Tue, Nov 15, 2022How the Deel content team shipped an internal website in 1 week with Replit Bounties — A Case Study
About Bounties Bounties is a marketplace on Replit where anyone can connect with and contract top creators on Replit to complete software development tasks. Many Replit developers specialize in JavaScript, Python, web, and bot development. All payments are processed through Stripe and converted to Cycles so that vetted Bounty Hunters can purchase compute resources on Replit and convert their Cycles to local currency if they are eligible. About the Bounty Poster
Sun, Nov 13, 2022Branching out the Filetree
The filetree is a central surface of the workspace which has long been under-leveraged to support the workflows of users. As part of our ongoing workspace revamp, we're shipping improvements to make the filetree more usable and powerful. These improvements include: fixing existing usability issues to make file management seamless improve rendering and loading performance introducing new features to enhance workflows in the workspace Multiselect Say goodbye to painstakingly moving files one by one, because long-awaited bulk actions are now ready for use in the filetree! In the desktop workspace, simply hold down shift to multiselect files. You can also hold down alt to multiselect files incrementally. You can move multiple files at a time by dragging them to your desired location, or perform other bulk actions like open tabs, open pane, download, and delete from the context menu.
Fri, Nov 11, 2022See Your Currently Running Repls
Have you ever wondered which of your repls are running at a given time? Do you know which ones are currently serving traffic, and which ones need to be woken up? Do you wish you had more visibility into when your repls have stopped in the past and when they've been restarted? If any of the above describe you, we have just launched a new feature made especially for you: the Repl Status Manager. To use it, go to the Status tab on the My Repls page. When you get there, you'll see a list of all the repls you've ever run in your account, sorted by recent activity -- including the ones that are currently running!
Mon, Oct 31, 2022Meet Replit Ghostwriter, your partner in code
A Ghost ... that codes. Today we unleash Ghostwriter, Replit's Coding AI, to the public for 1,000 Cycles ($10) per month. Ghostwriter makes coding fast, easier, and more fun. Tasks that used to be annoying or slow, just aren't anymore. Your coding, but better. Code with your AI pair programmer, on any device, anywhere. Try Ghostwriter, and you will never go back. Celebrate Halloween by getting your spooky software creating companion today. Want instant access? You can buy it. Want to try it out? We're offering a limited trial on a first come, first serve basis. Apply here. For two months, we've been hard at work beta testing the AI features. Taking user feedback. Fine-tuning. Everything we can do to make Ghostwriter one of the most powerful AI programming tools on the planet.
Wed, Oct 19, 2022Replit Mobile App
Introducing the Replit mobile app for Android and iOS. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the Replit mobile app. With the mobile app, you can code anything, anywhere. Build more, type less.
Mon, Oct 17, 2022Replit x India (Part 1)
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]! No other country in the world is as obsessed with coding as India is. India has the most number of computer science students graduating from college (215K+) each year and many more in adjacent fields of study like electrical engineering and IT. Learning to code is the surest way towards upward mobility and a solid middle class lifestyle. But the education system is broken which means that over 95% of graduating engineers are unfit to be employed immediately. IT services companies who hire 300K+ "freshers" each year, waste time and money on reteaching students what they were supposed to have learned in college itself. Some motivated students are aware of the poor quality of instruction they are receiving and turn to YouTube and other MOOCs that have some fantastic instructors (shout out to CodeWithHarry) that are helping kids to code. But MOOCs can take you only so far - it is well known that they have failed to deliver due to their low completion rates. Life happens and it's tough to stay motivated when you're learning and watching videos alone. Enter Replit. Today a kid learning to code in rural Bihar has access to the same internet connectivity (thanks to Reliance Jio) and top coding content on the internet (thanks to MOOCs like Harvard CS 50) as a developer in Silicon Valley. What the kid doesn't have access to is a decent computing device to code on and a community of learners with whom to learn from and collaborate on code. Replit solves this. The kid now has access to processing power and memory and storage in the cloud to run the most taxing code. They can meet other learners online, remix their code and ask for help from a supportive community of learners. And they don't have to worry about hosting their project anymore - we do it for free (cough cough Heroku)!
Wed, Oct 12, 2022Discuss code in context with Inline Threads
Part of what makes Replit so exciting to us is our community. We're always looking for new ways to help our creators connect, collaborate, and create something great together. When you're coding a great idea, we want to help you stay in creative flow, without being isolated from your friends or team. Since their introduction in 2021, Threads have been important for collaborative creation on Replit, especially for educators and students. Today, we're excited to release a new version of Threads and Chat. There's something in this release for everyone: from hobbyists and hackers, to students and educators, to teams and professionals. What's a thread?
- Wed, Oct 12, 2022
Analytics For Every Repl
Web hosting on Replit is simple yet effective. When you start a server in your repl, we automatically detect which port it opened on and provide a public endpoint for you to access it. In other words, every HTTP request that goes to a *.repl.co domain is reverse-proxied through our secure infrastructure. This lets us do some cool things that more basic hosting providers simply can't do. One of these is analytics for your website or API. Have you ever wondered how many people visited your web site, what browsers they used, and whether they had any issues? Now you can find out! As of today, web analytics on Replit is automatically available in every repl, without installing any third-party JavaScript packages. To access it, just add /analytics to the end of your repl's URL, such as https://replit.com/@user/slug/analytics after enabling the Explorer role on your account. Web Analytics Dashboard
Mon, Oct 3, 2022Replit's New Logomark
You may have noticed that Replit's logo looks a little different than it did last week. In summary: we're using what we call the "prompt" we already use elsewhere as our primary symbol. The prompt gives you an empty canvas, full of possibility, for you to start creating. We want Replit to be the same for your software creation journey! Let's dive in and learn why. We've had our old logo for a long time. The symbol (loopy, or hurricane, or ripple, or whatever else you call it) has served us well, but for a few reasons we wanted to simplify how Replit is represented:
Wed, Sep 28, 2022Fluid layout customization with Splits
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! With splits, you can completely customize the layout of the Replit Workspace. This might not seem like a big deal, but it unlocks a lot of new possibilities for templates and makes Replit more accessible for both novices and experts. How it works When you drag and drop a tab or pane over another pane, you have five primary hit areas: The header of every pane, and the top, right, bottom, and left "quadrants" of the pane. Our drag and drop logic actually uses conical sections to make dragging more ergonomic.
Fri, Sep 23, 2022Worldwide Repls, part 2: Load balancing for fun (although not quite profit)
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. The need for an alternative load balancer All of our infrastructure currently runs in Google Cloud Platform, and it comes with several options for very robust load-balancing across services in the form of the Google Cloud Load Balancer (a.k.a. GCLB). Since it's very easy to get started, that's what we used for several years. It has all sorts of very neat features like SSL termination, geographical routing to minimize latency, integrates with their autoscaling solution to let us grow and shrink the size of our fleet to reflect the number of concurrent users, and is even optimized to support a request load that is not quite homogeneous: a few requests that are 10,000x more expensive than others is totally supported. So far everything looks great on paper. Why did we need an alternative load balancer? When we originally announced that we were going to support non-US compute regions, we discovered that there was a small disconnect between how the GCLB operates and how we would like it to operate: back then, when a user made a request to start or connect to a container, the container would be created geographically near where the user made the request if possible, and would fall back to where we had capacity. This unfortunately meant that there were several cases where a user in India would start a container, it was created in the US, and all network packets would still need to perform one earth-sized roundtrip. To make things worse, this also happened to some folks in the US, so we had to revert that change. By this point in time it was clear that we had to create an intermediate layer that could allow us to make decisions as to where the containers were created, since we had all the information about the Repl upfront, but GCLB alone was not able to use this information. A bit later, our team of SREs found something even more disturbing: the distribution of load across our fleet was all over the place!
Tue, Sep 20, 2022Productizing Large Language Models
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. At Replit we have deployed transformer-based language models of all sizes: ~100m parameter models for search and spam, 1-10B models for a code autocomplete product we call GhostWriter, and 100B+ models for features that require a higher reasoning ability. In this post we'll talk about what we've learned about building and hosting large language models. Nonsense Any sufficiently advanced bullshit is indistinguishable from intelligence, or so the LLM thought. LLMs are super suggestible -- in fact, the primary way to interact with LLMs is via "prompting." Basically, you give the LLM a string of text and it generates a response, mostly in text form although some models can also generate audio or even images. The problem is, you can prompt the LLM with nonsense and it will generate nonsense. Garbage in, garbage out. Also, LLMs tend to get stuck in loops, repeating the same thing over and over again, since they have a limited attention span when dealing with some novel scenarios that were not present during training.
Mon, Sep 19, 2022Replit 100 Days of Code
We're excited to announce that today we are launching Replit's 100 Days of Code!! In just 15 minutes a day, you will build real world projects every day, totaling up to - you guessed it - 100 projects! In this course you will learn from Replit's own master teacher, David Morgan! He makes each day engaging and, honestly, hilarious! You'll be coding alongside like minded people, who may be starting their own coding journey just like you. You will develop a daily habit, shake off any fear of coding, forge new friendships, play your own multiplayer games with each other, and just have fun with Replit's vibrant community. Come join us to start building websites, use AI to create games, generate apps, learn automation, data science and much more! Oh and don't forget to invite your friends with this link join.replit.com/python.
Wed, Sep 14, 2022History++ - A Better Way to Do Versioning
Have you ever had to start over on a piece of code because you overwrote something by accident? Made an edit, replaced it, and then wished you could go back? Programmers have tools like git and the undo/redo stack to help them deal with challenges like this. Replit, of course, supports these things. But, we think there's a better way. Over the last week, we rolled out the new history UI to general availability. Here's what it looks like: The Basics
Sun, Sep 11, 2022Replit’s Commitment to Trust, Safety, and Integrity
When you sit down to a nice meal at a restaurant with family or friends, safety shouldn’t have to be your first concern. You should be able to trust that the food was prepared safely, that your chair isn’t going to fall apart when you sit on it, and that if other diners start to cause a scene, they will be asked to leave. Our Trust & Safety team at Replit has a very similar job, quietly working to keep Replit a safe and welcoming community so that your coding and creativity can thrive. Although most of the time this work is invisible to you, in this blog post we’ll give you a peek behind the scenes of Trust & Safety at Replit, as well as providing you with some tips to make your own Replit experience safe and comfortable. (Helmet optional.) How moderation works on Replit Supporting our users’ freedom of expression and creativity is baked deep into the DNA of Replit. You don’t need to ask for our permission to create and share your work, you can just do it. After all, we can’t ask you to trust us if we don’t show trust in you first. So, nothing that you do on Replit requires pre-approval by a moderator.