time communication. However, it’s closed source, meaning all your and your users’ data is under Google’s control.

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Escaping Dirty Pipe (a.k.a. CVE-2022-0847), mostly unscathed

Wed Mar 16 2022 by Luis Héctor Chávez

You may have heard that there was a very critical Linux kernel vulnerability making the rounds. As with all important enough vulnerabilities, this one has a catchy name: Dirty Pipe (no logo, though). This blogpost attempts to explain how that vulnerability impacted Replit. The good news is that as far as we know, there weren't any successful exploitations of it!

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Betting on CodeMirror

Thu Mar 10 2022 by Sergei Chestakov

At Replit, our mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. In order to achieve that ambitious goal, we need to make sure that the experience of writing, running, and sharing code is as seamless as possible. At the heart of that experience is the editor itself. As a result, we dedicate a huge amount of time and energy to improving the stability, performance, and accessibility of our editor.

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10 Resources for Beginners: Learn to Code on Replit

Sat Mar 5 2022 by Brittany Choi

Hello! I’m Brittany Choi. A little bit about me: I was an English teacher, but I recently transitioned to Technical and Content Writing. I started learning how to code on Replit to gain technical skills and to learn something new.

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Kaboom Draw

Mon Feb 28 2022 by tga

Programming is hard, especially for beginners where the code <-> output feedback loop is cumbersome. People need to click run button, see output, change code, click run again see output. There are a lot of ideas that greatly improved this experience like live-reloading (a lot in the audio / visual context, and UI dev). However the most exciting idea I've seen is still the experiments done by Bret Victor, like in Learnable Programming. Seeing his experiements on combining live reload + sensible controls still takes my breath every time.

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All New Repls are Powered By Nix

Wed Feb 23 2022 by Connor Brewster

For the past year we have been working hard to integrate Nix into our platform and rebuild our existing language experiences with package from Nix. We are excited to announce that all new repls are now powered by Nix. In this post we'll talk about what this means for the future of the platform and all the work that it took to get here.

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Getting Started with Solidity on Replit

Fri Feb 18 2022 by Osinachi Chukwujama

Have you ever wanted to quickly prototype an idea, reproduce a bug, or share a code demo? Maybe you just got an idea for a new smart contract that allows users to bet on soccer teams, and you want to quickly prototype this and share it with your teammates. In all of these instances, Replit is the perfect solution.

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Making new Python repls 100x faster to start up

Fri Feb 4 2022 by Luis Héctor Chávez

Python is currently the world's (and Replit's) most popular programming language. We've improved the Python experience during last year, with a Python package cache to make installs faster, and an integrated, multiplayer debugger to increase the understanding of what programs do. But there are still a few problems with Python. Packages are often very space-consuming, so they are installed into an ephemeral 2 GiB scratch disk to avoid filling up repl directories. Unfortunately this means that every time a Python repl starts, a lengthy package installation process must happen. This makes some Python repls take forever to start! Some other packages that have a large number of dependencies (like TensorFlow and Torch) were completely unusable because they don't even fit on the scratch directory.

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Using Replit and Google Sheets to Make a Simple Google Forms Alternative

Tue Jan 18 2022 by Nicolas Bohorquez

Replit, a cloud native code environment, provides all the tools you need to collaborate, create, test, and deploy software applications in a single place. Think of it as a new-generation Integrated Development Environment (IDE), with integrated support for authentication/authorization, data persistence, and auto deployment that makes your software development experience thrive.

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Python for Beginners: Interpreting My Amazon Spending with a Repl, Part Three

Sat Jan 1 2022 by Brittany Pirkle

I know you have been on the edge of your seats wondering why in the world a repl is better than a spreadsheet to calculate so much data?! In case you need a refresher, I analyzed my Amazon spending for 2021 using a Python repl and with just a few lines of code I could discern a variety of answers about my spending. Not only did I find out that I am spending way too much money on Amazon, but I also came to the conclusion of why a repl is better than a spreadsheet (read to the bottom to find out).

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Implementing RUI, Replit's Design System

Thu Dec 23 2021 by Alex Kotliarskyi

At Replit, we have a small engineering and design team supporting millions of users. Our secret is investing in good tools that make us more productive. In this blog post we'll give you an insider look into how we implemented one such tool - the Replit design system (or RUI for short).

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Repl Space and Templates

Wed Dec 15 2021 by Tyler Angert, Moudy Elkammash, Connor Brewster

When we want to support a new technology, we're faced with the question: "Do we (the Replit team) build this capability into the Replit directly, or can our users add it themselves?". Usually, we want the answer to be the latter. Repls are like personal computers for your projects. And the more these personal computers can be customized, the more they'll be used in creative, unexpected ways.

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Ace, CodeMirror, and Monaco: A Comparison of the Code Editors You Use in the Browser

Tue Dec 14 2021 by Faris Masad

I've been working on Replit for roughly six years now, and as the team has grown, I've focused on the IDE (what we call the workspace) portion of the product. Naturally, I was increasingly preoccupied with the code editor. While we've considered creating a code editor that meets our needs, the complexity involved in developing one, the richness of open-source choices available, and the size of our staff made it a fruitless rabbit hole to enter. Our time is best spent elsewhere. I have had the pleasure (and the pain) of using Ace, Monaco, and CodeMirror in production settings, sometimes simultaneously (more on that later). In this post, I'll go over some Replit history, my experience using the editors, and how they stack up against one another.

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Python for Beginners: Interpreting My Amazon Spending with a Repl, Part Two

Mon Dec 13 2021 by Brittany Pirkle

‘Tis the season to...calculate my spending? Amazon has become an easy way to have something delivered almost instantly (thank you overnight shipping), but it is almost too easy to spend money that I need a way to keep track of my spending (and maybe delete the app off my phone!). A Python repl is the perfect solution! In my last post, I discussed the perks of using Python for this project and the importance of the right package manager.

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Will Nix Overtake Docker?

Mon Nov 29 2021 by Connor Brewster

In many discussions about Nix, the comparison of Nix and Docker comes up frequently. This question could be dismissed by saying that Nix and Docker are different tools that solve different problems. One is a toolkit for building and deploying containers and the other is a package and configuration manager. However, these tools do have some overlap: they can both be used to create reproducible environments. A reproducible environment is one that can be recreated from scratch in an identical way (ideally bit-for-bit). Practically, this means having the same tools, versions, and configuration between the environments.

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How to Turn on Dark Mode and Switch Themes on Replit

Tue Nov 23 2021 by Piero Maddaleni

We recently changed how you change themes on Replit, and since people have been asking, we'll show you how it's done in this short blogpost. Start off by clicking on the hamburger button in the top right corner to open up the sidebar:

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Announcing File Persistence in Hosted Apps for Hackers

Thu Nov 11 2021 by Luis Héctor Chávez

We mostly think of repls as being full computers in the cloud, and one of the goals of the platform team at Replit is to enable people to build almost anything in replspace. In the past, when a file was stored in a repl, it would only be saved when the editor was opened. This went against our goal and made it impossible to write certain servers that changed files at runtime. This was especially hard for newcomers, because that's the easiest way to persist information. Starting today, Hacker and Teams subscribers will be able to write services that accept file uploads or store data in a local database (think SQLite) or text file, regardless of how the repl was started.

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Python for Beginners: Interpreting My Amazon Spending with a Repl

Wed Nov 3 2021 by Brittany Pirkle

About a year ago, I created a blog series on a novice learner’s journey into the world of code through a look at the basics (read the whole series here). Now, with a much larger knowledge base and understanding of both code and Replit, I am taking it a step further into a new language and project. My goal is to create a practical beginner project and justify why using Replit is the best option, even for beginners.

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Faster Nix Repl Startup

Wed Oct 13 2021 by Connor Brewster

For the past few months we have been working on improving our Nix integration. Nix allows users to easily use over 80,000 Linux packages in a repl. Nix opens the door to many exciting tools and applications on the platform. Our goal is for every repl to be backed by Nix. Before we can do that, we need to ensure that the Nix experience is just as good, if not better, than our existing Polygott solution.

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A New Code Editor for Mobile - CodeMirror 6

Tue Sep 21 2021 by Faris Masad

Today, we are thrilled to announce CodeMirror as the new code editor on Replit for mobile devices. CodeMirror is a versatile code editor that has been specifically designed with mobile in mind, providing an excellent touchscreen experience. This change is the beginning of a focused effort on mobile development here at Replit; the editor is just the first step! The editor supports all the features you expect from a code editor, and we're working on making it even more powerful.

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How I Created an NPM Package to Access Amtrak's Semi-Private API

Wed Sep 15 2021 by Piero Maddaleni

Recently, I took it upon myself to both learn TypeScript and reverse engineer Amtrak's train tracking API. The result of this was the Amtrak NPM Package and my own Amtrak Train Tracking API. I wanted to make it easier for others to use the API, as the data received from Amtrak's endpoint isn't useable without the use of decryption, and even then the resulting data is all in one massive JSON object.

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Data Loss: a sad tale with a happy ending

Fri Sep 10 2021 by Luis Héctor Chávez

Earlier this year, we discovered that we were losing data for some of our users. This manifested as either repls being completely empty after reloading, or some of the changes to files not being present after reloading. Obviously losing data is the worst we can do, so we had to fix this immediately. This blog post narrates the adventure of how we discovered this, how we fixed it, and the lessons we learned during the way.

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Making Replit Faster for Everyone

Wed Sep 1 2021 by Matt Iselin

Replit's mission is to make programming accessible and provide computer superpowers. To achieve that goal, repls need to be fast. To that end we've been working on a number of improvements in our infrastructure and code to unlock faster repls.

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Coding for Change

Wed Sep 1 2021 by Lena Vu Sawyer

Replit and Congressional App Challenge are joining efforts to increase Computer Science literacy and access in the U.S.

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Everyone will learn to program (or why the computer revolution *still* hasn't happened yet)

Thu Aug 19 2021 by Patrick Coleman

Last week I spoke on behalf of Replit at the ASU+GSV summit, one of the largest education technology conferences in the world, on the topic "Is coding an essential modern fluency?". For me and the rest of the panelists (Mike Smith of Harvard, Taniya Mishra of SureStart, and Krishna Vedati of Tynker) the answer is an easy and obvious YES. And I'm guessing if you've been coding along with Replit's journey, it's a yes too.

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Replit²

Fri Aug 6 2021 by Guillaume St-Pierre

Replit has many use cases and features, but one that's less talked about is its ability to serve as a secure compute environment for specialized apps. What if you want to build some tool that will generate code, then execute it for your users? Or maybe you are building a specialized online IDE that injects code for users, then executes the bundle? With Replit, you can start building those kinds of applications quickly without having to focus on building a fast and secure backend. Build the frontend, we'll provide the compute power.

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Changelog - July 2021

Sun Aug 1 2021 by Replit team

We're back for the July edition of our monthly changelog where we highlight some of our big and small feature releases, user experience changes, and bug fixes!

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The wild west of the internet

Thu Jul 29 2021 by Nathan Zilora

Emails are the wild west of the internet. A lawless land filled with incompatibility and unexpected behaviors. At the same time, it’s still one of the best ways we can reach our customers and inform them about new features and events that they might be interested in. I’m going to talk about a recent experience I had with the emails, specifically Gmail iOS dark mode. My hope is that you can learn from this experience and it’ll save you the time and turmoil it cost me.

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A Python Framework With Built-in Database and Auth Support

Wed Jul 28 2021 by Spencer Pogorzelski

Replit enables coders to build apps quickly. With nothing but a browser, a developer can spin up a server, store data in Repl DB, and authenticate users using Repl Auth. However, until today, users had to string together all these components to build an app. This is why we're excited to announce replit.web, a Python framework focused on making apps quickly. Building an app with user auth and persistence has never been easier:

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Building a web app with Nix (Because why not?)

Fri Jul 16 2021 by Guillaume St-Pierre

Learning a new programming language can be a very difficult task. Where should you start? How do I improve my skills from "Hello, World!" to building complete applications? It helps to have a starter project. One of my favourites is building a web app. I have been learning the Nix package manager for a few weeks now - starting with creating a dynamic version system - and I think its the perfect time to write a web application with it (Even though I probably shouldn't).

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Building the future of collaborative coding

Fri Jul 9 2021 by Sergei Chestakov

One of the most powerful aspects of Replit is the ability to collaborate with friends and peers in real time. When we first added support for multiplayer, we set out to make it as easy as possible to code with others. Since then, collaboration has become an integral part of our product with the release of features like threads and draw.

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Changelog - June 2021

Fri Jul 2 2021 by Replit team

Welcome to the June edition of our monthly changelog, where we highlight some of our big and small feature releases, user experience changes, and bug fixes!

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Multiplayer Debugging Experience for Python, Node.js, Java, and C/C++

Fri Jul 2 2021 by Luis Héctor Chávez, Alex Kotliarskyi, Tyler Angert

A couple of months ago, we announced our intention to create a new collaborative program comprehension experience for your repls. This project isn't just about figuring out what's wrong with your code, but really understanding what's going on, together with the people you work with. Today, we are happy to announce that we're releasing the first phase of this experience: a Replit-native, zero-configuration, multiplayer-friendly, interactive debugger for C, C++, Node.js, Python, and Java repls!

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AmpleMarket gets their whole team coding with Replit

Wed Jun 30 2021 by Obaida Albaroudi & Patrick Coleman

Speed is the number one thing that lets startups compete against the big companies. Imagine how fast you could move if your whole team could do even just a little bit of coding. That tedious repetitive task? Automate it. Communicating product requirements? Code an MVP. Etc. Etc.

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How I learned to code by creating a simple Slack bot

Fri Jun 25 2021 by Tala Awwad

Hi, my name is Tala👋 , and I have always been so inspired by engineers and their ability to create something out of basically nothing. So one goal of mine was to be able to create something just like they do every day. Mind you, in no way am I experienced in programming; I actually find it quite intimidating (my background is business). However, I wanted to challenge myself and start off small by creating a Slack bot that can automatically send our “Weekly Wins” thread. Weekly Wins

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[RVO] How Nisawa is Enabling Reliable Delivery in African Cities

Thu Jun 10 2021 by Francois Birori & Anselme Mucunguzi

Can you imagine how you’d get a package or meal delivered to you if your house did not have a physical address? Now imagine how that would work if your local food delivery, postal, or parcel services were also ineffective, lacked the technology, or didn't exist at all.

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Top 8 Common Java Errors for Beginners - and How to Solve Them

Tue Jun 8 2021 by Matthew Wallace

Did you know that in Java's standard library, there are a total of more than 500 different exceptions! There lots of ways for programmers to make mistakes - each of them unique and complex. Luckily we've taken the time to unwrap the meaning behind many of these errors, so you can spend less time debugging and more time coding. To begin with, let's have a look at the syntax errors!

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[RV0] How we gameified exploratory CS with Tech Roulette

Fri Jun 4 2021 by Mingjie Jiang, Megan Cui, Brian Xiang

We're Execute Big, a CS education non-profit org, and as three-person strong team, our mission is to give every student the chance to explore and experience CS education. We've been bringing unique programs to students across the country, and the move to virtual programs sparked a little creativity in us — after all, virtualization has made education more accessible than ever.

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How we went from supporting 50 languages to all of them

Mon May 24 2021 by Connor Brewster and Mason Clayton

At Replit, we want to give our users the most powerful, flexible, and easy-to-get-started coding environment. However, it has been limiting because we only support a fixed set of languages and OS packages, some of which are outdated. Ideally, users should be able to use any language and install any package with minimal fuss. That's why today, we're announcing that we've incorporated Nix in our infrastructure to give users access to over 30,000 OS packages instantly.

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A URL Shortener in 16 Lines of Code with Node.js and nanoexpress

Tue May 11 2021 by Piero Maddaleni

The Backstory

The Slack message I received last October In October of 2020, Meghan, our people person, messaged me asking if there was a professional-looking URL shortener. Over the next 48 hours, I created Replit.sh, a URL shortener for use by the Replit team and published it on Github for anyone to use. For the past few days, I have been working on rewriting the entire system from the ground up and so it just made sense for me to make a tutorial on how it is done.

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How to send $ETH in 19 lines of Python

Wed May 5 2021 by Soren Rood

With the emergence of blockchain technology, people can get paid from anywhere in the world. This type of transaction is revolutionary because we are able to send value from one person to another with no bank.

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Team Nicknames

Wed May 5 2021 by Lena Vu Sawyer

You can now give your team members nicknames in Replit Teams! This will help admins better organize and view their teammates.

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Replit Empowers Synctera to Find Hidden Talent

Mon May 3 2021 by Obaida Albaroudi & Patrick Coleman

Talent is one of the most important factors in the success of a new business, and Synctera has been using Replit to run a technical interview process that effectively uncovers the best engineers, whether they have a stellar resume or a nontraditional background.

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Why We Switched From Webpack To Vite

Wed Apr 28 2021 by Sergei Chestakov

At Replit, our mission is to make programming more accessible. We provide people with free compute in the cloud so that they can build apps on any device. Among the most popular ways to create apps on the web today is React. Historically, however, React tooling has been slow on Replit. While the JavaScript ecosystem has produced excellent tools for professional developers, many of the most popular ones, like Create React App and Webpack, have become increasingly complex and inefficient.

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Debug, Debugger, Debuggest!—A new Collaborative Comprehension Experience

Fri Apr 23 2021 by Luis Héctor Chávez

Earlier this year, we decided to close the #1 most requested entry in our Canny board, which requested to improve our previous debugger so that it could also work with multiple files in a project. This was done because it became very clear that there is a need to have better tools to aid with program comprehension built directly into Replit. But we also realized that we could go even further. Even though most of our users could be happy with a traditional debugger experience, our mission is to give people computer superpowers! So today we are announcing that we are working on a new, reimagined, collaborative debugging experience (or maybe we should call it a "program comprehension experience?").

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A whiteboard for every repl

Fri Apr 23 2021 by Jeremy Press

Replit is a place where beginners, educators, and professionals alike can code and share their ideas collaboratively. Something that goes hand and hand with your source code is how you communicate it. We built threads, which allow you to leave contextual messages around code, and added better markdown support for READMEs and other guides. However, we were missing a visual way for people to explain and collaborate around code. Today we're excited to announce support for draw files, powered by excalidraw.

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Announcing Secrets Management

Mon Apr 19 2021 by Faris Masad

Replit is the go-to place for a lot of people to build their applications. People build chatbots, web applications, games, and so much more. Naturally, projects like this need to maintain sensitive information (secrets). Today we're announcing a new and improved way to manage secrets.

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Meet the college students who used Replit to build a startup with $1,000 in monthly revenue in 3 weeks

Tue Apr 13 2021 by Søren Rood

Hi 👋🏻, I'm Søren. I'm a 20 year old Computer Science student based in Seattle, Washington. I've always been interested in the intersection of finance and computer science and I tend to find myself building things in the space. Before I was offered a position at Replit, I worked as a software engineer at a FinTech startup writing market-making systems for various crypto brokerages. While I was doing this, I was also working on a side-project with my close friends and co-founders Justin and Steven. This project is called Blubbr.

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Boosts

Mon Apr 12 2021 by Sergei Chestakov

Our Hacker plan has always been a great choice if you need more powerful repls. In addition to benefits like private repls, more storage, and always on, the Hacker plan gives all of your repls 4x the CPU and RAM compared to those in our free plan.

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Introducing system audio

Thu Apr 8 2021 by Luis Héctor Chávez

We know that games are an important part of our commitment to making programming more accessible, more creative, and more fun. Back in February when we announced a significant revamp to our graphics stack, we also promised that we would also provide system audio integration. That support is finally available today, as an opt-in feature.

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Securing your graphic repls

Wed Apr 7 2021 by Luis Héctor Chávez

Have you ever wished to be able to protect your graphic repls against prying eyes? Starting today, all VNC connections are automatically protected by the same token that keep your connection to the repl secure. There is nothing you need to do, since this is completely transparent.

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Introducing Kaboom

Tue Apr 6 2021 by Tiga Wu

Games are awesome, making games is even more awesome. I love making games, making games makes me happy, being happy makes me make better games, i hope everyone can be happy and enjoy making games! -- me, today

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Welcome to the Wonderful World of Clusters

Fri Mar 26 2021 by Luis Héctor Chávez

Having a solid foundation is critical for us to be able to fulfill our mission of making programming more accessible, more creative, and more fun. We did a great job of making the platform more stable during last year, but every now and then we would still run into unforeseen problems that cascaded into other parts of the platform, producing a bad experience for everyone. So back in October (just a few weeks after I joined the team) when we had 2 load-related site-wide outages within a week, we knew it was time to do a major overhaul of how our infrastructure handles traffic. And now today, we're announcing that as a side effect of that infrastructure change, Hacker repls now run in newer, more powerful machines, which means that we'll have more room to grow and experiment with more benefits for Hackers (and you might find that things feel a little bit snappier lately). This is the first of a three-part series of blogposts on how we rebuilt our infrastructure over the course of ~5 months.

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Introducing the Python package cache

Fri Mar 19 2021 by Luis Héctor Chávez

Figuring out how to install third-party libraries can derail people from learning to code or starting a new side project. We built the Universal Package Manager (UPM for short) to save people from having to think about package installation at all. Just import the library, press run, and UPM will install it into your repl!

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Replit Case Study - Catalyst Coding Club

Thu Mar 11 2021 by Aaryan Jain

Realizing the lack of exposure to STEM skills for younger students, a group of high school students started Catalyst, a club to introduce students all ages to CS and making sure it is accessible for everyone. Located in Redmond WA, Catalyst strives to produce an environment in which students can thrive and become passionate about the technological world. It is our goal to help ensure students in our community get the exposure they need to computer science and make an informed decision about their future careers.

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Markdown Preview

Thu Mar 11 2021 by Sergei Chestakov

It's always been super fast to start writing markdown in a repl. However, the more we used it, the more we realized there were some key features we were missing that would make our lives easier. Which is why we're excited to announce all of the new improvements we've made to the markdown editing experience on Replit!

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Replit Dotcom

Wed Mar 10 2021 by Amjad Masad

tl;dr In the next few days, we'll be moving domains from "repl.it" to "replit.com." Nothing is required on your end -- all urls will automatically redirect and you'll remain logged-in (as if by magic). Nothing else changes. We prefer if people referred to us as "Replit" (pronounced rep-lit 🔥). To understand the origins of our name and how we got here, it's useful to tell you the Replit genesis story:

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Replit's Intern Interview Process

Wed Mar 10 2021 by Meghan Larson

Our team is blown away by the level of talent that applied to our 2021 internship programs. I read every official application (over 500!) and looked at countless projects. Our initial intention was to be open to community members that saw the post on our jobs page, applicants that I spoke with at college career fairs, and people that our teammates referred. However, our application link was quickly shared, and we had an avalanche of talented and passionate candidates applying.

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No-setup Unit Testing

Mon Mar 1 2021 by Faris Masad & Jeremy Press

Unit testing is a powerful way to verify that code works as intended and creates a quick feedback loop for development & learning. However, setting up a reproducible unit-testing environment is a time-consuming and delicate affair. At Replit, our goal is to give people coding superpowers by demolishing barriers and democratizing access to expert tools. Today, we're launching our zero-setup unit testing environment.

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HTTPS by default

Fri Feb 26 2021 by Newman Hu and Sidney Kochman

The easiest, fastest way to put a server on the internet should also come with secure defaults. That's why we're excited to announce that Replit is now HTTPS-first, which brings additional privacy, integrity, and security benefits to servers hosted on our platform. This applies to every HTTP server repl on Replit.

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Series A to Revolutionize Computing

Thu Feb 18 2021 by Amjad Masad & Haya Odeh

Our mission is to give everyone in the world computer superpowers. We build powerful yet approachable tools & platforms for developers, students, and educators.

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Responsible Disclosure

Fri Feb 12 2021 by Dan Stowell

On Sunday, January 31st, a vulnerability was disclosed to us by Replit users. People had been allowed to transfer repls they did not own to teams they did own. Within minutes of finding out, we disabled the affected endpoint. We have found no evidence that this vulnerability was exploited to transfer repls from any of our users. If we had found evidence, we would have contacted the affected community members immediately.

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Hosting Apps with Always On

Tue Feb 9 2021 by Mason Clayton, Connor Brewster, Sidney Kochman

Today we're excited to announce that Always On repls are available to all hackers! Anyone with Hacker plan can choose up to 5 repls and keep them running all the time. With Always On, you can for example spin up and host an app like a Discord bot in 30 seconds:

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Killing Containers at Scale

Mon Feb 1 2021 by Connor Brewster

To make it so that anyone with a web browser can code on Replit, our backend infrastructures runs on preemptible VMs. That means the computer running your code can shutdown at any time! We've made it really fast for repls to reconnect when that happens. Despite our best efforts, though, people had been seeing repls stuck connecting for a long time. After some profiling and digging into the Docker source code, we found and fixed the problem. Our session connection error rate dropped from 3% to under 0.5% and our 99th percentile session boot time dropped from 2 minutes to 15 seconds.

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Rails in 30 seconds

Sat Jan 30 2021 by Amjad Masad

Philosophically, Replit and Rails are incredibly aligned. We both exist to remove excessive configuration and complexity that stands in the way of building things. However, for a long time, it bothered me that Replit didn't work well with Rails because we focus on small and lightweight projects. Recently, our infrastructure has gotten much more powerful, and I decided to give Rails another spin. It turns out it's not only possible to do Rails on Replit; it's quite a delightful experience. It takes less than 30 seconds from starting a project to seeing the welcome screen:

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Going Global

Thu Jan 28 2021 by Amjad Masad & Zach Anderson

We had the idea for Replit in Jordan, launched as a startup in New York, and incorporated as a company in San Mateo. The US gave us the infrastructure, the capital, and network to launch our business, and for that we're forever grateful. However, to us, the internet is a new country and we want to make our citizenship official and our commitment real. We're joining our global community of hackers, students, teachers, and entrepreneurs and becoming a global company and service. Starting today:

  • Our first two non-US compute regions are up -- Mumbai, India and London, England -- making us a global service
  • We're hiring worldwide making us a globally distributed company
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Ode to Educators

Thu Jan 28 2021 by Derrick McMillen

"Why am I here? I don't even like computer science", Raul lingered by the door, his body language showing his discomfort. "This is a mistake. I'm not supposed to be here". Now fully within the classroom, Raul alternated between pacing in circles and eyeing the last few good seats left in our quickly filling classroom. Several minutes passed, and my students used the last remaining minutes of their passing period to trade stories from their summer and muse about the overwhelming sensation of the coming year. They were 11th graders now, after all; this was "the most important year to appeal to colleges."

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Tabbed Shell

Tue Dec 29 2020 by Sergei Chestakov

Among the many things that makes Repl.it special is our ability to provide free compute to millions of users. We've built a platform that not only lets you write and run code, but also gives you access to a Linux container through which you can execute arbitrarily complex commands. Despite being such a powerful feature, we haven't done a great job of exposing that capability to its fullest.

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Input/Outputing Testing & Autograding

Wed Dec 16 2020 by Wade Bourne & Derrick McMillen

Today, a highly requested feature has been released: Input/Output testing & autograding. The Input/Output Tests pane is embeded within all new and existing Teams for Education projects.

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Anyone Can Code - Week 7

Mon Dec 14 2020 by Brittany Pirkle

I have come to the end of my journey and have to say I am pleased with the outcome. My knowledge level before this experiment was literally zero. My husband even told me that code was hard and it would be difficult to produce an entire website in a short period of time. I will admit there were several times of head scratching and google searches galore. I also had several experts I could go to when CSS was confusing me. However, overall, I feel I gained knowledge on a subject that was, formerly, completely foreign to me. Ironically, an associate of mine reached out looking for someone who could assist her in solving an HTML code issue on her website. I was able to successfully help her fix the problem and explain to her some of the basics of code. I wouldn’t go so far as saying the former teacher turned student has become the teacher again, but this new skill set is already coming in handy.

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Top 8 JavaScript Errors with Solutions

Wed Dec 9 2020 by Kelly M.

According to the JavaScript MDN web docs there are six types of JavaScript errors, seven if we count warnings. However, the most common JavaScript errors triggered while coding are reference, syntax, and type errors. This article dives into the top eight of these errors, with examples and descriptive solutions on how to fix them.

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Anyone Can Code - Week 6

Thu Dec 3 2020 by Brittany Pirkle

Here we are at week six and the web page is essentially done! That wasn’t so bad, was it? (Here is what I have done the last five weeks). The final step is to create a customized domain. This final step is optional because Repl.it does provide a domain name when a web page is created. However, for something more personalized, a customized domain name can be purchased. The cool part about this is when a domain name is purchased, you can call it whatever you want (as long as the name’s available), you own it, and no one else can use it.

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We've Been Pwned

Thu Dec 3 2020 by Mason Clayton

As long as I can remember Replit has been receiving a large number of vulnerability reports. We're very grateful for these and take them extremely seriously. However, 99% of them stem from a misunderstanding of what we do. Our main product is RCE (remote code execution) and naturally this leads to a whole lot of RCE vulnerability reports.

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How Far We've Come

Tue Dec 1 2020 by Dan Stowell

In early September we set out to simplify and stabilize Replit. "There's no better time to cut back than when you're growing," said Amjad. We've been working on this project in earnest for 10 weeks now. When you're in the thick of improving things all you can see is what remains undone, so it's good to look at how far you've come!

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Anyone Can Code - Week 5

Mon Nov 23 2020 by Brittany Pirkle

How are we already into week 5 of this project? It’s amazing how much I have learned in such a short time. (If you need a recap of the last four weeks, you can go here). When the basic foundational steps are broken down into small chunks, the world of code doesn’t seem as overwhelming as I thought it would be!

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Anyone Can Code - Week 4

Tue Nov 17 2020 by Brittany Pirkle

I am over halfway done with this project and I have learned so much. Coding intimidated me at first, but with Replit it has been extremely user friendly, fun, and attainable!

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Anyone Can Code - Week 3

Mon Nov 9 2020 by Brittany Pirkle

Remember how I said three weeks ago (see the first week of my journey here) that anyone can code? Well, it really is true. In fact, I am kind of impressed with myself in how quickly I have been able to figure out the basics of coding ;). Using Replit, online tutorials, videos, and the guidance of a few experts (at Repl.it) has made the learning curve way less intimidating. But if you follow along with me, it can be easy for you too!

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reCAPTCHA and the anonymous experience

Wed Nov 4 2020 by Amjad Masad

When we started Repl.it, we set out to remove all friction from getting started with programming. That also meant getting out of the way and letting you code as quickly as possible. As part of that, and for a long time, you could start coding on Repl.it without a user account.

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Anyone Can Code - Week 2

Mon Nov 2 2020 by Brittany Pirkle

Now that I know WHAT I am going to do (read last week’s blog post here), I need to learn HOW to do it. The world of coding can be overwhelming if you try to learn too much at once. Like school, you have to learn the basics before you can learn more advanced concepts. In this instance, I need to learn basic languages, skills, and concepts first and not get consumed by the many, many advanced concepts of coding.

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Group Projects on Teams for Education

Wed Oct 21 2020 by David Cako

Today we are excited to introduce Group Projects on Teams for Education. Group Projects enables students to collaborate as groups on teacher-created lessons in 50+ programing languages via our familiar and powerful online IDE.

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How Fig Shipped an MVP in Two Weeks During YC

Tue Oct 6 2020 by Brendan Falk

My name is Brendan Falk. I am one of the co-founders of Fig (YC S20). Fig adds visual apps and shortcuts to your Terminal. We make it easy for developers to build visual apps that streamline terminal workflows. We then let developers share apps with their team and the community. Our website gives a good demo.

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Education Privacy Update

Mon Sep 21 2020 by Patrick Coleman

Teachers, educators, and administrators, we've heard your concerns about privacy. We're excited to announce a new feature for Teams for Education, Private Invites, designed specifically to keep students' (including those under the age of 13) information private. Click here to create a team.

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Focusing on a solid foundation

Mon Sep 21 2020 by Amjad Masad

At Repl.it, our mission is to make programming more accessible, more creative, and more fun. A place away from the modern software development grind. It’s an ambitious mission, and it's already resonated with millions of coders who followed their creative energy to build great apps, like repl.email, a free email service built and hosted entirely on Repl.it and available to anyone with a Repl.it account.

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A database for every repl

Mon Sep 14 2020 by Sidney Kochman

Repl.it is already the best place to build your apps. But there was a missing piece: where do you store your data?

We’re introducing Repl.it Database: a fast, free, and easy key-value store that’s built into every repl.

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How to Land Your First Job as a Python Developer

Thu Sep 10 2020 by Galina Divakova

Python’s status as one of the world’s most widely used programming languages is well known. Some experts rank it to be at par with JavaScript in terms of simplicity, flexibility, and popularity. Its syntax is so straightforward and easy to read, custom-built software packages written in Python are the most shared in top online repositories. From app development to Google using the language for crawling webpages — Python is everywhere and it’s an exciting time to be a Python Developer.

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CLUI Command bar and Search

Thu Aug 27 2020 by Moudy Elkammash and Sergei Chestakov

One of the challenges of adding new functionality to any interface is balancing discoverability with visual clutter. We've written before about how a universal command bar can be a great way to expose features without overloading the UI with buttons. This pattern already works well for us in our mobile interface, so now we're bringing it to desktop! Here's a demo of what it looks like:

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Prepare for a Python Interview with These 7 Questions

Tue Aug 25 2020 by James Gallagher

How you respond to questions in a technical interview has a massive impact on whether you’re offered a job with an organization. If you can answer technical questions well and explain your reasoning, your chances of being offered a job is greatly improved.

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7 Questions to Help You Prepare for a JavaScript Interview

Fri Aug 14 2020 by James Gallagher

Job interviews are stressful enough. Technical interviews take the process a step further. In a technical interview, knowing the answer to a question does not necessarily mean you’ll be able to answer it. You need to know how to articulate the complex technical topics that you’ve mastered.

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The role of AI in coding

Sat Aug 8 2020 by Amjad Masad

In the past decade, we've seen an explosion of innovation in AI and machine learning. However, coding itself was barely touched by AI. The most significant example of AI-powered coding tools is editor autocomplete extensions like Kite or Tabnine.

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Audio - Play sound in any language on the web

Fri Jul 31 2020 by Wade Bourne

Audio brings games and projects to life! Web developers have it easy, they can publish their apps on the web and play audio using the browser API no problem. However, what about those of us that are command-line and graphics apps in other languages? Repl.it is a special place on the web where you can publish any app in any language, but so far it’s been missing audio capabilities because code executes in a container on the backend. This summer, for my internship I set out to solve this problem and make it possible to play audio in any repl in any language. In this post I’ll show you how to play audio in your repl and then I will chronicle the journey that got us here.

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Shareable Computing

Wed Jul 29 2020 by GPT-3

This is a guest blogpost by GPT-3, the new AI software from OpenAI. We only gave it the title and "Repl.it" and it generated the following post for us

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A Beginner's Guide to SQL

Tue Jul 28 2020 by James Gallagher

Data is absolutely everywhere. When you visited this web page, you generated data. When you took a note of your to-dos for the day in your reminders, you generated data.

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Emmet support

Mon Jul 27 2020 by Amjad Masad

Emmet is a plugin for many popular text editors which greatly improves HTML & CSS workflow, it's also one that's been requested by many of our users.

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Dear users coming from Glitch

Thu Jul 23 2020 by Amjad Masad

First, at Replit we're not motivated by competition. What we care about the most is making programming and computing more accessible. That means anyone who wants to code and build things should be able to do so without any hurdles.

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Java Concepts I Wish I Knew Years Ago

Fri Jul 10 2020 by James Gallagher

When I think about the best programming languages to learn, Java is near the top of the list. The language has a wide range of use cases and a beginner-friendly syntax that makes it a great language to learn. While Java may be older than some languages like Ruby or Python, it’s a valuable skill to have if you’re willing to devote the time to learning Java.

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CSS Concepts I Wish I Had Known Years Ago

Mon Jul 6 2020 by Christina Kopecky

When I think of web development, I like to think of it in terms of building a house. When we learn HTML, we are learning how to build the web page from the ground up, framing it with the lumber that will eventually become our end product.

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Multitabs

Thu Jul 2 2020 by Sergei Chestakov

Repl.it is a great place for prototyping ideas and starting new projects. However as your projects get bigger, the editing experience starts feeling a little limited. That's why we're exciting to announce that we're adding support for tabs!

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Git: An Introduction for Beginners

Mon Jun 29 2020 by James Gallagher

When you’re working on a software project, it’s crucial to keep a log of all the changes made to the project. This will help you see how your work has evolved over time. It will also allow other collaborators on a project to keep track of what changes have been made and by who. That’s where Git comes in.

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Community Video Competition

Tue Jun 23 2020 by Patrick Coleman

Over the past week, we ran a video competition for Replers. We got some great submissions from the community, and now it's time to announce the winners!

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Popular Beginner JavaScript Concepts

Mon Jun 22 2020 by James Gallagher

JavaScript is behind nearly every modern website on the web. JavaScript powers most of the dynamic features you see on the web, such as buttons which change when they’re clicked or images with zoom capabilities.

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Popular Beginner Python Concepts

Mon Jun 15 2020 by James Gallagher

Python is a programming language that’s widely favored by beginners. It’s no wonder, really. Python has a simple syntax which many people say resembles English, so it’s easy to read and write. In addition, Python is used for a wide array of purposes, from data science to web development.

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Repl.it and GitHub Classroom

Thu May 28 2020 by Tyler Angert & Jeremy Press

Repl.it has always tried to make coding fast, easy, and work seamlessly with your other tools. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Repl.it has teamed up with GitHub Classroom to make learning how to code even easier.

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Terminal Links

Thu Apr 30 2020 by Arnav Bansal

Terminals make it hard to copy things: Selecting text works differently to what people are used to, and ^C aborts the current program. Links are hard to use.

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Improving Repl.it's Mobile UX

Tue Apr 28 2020 by Moudy Elkammash

I like the process of writing because of how simple and portable the tools are. Regardless of time or place, a way to write things down is never far away. There's very little friction between inspiration and experimentation. I wish writing code was more like this.

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Terminal Search

Tue Apr 14 2020 by Amjad Masad

When you're deep into a debugging session printing a bunch of here, there, and wat, the output in the terminal can get hard to read. That's when search comes in handy, and that's why we're excited to announce our new terminal search functionality.

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Packaging Support for Java - Try Maven Packages in Your Browser

Wed Mar 25 2020 by Amjad Masad

Java is one of the most popular languages on Repl.it, and the JVM powers many of our other languages (Java Swing, Clojure, Kotlin). We want to make it as easy as possible to code with other people and build new programs out of programs that already exist. So we've added packaging support for Java!

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Using Repl.it as a CMS

Mon Mar 23 2020 by Tyler Angert

At Repl.it, we try to dogfood (use our own product) as much as we can. Parts of Repl.it are already developed on / hosted entirely on itself-- our blog, our docs, and even our new UI library is being developed almost entirely on Repl.it. But one interesting use case we’re exploring now is using Repl.it as a CMS for all of our new marketing pages.

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How to Conduct Remote Interviews

Fri Mar 20 2020 by Amjad Masad

Remote interviews can be hard, especially if you’ve never done them before. With the COVID-19 crisis, we’re seeing a lot of teams forced to transition to remote interviewing. Luckily, we’ve done hundreds of remote phone screens, and more recently we’ve been doing what we’re calling “remote onsites.” In this post, we'll describe how we and some of our customers leverage Repl.it Multiplayer -- our realtime collaborative development environment -- and other tools to interview candidates remotely.

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CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line

Thu Mar 5 2020 by Tyler Angert and Moudy Elkammash

“Command line interfaces. Once that was all we had. Then they disappeared, replaced by what we thought was a great advance: GUIs. GUIs were - and still are - valuable, but they fail to scale to the demands of today's systems. So now command line interfaces are back again, hiding under the name of search. Now you see them, now you don't. Now you see them again. And they will get better and better with time: mark my words, that is my prediction for the future of interfaces.” [1]

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Repl from Repo

Tue Dec 10 2019 by Amjad Masad

When I think of GitHub I imagine a vast network of people and code; a superorganism that changed how we make software. When I was getting into programming, starting a new project was daunting -- you had to imagine and build everything nearly from scratch. My version of code-sharing was calling my older cousin who was going to college for CS and getting code dictated to me over the phone. When the Internet arrived in my home town, it made hacking on new projects so much more fun. Starting a new project, at least initially, became about discovery:

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Free Hacker Plans for Eligible Students

Tue Sep 24 2019 by Bryan Byrne

We believe everyone should have instant access to a complete coding environment in their browser. That’s why Repl.it has joined the GitHub Student Developer Pack, giving eligible students free access to private repls, unlimited multiplayer sessions, and additional processing power. Students can now focus on learning and collaborating with their classmates in new ways, without the hassle of setting up a new environment each time.

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Making Repl.it Collaborative at Heart

Wed Sep 18 2019 by Amjad Masad

Coding, people believed, was an activity hackers did alone. While that might have been true in the past, the world is changing. New programmers come online every day and they want to effortlessly work and interact with others while writing code. Yet collaborative coding environments have remained troublesome to setup.

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SQLite, replified

Fri Aug 2 2019 by Sidney Kochman

SQLite is now a supported language on Repl.it! Our SQLite support brings the entire SQLite command-line interface right into your workspace. Now you have a simple way to experiment, prototype, or refine your data model with SQL.

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Previewing Markdown in Repls

Fri Aug 2 2019 by Tim Chen

When our community members want to provide instructions within a repl, the most common pattern we've seen is in a .txt file, or as a code comment. Users quickly figured out that while they could make markdown files, there was no way to render it in a more readable format. Today, that changes. We're happy to announce that you can now preview markdown in repls!

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Repl.it Q&A

Tue May 14 2019 by Katya Delaney

Building tools for a helpful community

“Community” is one of the hardest concepts to define in the English language. Weird, right? It seems like it would be intuitive, but it’s actually something sociologists have struggled with for hundreds of years. Is a community defined by a shared space? A language? A goal? Something as nebulous as just a feeling or an attitude? The answer changes dramatically depending on who you ask.

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Repl.it Multiplayer

Thu Dec 6 2018 by Faris & Amjad Masad

Today we're announcing the most-significant evolution of our platform — something we've been building towards for a long time that we're thrilled to share with you.

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Repl.it raises $4.5M, announces a million users

Mon Oct 22 2018 by Amjad Masad

We're thrilled to announce that we have raised a Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Marc Andreessen and Andrew Chen championing the deal. We're also sharing that a million users are now using Repl.it. Moreover, our developers have shipped 250,000 websites/apps since our hosting platform launch in March.

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File Switcher

Tue Oct 16 2018 by Faris Masad

A few days ago we shipped a simple feature that will save our users time in finding and opening files, especially for larger projects. This can even be used without having the file tree visible. Read on to see how to use it and to see a demonstration.

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Databases Built by Students

Mon Sep 24 2018 by Nathan Zilora

In case you weren't aware, the repl.it discord server recently had a code jam, with the objective being to make a database. Over 14 people finished and submitted a design for the jam. However this jam was a bit different compared to our first and second jams. First of all, we have groups of 2, instead of individual people. This could be viewed and a boon or a bane, but we'll go over that in more detail later. The second set differences were the bonus points. In the past, we've always graded on code quality, efficiency, and creativity.

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Hack Chicago

Fri Aug 10 2018 by Yev Barkalov

On the weekend of July 21st, we sponsored and attended the Midwest's largest high school hackathon, Hack Chicago!

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Community-Led Code Jams

Fri Aug 10 2018 by Tim Chen

A few months ago, we created a new Discord channel - a real time chat app - for Repl.it. We've since expanded our user count to be well over 500. Our Discord server is community-driven - we have a team of three users who help us moderate the server and facilitate a culture of friendly collaboration and sharing knowledge. However, our favorite outcome of this community are the code jams.

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Not Hotdog

Thu Jul 19 2018 by Yev Barkalov

Today we're going to write a program that tells you whether an image is a hotdog or not!

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Universal Package Manager

Thu Jul 19 2018 by Amjad Masad

Open-source has revolutionized software development -- it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that it's been the most significant productivity win for developers in the last decade or so. At Repl.it, our goal is to make programming more accessible and what better way to do that than make available to programmers the entirety of open-source packages available at their fingertips.

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Zero Setup VSCode Intelligence

Mon Jul 2 2018 by Faris Masad

At Repl.it our goal is to provide state of the art in developer tools to everyone in the world, for free. When we started moving our product beyond a simple REPL and started adding IDE features, we had to invent standards and wrappers around every language tool for our frontend to consume. For every editor feature, say errors and warnings (linting), we had to extend our development protocol with a set of commands and data structures, and then teach our development containers how to wrap the given tool, say Pylint, and our frontend on how to consume it (say annotate the editor with errors and warnings). A similar thing has been happening with IDEs for the past few decades -- every editor had to come up with their in-house ad-hoc protocol, and every tool developer had to build adapters and wrappers for editors to consume.

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Showcase Repls on your Profile

Mon Jul 2 2018 by Tim Chen

As you use Repl.it more and more, you often find yourself frequently creating repls for quick testing. On your repls dashboard, you can mark important repls by starring them - allowing you to quickly access them. However, there was no way to surface your best work on your profile - users would have to sift through all your repls to find the one they were looking for - until now.

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Repl.it @ StuyHacks

Wed Jun 27 2018 by Yev Barkalov

I’m still in high school but I just flew from San Francisco to New York City to be a sponsor at a high school hackathon so, yeah, you already know that the whole experience was pretty awesome.

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How To Build a Website with Replit

Thu Jun 14 2018 by Yev Barkalov

While you can write web applications and text-based ensembles in Repl.it, sometimes it's nice to be able to just put together a simple HTML/CSS website using the same awesome editor!

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React Framework Preboot

Wed Jun 13 2018 by Amjad Masad

Two days ago we introduced our beta support for React frameworks, ranging from static-site generators like GatsbyJS, to fullstack frameworks like Next.js. Today we're launching a significant performance enhancement that we're calling preboot.

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Repl.it IRL

Wed Jun 13 2018 by Yev Barkalov

On Monday, June 11th, we had our first Repl.it Meetup and it was super awesome!

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Repl.it ❤️ React

Thu Jun 7 2018 by Amjad Masad

Despite the negative press covfefe around React.js when it first came out, I instantly fell in love with it. The thing I liked the most about it was the component model. Until then the JavaScript community has been trying for years to come up with the correct abstraction for creating reusable modules, but it was always leaky. Because React components are essentially functions, and because functions are the undisputed champion of reusable code, it worked out extraordinarily well. You don't need dependency-injection, or any other modularity hacks, you simply pass props! Also, the virtual dom made it so that components are, by default, protected from other components prying into their internals.

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Don't Let Your Development Environment Rot

Mon Jun 4 2018 by Amjad Masad

Most systems -- both natural and artificial -- decay, rot, and eventually die. Software is no different. A lot has been written about fighting "software rot" but there's another type of rot related to software that's not talked about much -- the development environment rot.

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Repl.it: the IDE That Grows—from Playgrounds to Fullstack Apps

Tue Mar 13 2018 by Amjad Masad

At Repl.it we come to work every day to explore a single idea—what if programming just worked? What if instead of fiddling around with packages, configurations, and mismatching versions, you just open your IDE and start coding. What if developers can go from an idea to coding and shipping software with no time in between. What if teachers who want to teach programming don't have to also work as IT administrators. What if students can just code their homework without having to set up the development environment on every computer they wanted to code on.

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Live Server Development and Deployment (Beta)

Mon Mar 12 2018 by Amjad Masad

Repl.it is becoming the platform where developers come to learn and build. With web hosting we also made it possible to host websites and since then we've seen an explosion of websites hosted on Repl.it. Today we're going further by making it possible to deploy servers on Repl.it.

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File tree!

Fri Mar 9 2018 by Faris Masad

Sometime in 2016 we in introduced the concept of "files" to Repl.it, you would click add file and a tab would appear on your Repl. As simple repls grew into full fledged applications and websites tabs started getting ugly and hard to manage.

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I Built This - Feb 2018 Competition Summary

Thu Mar 8 2018 by Tim Chen

As we released I Built This, our community where users can post about their repl creations, we were exposed to many amazing projects created by our users. To kick it off, we hosted a competition where users post their work and garner upvotes for prizes. The projects shared in the competition spanned a wide range of skill levels, from beginner to advanced, from simple to complex.

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Introducing Node.js package support

Wed Mar 7 2018 by Amjad Masad

Ever since we introduced third-party package support for Python we've seen an explosion of exciting programs on Repl.it. Everything from games to machine-learning applications that just weren't possible before.

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New and improved repls page

Mon Feb 26 2018 by Amjad Masad

People use Repl.it in a variety of ways; some use it for building and shipping applications, while others use it for working on homework, and many others use it as a quick prototyping/experimentation tool. Supporting all these use cases (and more) is something we care a lot about, but up until now there wasn't an easy way to, for example, quickly go back to a project that you continue to work on every day.

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Modular, fast, small: how we built a server-rendered IDE

Wed Feb 14 2018 by Mason Clayton

At Repl.it our mission is to make programming more accessible, which means our coding environment needs to be lightweight, load fast, and work from anywhere in the world. However, as with so many software projects that evolve with time, we accumulated some bloat (luckily, we haven't included a mail client yet) and quite a few ad-hoc hacks to glue everything together. In this post, we'll go over how we designed our new IDE to have a small core (everything is a plugin), to be easily customizable (even on the fly), and to server-render.

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Internet access for all

Mon Feb 5 2018 by Tim Chen

Repl.it is quickly becoming a tool that's used in everyday programming, and our users are building all sorts of amazing programs. One thing that's been missing for a long time is the ability to access the internet from repls. Being able to call APIs or remote servers is something programmers can't live without. That's why we're excited to announce that starting now we're openning internet access for all!

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Pricing update

Mon Feb 5 2018 by Amjad Masad

At Repl.it our mission is to make programming more accessible. We want to build the platform that will empower the next billion programmers to build the future of software. To accomplish this we needed to build a sustainable business that allows us to grow with our users.

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Teaching refugees how to code

Fri Jan 26 2018 by Haya Odeh

At Repl.it our mission is to make programming more accessible. We can’t do this alone so it’s great to partner with non-profits and hack clubs that share our mission. Re-coded is one of those non-profits, they're teaching programming in the refugee camps in Iraq and Turkey. Today I’d like to share with you their story of how they found Repl.it useful in overcoming logistical challenges.

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Your websites hosted on Repl.it

Mon Jan 22 2018 by Amjad Masad

People in our community build awesome games, apps, and websites on Repl.it's web programming environment, but until now they didn't have any easy way of sharing these creations with other people.

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Repl History

Mon Dec 11 2017 by Amjad & Faris Masad

At Repl.it we focus on simplicity, speed, and, most importantly, reliability. If you're using Repl.it as your primary or secondary IDE we want you to be confident that the time you invest working on your code will never go to waste.

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New in Repls: autosave, custom urls, and more

Sun Nov 12 2017 by Haya Odeh

We are always excited about launching new features and sharing with you, our dear users, what we’ve been up to. For the past few months, Amjad, Mason and I have been working hard and last night we quietly launched the new repl features. These features required a lot of infrastructure and data changes which is always tricky to execute. We ran into some technical difficulties last night with the data migration but was able to bring the site back up and things have been running relatively smoothly since then.

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A Few Updates in the Workspace

Fri Sep 8 2017 by Mason Clayton

We strive to make the workspace as useful as possible while keeping it intuitive and approachable. We get a crazy number of requests for features every day, not to mention our own ideas. It becomes a challenging balance between feature creep and simplicity. Lately we've added a few of these features that we hope you'll find useful and, if not, you won't even notice they're there.

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Two Stories from Our Community

Wed Aug 23 2017 by Haya Odeh

Like any other startup, we go through ups and downs. However, we try to keep a positive energy, and you, my friends, contribute to that by sending your love, support, and thanks everyday. Above all, you inspire us with stories of how our product helped you learn, teach, and even develop a new skill to land a better job.

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Your Repl.it Profile

Wed Jul 5 2017 by Amjad Masad, Haya Odeh, and Mason Clayton

We're constantly surprised and delighted by the creativity of people in our community. Whether it be games, animations, utilities, or simply snippets to answer Stackoverflow questions -- it's always fascinating to see! However, we haven't done a good job giving credits to authors for their creations.

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One more console

Thu Jun 1 2017 by Amjad Masad

Debugging web projects on Repl.it can be frustrating. Until today, there was no easy way to view your errors and console logs (unless you open your browsers' developer tools). But that's changing because we're introducing our new tabbed console view for environments that has graphics output (like Web and Python Turtle).

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Check out my Repl!

Mon May 29 2017 by Haya Odeh

The label "sessions" is very near and dear to my heart. I vividly remember how Amjad came up with the name and why. After we learned that people would like to create accounts on Repl.it, we were trying to figure out what was the main value proposition for creating an account. Of course, it was saving code! But what do you call a list of code projects saved on your account?

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Model solutions

Fri Apr 21 2017 by Vitaly Pavlenko

There is a special moment in learning: when a student runs their code against the unit tests and finally sees all of them turn green. This moment of enlightenment means the student has just managed to create their own working solution to a difficult problem, and has made a step towards becoming a great programmer! Wouldn't it be cool to further enhance the student's knowledge by showing the student different approaches to tackle the same problem?

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Require any npm package

Tue Mar 28 2017 by Amjad Masad

Last year we introduced support for importing any Python package from PyPi and -- although we don't have perfect support for all packages -- it turned out to be a very popular feature. That's why today we're excited to continue the roll-out for the rest of our platform starting with web-based languages.

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Building Towards a Holistic Development Service

Mon Mar 27 2017 by Amjad Masad

Software development is one of the first -- if not the first -- examples of what J. C. Licklider called the Man-Computer Symbiosis. A "cooperative interaction" between people and computers where the person is concerned in what may be classified as the creative aspect of the work such as setting the goals, formulating the hypothesis and evaluating the results while the computer does all the "routinizable work".

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YouTube tutorials using Repl.it

Mon Mar 20 2017 by Amjad Masad

EDIT - This article is now outdated

If you're looking for up-to-date videos about Replit, the best place to loook is our Youtube channel. The videos below may be inaccurate, or missing.

We've been seeing more and more coding video tutorials using YouTube and Twitch.tv. Today we're sharing some of our favorite YouTube videos that uses Repl.it

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Start Coding with Haskell on Replit

Mon Feb 27 2017 by Mason Clayton

We heard your requests for Haskell and today we're excited to finally announce Haskell as yet another language we support. We've decided to put our focus on adding more functional languages, starting with Haskell, so you can expect more very soon.

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Collaborate with Other Teachers in your Classrooms

Wed Feb 15 2017 by Alek Hurst

Hey teachers, we've noticed that you have been teaching up a storm in your Replit classrooms, and with this feature we want to turn those storms into educational hurricanes! To do so, we implemented teacher collaboration, which allows you to add an additional teacher to your Replit classrooms. This additional teacher can do almost everything you can do, excluding a couple of small destructive things...

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Infinite Loops

Mon Jan 23 2017 by Amjad Masad

At Repl.it we aim to make the full power of programming easily accessible for everyone. That's why when we designed our code execution service we decided that we would not timebox users' programs or sessions.

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Reorder Assignments with Teams for Education

Thu Jan 19 2017 by Haya Odeh

At Repl.it our mission is to make programming more accessible, and the best way we found to achieve this is to support, you, the teachers on the ground doing working with students. That's why we want to make sure you control the student experience and today we're making it possible to control the assignments order from your classroom dashboard.

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Live File Updates

Fri Dec 23 2016 by Mason Clayton

Today we're excited to release a feature which shows any files your program creates directly inside the REPL. And any time that file changes it will be updated live in the editor. This can be anything from a text file to a gif.

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Python Package Search

Fri Dec 2 2016 by Amjad Masad

We recently made it possible to import any package from PyPi. However, people who missed the announcement didn't know this was possible. There was also no good way to search and explore packages.

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Introducing Step Debugging for Python

Mon Nov 28 2016 by Amjad Masad

Debug your Python3 programs from your browser

At Repl.it, our goal is to make programming more accessible, and as part of this we aim to provide the full power of popular programming environments with no setup time. And I don't think it's an understatement to say that debugging is the majority of what we, as programmers, do.

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Introducing Pylint Support

Sat Nov 12 2016 by Amjad Masad

Today, we're excited to introduce lint support for Python3. Where previously you had to run your code, look at the console for an error, find the line number of the error and then find that line in your editor. Now, we'll show you errors and potential mistakes live as you type!

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from PyPi import *

Tue Oct 25 2016 by Amjad Masad

Import any Python Package

At Repl.it, our goal is to make programming more accessible, and as part of this we aim to provide the full power of popular programming environments with no setup time. And no modern programming language is complete without third-party packages.

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Scheduled Assignments

Wed Sep 28 2016 by Amjad Masad

Today, we're introducing scheduled assignments. Teachers using Repl.it Classroom can now schedule assignments to be published in the future. You can imagine working on your assignment, schedule a publish date, go on vacation, and still have your students receive their assignments at the right time.

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Vagueness to Clarity

Thu Jul 28 2016 by Haya Odeh

clarity

Simple design is not only how the product looks like, but more importantly, how the product functions; it’s about creating the easiest and simplest path for the user to accomplish their goal. Usually, simple design comes from complex requirements and a lot of ideas — in order to break it down I usually go through a process that I call Vagueness to Clarity

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Every Project Should Have Its Own REPL

Thu Jul 21 2016 by Amjad Masad

It's no secret we're big fans of REPLs. We believe that immediate access to the programming environment accelerates learning and is generally more productive. REPLs cut out the middleman -- no need to build UIs or scripts for every possible action you might want to take -- just talk to the interpreter directly.

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Evalbot: a bot that speaks code

Sat Jul 2 2016 by Faris Masad

Arguments over programming language semantics, standard library behavior, or syntax can now be simply and immediately settled within the chatroom by talking to Evalbot. It is a bot that can speak over 10 programming languages and is ever-present on Messenger and can be added to your team chat on Slack.

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Distributed Websocket Rate Limiting

Sun Jun 26 2016 by Amjad Masad

Rate limiting is standard practice for services offering an API. It's used for both protecting against bad actors, for example, attempting DOS attacks and to simply enforce limits on the service. There are many resources on the web on how to implement a rate limiter in your favorite language/stack. However, I couldn't find anything on how to rate limit Websocket connections (they differ in that they are persistent connections).

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API Docs

Fri Jun 24 2016 by Amjad Masad

Repl.it's code execution API is an HTTP and WebSocket endpoint that you connect to and send code to execute. You can connect from any device or browser and start executing code. This guide will describe the concepts behind the service, how it can be used, and provide a step-by-step guide for signing up and trying out the service!

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Autocomplete Your Code with Replit

Sat Jun 18 2016 by Faris Masad

Autocomplete plays a big role in how we use software, imagine a world where you have to type full search terms without predictions into google search, ugh, the savagery! Many developers employ this technology when writing code in order to increase their productivity. So we decided to implement this feature to help you become the power user you want to be.

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A Swift REPL

Tue Jun 14 2016 by Amjad Masad

In this age of containers it's much easier to run arbitrary code in the cloud. The harder parts are scaling the service, making it reliable, and —as in this case— creating cool and useful experiences. When we looked at existing Swift REPL implementations on the web we found that none delivered a stateful and interactive environment. Just an editor with a run button.

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