Replit gives you the power to both build your own applications and to leverage powerful third party services through their APIs. By integrating third party services into their Repls, Replit users have unlocked a diverse range of capabilities such as speech to text, video livestreaming, embedding data into AI applications, and even tracking Amtrak trains.
Amjad Masad, CEO: I'm excited to welcome Michele Catasta to the Replit team as our VP of AI. Michele joins us from Google, where he was Head of Applied Research at Google Labs and, before that, Google X, where he researched Large Language Models applied to code. Michele has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and was Research Scientist and Instructor in AI at Stanford University. This manifesto is a culmination of a conversation Michele and I have had for over a year on the future of AI and its impact on the software industry:
Yesterday, on April 2, 2023, Replit discovered a site vulnerability that may have exposed GitHub auth tokens for <0.01% of Replit users, stemming from use of the GitHub import feature. This could have permitted unauthorized read/write access to all the repositories of those users by default (users can choose to authorize just a subset of repositories).
Replit and AI Camp are launching a brand new, 4-hour course, right here on Replit! Unlock the Power of LLMs like GPT with Python, is a four-lesson course that’ll teach you:
Last week we announced the Pro plan to speed up your development with Replit's AI tools and an even more powerful Workspace.
In August last year, we announced Repl Identity, a signed identity for every Repl that your code can use to authenticate other Repls when communicating with your APIs and services.
The inaugural tutorial jam has come to an end! Our wonderful Replit community shipped some fantastic learning experiences! Contestants were tasked with building a learning Repl using our new .tutorial
functionality, including using the new floating video pane, just like we've used on 100 Days of Code!
Plug: If you're excited about what we're building and would like to partner with us in India, please reach out at [email protected]!
A few weeks ago we released Tabs, which allowed people to open up different files and tools you want, side by side. But the Workspace’s overall layout was still pretty static: you can only open things side by side, with no way to remove panes or quickly rearrange what you're focused on. That's changing today!
In our previous blog post about Worldwide Repls, we talked about how we revamped part of our infrastructure to build a new abstraction that allowed us to build other components on top of it: the control plane. In this entry, we'll talk about the very first thing we built on top: a load balancer.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their near-magical ability to learn from very few examples -- as little as zero -- to create language wonders. LLMs can chat, write poetry, write code, and even do basic arithmetic. However, the same properties that make LLMs magical also make them challenging from an engineering perspective.
Hey, it’s your friendly community intern, Lily! It’s been 8 months since I became an intern at Replit, and this blog post concludes my awesome journey.
We’re proud to say that Replit was built by and for hackers. A hacker, as defined in an early Internet glossary, is “A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.” It’s this sense of curiosity and delight that motivates our community to grow and share their skills, and to show off their creations in our Community.
We are now finished calculating the winners for the second phase of the contest using a super-secret formula that measures community reception! You can check out all the phase 1 winners here, which were hand-selected by a group of judges.
Early last year, we made the announcement that our infrastructure and Repls now had Nix baked in. Just a few months ago, we announced all new Repls would be Nix-based. And today, we're happy to announce that our GitHub imports flow is now also powered by Nix!
During the ReplCon 2022 keynote, we announced that we were going to geo-distribute our infrastructure so that your Repls are much faster when accessed outside of the United States. The speed of electrons / light in a medium is a fundamental speed limit. Most of our users are several thousand kilometers away from the data centers where we host Repls (currently limited to the United States), so the round trip from them to the users' homes is going to necessarily take several hundred milliseconds just to traverse the series of tubes that is the Internet. Today, we have finished the first milestone to make this a reality, and that comes with some pretty neat side-effects!
Today, we're launching “Generate code” to all subscribers of our Hacker Plan. With “Generate code”, you state what you'd like your code to do, and an artifical intelligence writes it for you. You can then run the code right from your repl, with all the other Replit features you know and love (packages get magically installed, a web server gets started if you need it, you can invite your friends for a multiplayer session, and much more).
We are stoked to announce Kajam 2022 - Replit's second annual game jam! If you're interested in registering head right on over to the official Kajam site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Replit is your computer — for whatever you need to do. We announced last year that Hackers would be able to have their hosted apps be able to persist file changes since that made it possible to build a lot more apps. But we were not quite satisfied that only Hackers were going to get this new feature.
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.
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.
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).
SpaceTraders is an online multiplayer game where you buy a spaceship, explore space, and set up trades. But it’s not just any other space exploration game—this one you play by manipulating a REST API. It’s a fun, interactive way for new programmers to learn and stretch their skills.
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.
Following our Series A announcement earlier this year, I'm thrilled to announce that we raised Series B financing from new and existing investors. This year alone we've doubled our user base to reach 10m+ users, tripled concurrent containers on our network, and grew traffic to sites and apps on the network by orders of magnitude. This is a major milestone for our team & community.
Django is a Python framework for building out full-fledged web applications. It’s loved by developers due to its battery-included philosophy and comes preloaded with features you can use to rapidly develop your web application.
At Replit, we have created a general purpose computing environment that anyone can use to run whatever programs they want, and access whatever services they want. You can run almost any type of software in a repl, including Mac OS, a Commodore 64 emulator, DOOM, or even a web browser.
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.
With many development tools and even whole development environments moving to the cloud, Replit is at the forefront of this change.
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.
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.
As building software grows more like snapping Legos together, how people find and use those Legos becomes more important. That's why we are donating $25,000 to the NixOS Foundation and betting on Nix as the future of software distribution.
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.
Today we're excited to announce that anyone can embed repls on their site, in their app, or as part of their business, including for commercial use. This update is reflected in our terms and conditions. We can't wait to see what you all build.
Looking for how to change your Replit theme? Click here.
Welcome back to our monthly changelog! This month was full of bug fixes and small tweaks during one of our busiest times of the year. As always, we love hearing from you! Drop us a line on twitter or on our feedback board!
Update: To stay up to date on Replit and AI, check out our Ghostwriter Beta & AI mode announcement. In it we discuss how we infused state-of-the-art intelligence into nearly all IDE features as well as the future of AI on Replit.
During our summer hackathon, we challenged our community to build Amazon Alexa skills. As usual, we were blown away at the results. This blogpost will announce the winners and showcase some of our favorite submissions.
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.
*Edit: As of March 2022, Teams for Education is now free to all educators. You can gain access here.
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.
We're excited to announce the Replit summer hackathon! What you'll be building: Amazon Alexa skills!
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).
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.
Our first Replit Ventures was a tremendous success.
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!
UPDATE - 05/07/2021 Thanks to Travis Cardwell for letting us know that Nix requires the version part of the derivation name to start with a digit. The post has been upated from its original version to include this requirement.
I had the pleasure of attending the RESPECT conference last month, convening with and hearing from a number of CS educators and researchers throughout the week. The focus of the conference was on equity in CS education.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This post is part of a series about the wonderful world of clusters. Check out the first post for an overview of what clusters are all about. In this post we will take a peek under the hood of our hosting infrastructure and walk through how we made hosting work in a multi-cluster world.
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?").
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.
Hi 👋🏻, I'm Søren. I'm a 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
A few months ago, we announced Annotations for our education users, a feature which lets Replit collaborators highlight code and discuss it in context.
*Edit: As of March 2022, Teams for Education is free for all educators. You can gain access here.
At Replit our mission is to make programming more accessible to everyone, everywhere, and as we've been going global, we know that we have to comply with various privacy laws and regulations around the world, so that you can focus on coding, not privacy compliance.
*Edit: As of March 2022, Teams for Education is free for all educators. You can gain access here.
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.
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. Users with a free plan can access Always On power ups using Cycles! With Always On, you can for example spin up and host an app like a Discord bot in 30 seconds:
Hello teachers, and welcome back to another week of updates to Teams for Education. We're continuing to invest heavily in the product, with over half of our engineers working on Teams right now, and are committed to education and to helping give computer science teachers super powers!
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:
*Edit: As of March 2022, Teams for Education is now free to all educators. You can gain access here.
We have reimagined the native graphics experience on Replit. Our community of educators and hackers have given us immense feedback on graphics performance and reliability.
*Edit: As of March 2022, Teams for Education is free for all educators. You can gain access here.
Since we introduced native graphics in the browser in 2019, our community has built awesome games and programs in LÖVE, Pygame, and Java Swing. Being able to write some code and see the results right away is what Replit is all about. That and finding peace in a bouncing DVD logo:
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!
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!
Great news! We just made it a lot easier to have conversations about code. You can now use familiar markdown syntax in annotations and chat.
*Edit: As of March 2022, Teams for Education is free for all educators. You can gain access here.
It is no surprise that the information technology and software industries will continue to grow as an in-demand profession with many pathways that can be pursued. For software development alone, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the job outlook will increase by 22% by 2030.
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!
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.
We're thrilled to announce the PL Jam results. Here are the criteria our judges used:
In web developer job interviews, you may come across some Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) questions when a hiring team assesses your knowledge of the differences between the main languages used in web development. The cool thing is CSS and HTML are used by all web developers ranging from Wordpress developers to Python developers.
As one the first topics a full stack web developer or web designer learns, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the basis of a website. It is one of the most popular languages to use in the construction of a web page, used by web developers and designers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Encountering errors is a natural part of working in computer science. Whether you are a seasoned coding expert or a newbie, seeing some red text in a console accompanied by an error message is an experience that you will have often.
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:
Update: To stay up to date on Replit and AI, check out our Ghostwriter Beta & AI mode announcement. In it we discuss how we infused state-of-the-art intelligence into nearly all IDE features as well as the future of AI on Replit.
Like English, Python has its own set of rules. Lines of code have to be written in a certain way, just like how sentences must follow a specific structure. Punctuation must be used within a set of guidelines when you’re writing in both English and Python code.
You can now register your team to enter the programming language jam! In addition to setting up your team you can start brainstorming ideas, but we ask you to wait until the 10th before you start hacking.
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.
UPDATE: The jam registration is now open. Read the instructions.
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.
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.
*Edit: As of March 2022, Teams for Education is free for all educators. You can gain access here.
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.
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 and unlimited multiplayer sessions. 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.
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.
Last week, Kat and I were lucky enough to sit down with Chad Fowler, programmer, author of The Passionate Programmer, start-up investor, founder of both The International Ruby Conference and RailsConf, and musician.
At Repl.it we live and breathe making software creation easier. With our programming environment, you could start coding in your favorite language in seconds. With live deployments, we made web hosting a breeze. With Multiplayer, we've removed the drudgery from coding with friends. And today, we're excited to bring native GUI applications and game development to the browser.
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.
"The intoxicating delight of sudden understanding"1 best describes what I felt the first time I derived the Y Combinator (guided by the Little Schemer book). Learning Lisp (by way of Scheme) is how I first came about Paul Graham's essays. Which was, of course, a gateway drug to startups.
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.
Looking for how to change your Replit theme? Click here.
For the month of July, our Repl.it IRL will be taking place on July 11th from 4 to 7 PM at the Bradfield School of Computer Science!
We recently added some changes to how eval mode/project mode operates. These changes allow you to interact with generated files through the console.
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.
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.
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.
Ollie Parish, also known as @op on Repl.it, is an avid Repler and constantly pushes our systems to its limits (in the best way). In this guest blog post, he describes his journey in using neural networks to generate large primes. You can also check out the repl described in his research: https://repl.it/@op/DNN-3-1
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.
On the heels of our Node.js npm support announcement, we're pleased to announce that we now support Ruby Gems too. We're excited to have the Ruby community join the fun.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Some changes and fixes we make don't deserve their own blogpost. So we thought a good way to keep you up-to-date is to collect however many that could be of interest and write a "Changelog".
On the heels of Google announcing native Kotlin support on Android yesterday, we thought it'd be cool to get a Kotlin REPL up so that people can try it.
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.
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".
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
Earlier this week we introduced Haskell support. And now, as promised, we're continuing to add more functional languages. So today we're excited to introduce Clojure. A Lisp dialect that runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine with a focus on immutability.
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.
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.
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!
Ever since the LOGO programming language educators have been using Turtle Graphics to demonstrate the power of programming to their students while making it fun and interesting.
On Wednesday we announced assignment scheduling, and today we're releasing another date related feature—due dates. It's no secret that students can procrastinate, so sometimes it's useful to have deadlines for the assignments as a reminder.
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.
Before we decided to build repl.it classroom, we paid a visit to one of the schools using us in the classroom. I felt excited and anxious at the same time; I was introduced to the teacher and students in the class, and then my job started as designer observing and paying attention to every single detail.
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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