Wed, Jul 27, 2022Get Replit Famous
Replit wouldn't be Replit without our community. Our community is a global group of hackers, learners, educators, and entrepreneurs from all walks of life. It's extremely important to us that they have a space to share their work and collaborate with one another. Features like Search, Profiles, and Publishing were all built with the goal of making the on-platform social experience better. In the past, if someone you know shared something on Replit, it would get lost in the sea of published Repls. As our community has grown and the number of published Repls has increased, it has become increasingly difficult to discover new content and keep up with the work of your friends. This shouldn't be the case. If one of my friends publishes a cool Repl, I should know about it! Enter: Following!
Tue, Jul 26, 2022The New Game: Engaging 15M Next Generation Developers
Today, we launch partnerships with 19 companies, offering 35+ templates for Replit users to build with. The goal? Helping our community build the next-generation of projects. Let me explain. Context: The growing strength of the Replit community The Replit community is growing exponentially. As of today: +15M Replit users
Wed, Jul 20, 2022Revamping the GitHub Import Flow
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! For a while now, the state of Git and GitHub integration within Replit has been a major pain point. One of the foremost problems was that while the rest of Replit jumped on the Nix train, repos imported from GitHub were still forced to use the old Bash style Repls. We hear you: it's frustrating not to have the ability to use our packager or to go through a convoluted multi-step import experience. While many other parts of Replit have been getting frequent updates and reworks, the code powering everything Git was left behind. It was thought that this change would be a rather significant and difficult change. The longer we pushed it off, the more adamant we became that we'd need to get it done right this time. We finally decided that enough was enough - we dove deep into actually resolving this. And after some changes, we very quickly realised that the problem was not nearly as scary as we thought. After some tinkering, your GitHub imports should now be faster and more intuitive than ever! Here's a side-by-side comparison of the two flows:
Thu, Jul 14, 2022Inspect your HTML/CSS/JS Repls with native DevTools
We recently launched a new Replit-native way to inspect and debug web pages you build on Replit. Whether you're learning the basics or hosting a rich application, quickly being able to inspect the console and DOM is critical to your workflow. Browsers ship with developer tools (e.g. Chrome), but they have a few shortcomings when working on Replit: Inspecting the nested webview iframe using browser DevTools can be complicated There are no solid solutions for developers working on mobile devices Some schools block access to browser DevTools Now all repls that show a webview have access to a Replit-native set of DevTools. Just click the wrench icon to bring it up:
Thu, Jul 14, 2022Kajam 2022 Winners
What’s Kajam? Kajam is Replit’s official game jam where members of our community build games, play games, and sometimes even win cash prizes for their games in the span of a single week! This year, from June 25th to July 2nd, Replit spiced things up with a grand prize of $10,000, category prizes of $5,000, and a new Crowd Pleaser prize of $1,000. The catch? The games had to meet the theme: SPICY! During the jam, participants collaborated and got help from mentors on our Discord, audiences sampled and judged the games for themselves, and some players even documented their journeys! In the end, we received over 190 awesome submissions this year, battling to win the grand prize! But only one could beat the heat. Our judges (PolyMars, CodeWithHarry Metal and Coffee, Ania Kubow, MindJoy, Tiga Wu, Lee Fleming, Vimlark) carefully reviewed each game to decide the ultimate spicy winners… This year’s winners: Most Creative - SpicyBoyTimeToShine
Tue, Jul 12, 2022Leaky UIs
Building a robust and powerful UI without compromising on simplicity is complicated, and we're always exploring solutions that alleviate that problem. A few years ago, we rewrote our workspace architecture, and Amjad gave a talk about it. We're about to add a lot of firepower to our layout system (stay tuned!), but we noticed significant shortcomings in our abstractions. This blog post will outline the flaws and how the underlying data structure hurt the interactions. To keep this post concise, I will defer the reasoning behind the UI and UX to a future post. First, let's lay down some fundamentals. We want a tiled layout system where a group of panes (a.k.a tiles) are laid on the screen next to each other, vertically and/or horizontally, without overlapping. Each pane should have another pane adjacent to it or be at the edge of the screen. The screen is finite, and pane sizes vary. People should be able to resize their panes.
Fri, Jul 8, 2022Worldwide Repls, part 1: The Control Plane
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! The control / data plane separation Up to this point, our infrastructure was designed in a way that allows for horizontal scalability: being able to have more capacity to run Repls by adding more VMs to our infrastructure. This allows us to quickly react to having more users at certain times of day without making any code changes, and is built upon having a Load Balancer that routes requests to connect to a container using the WebSockets protocol to individual VMs in our infrastructure. Some of you might remember that we had announced global routing last year, which we achieved by having a small set of servers in Mumbai, India. That worked well during testing, but after enabling it for everybody we discovered an interesting edge case: since the Load Balancer is the component that decides where any WebSockets connection goes and we have little control over that whole process, sometimes the India servers were a bit busier than servers elsewhere and the Load Balancer decided to route a connection to the United States. But what if this was a multiplayer Repl, or a reconnect to a Repl that was already running? In those cases, the VM where the request lands performs a transparent proxy of the WebSockets connection to the VM where the Repl is actually running. So now users would have to connect to a server in the United States (which was the old "normal"), but then that server had to talk to a server in India, which added an unnecessary ~250ms worth of roundtrip to the previous behavior. We had accidentally made things slower! Sadly, we had to revert this change 😢. So back to the drawing board we go. What became obvious is that we had to make changes such that the Load Balancer was not the source of truth of where Repls are placed. Enter the Control Plane. In Networking, there is a distinction between what are called Control and Data Planes: where the Control Plane is concerned with making changes to the network to make sure that packets go to their destination in the best way possible at that moment, and the Data Plane is the part of the system that actually moves the internet packets (a.k.a. the data). There is also the Management Plane, which is analogous to the Control Plane but manages other non-networking systems. So for us, we wanted to have a Control / Data Plane separation to clearly distinguish making modifications to the shape of the system: making a Repl start / stop in a particular VM vs. the WebSockets communication between the Linux container and the Workspace. A new abstraction to build upon
- Thu, Jul 7, 2022
How to Get Your Repl Noticed
Ok, so you've built an awesome project on Replit and are ready to share it. Now what? How do you get your first users? How do you make it stand out? In this guide, we will cover how to publish your Repl and how to document your project to set it up for success in the community. If you want inpiration for what to build, check out the winning Repls for the Creator Fund, Kajam, or the current trending page. Let's dive in! Publish Your Repl Awesome! We've just completed our project. This Repl is a Flask app that can say "Hello World" in 5 different languages and it's ready to get published.
Mon, Jul 4, 2022Improving Domain Linking for Repls
For some time now, it's been possible to link your custom domain to your Repl. You buy that perfect domain name, connect it to your website hosted on Replit, and you're good to go! Custom domains help you create a unique home on the internet - for your blog, a product you're launching, or just a space to try new ideas. We are rolling out domain linking improvements - direct apex domain linking, magic domain linking, and multiple domain support. We also updated our domain verification logic! You can experience these right now if you're an explorer. Otherwise, these will make it to you soon! Domain Verification Logic Previously, we would verify your domain by attempting to access a special Replit proxy-enabled route on the domain. As the number of domains grew, our servers' time spent verifying domains increased. We wanted to make this process more efficient. We updated the logic to verify DNS (the internet's address book) records - speedy! - before further checks. Verification happens on a slightly different cadence, in batches now. In addition, every evening, we reverify domains. This daily re-verification process checks to see if we can still access your repl through your domain. If we encounter a problem, your domain linking status panel will update to show the domain is no longer "verified." Where possible, we'll show you the records that we see to make troubleshooting easier. Because we are now verifying DNS records, and services like Cloudflare's "orange-cloud" modify DNS, we added TXT record verification to save you from having to turn off Cloudflare (or other systems) protection to successfully link.
Wed, Jun 22, 2022Announcing the Replit Ventures 2022 (RV1) Cohort
With over 150 applications from +25 countries, the Replit Ventures 2022 (RV1) field was extremely competitive. Today, we are excited to welcome 13 teams. The teams offer a variety of geographies (9 different countries), missions (2 non-profit, 11 for-profit), and industries (e.g., Web3, Entertainment). For more information, read about each team below. 10 Academy 10 Academy identifies high-potential young people from anywhere in Africa and enables them to get a global-level job as a Machine Learning Engineer, Data Engineer or Web3 Engineer in less than 6 months. The founders are Yabebal Fantaye (@yabebalf) & Arun Sharma (a2sharma_). Chalc.io
- Mon, Jun 20, 2022
Embedding an Editable Repl is Going Away
We've started the process of deprecating editable embedded Repls, these will become read-only from August 1st. You might be wondering why? Abuse of Repls is Problematic This blog post from 2020 explains the situation well, when you run a Repl from within an embed it is essentially being used anonymously and can therefore have a massive burden on your experience by swamping our servers with abuse. Not having the option to have editable embeds means that we avoid this problem altogether. Clickjacking is a Thing
Wed, Jun 1, 2022The New Publish Flow
TL;DR - sharing stuff you make on Replit is now easier than ever. Replit has the most powerful primitive of any social platform that has ever existed. On Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and many others, you only have the option of sharing text, images, and videos. On Replit, the core primitive is a computer. The thing that's actually shared on the Replit social network is a runnable machine. We've had users build and share games, personal websites, trading bots, password crackers, operating systems, and even MacOS clones. In the past, the process of sharing your work on Replit has been buggy and confusing. The old publish flow didn't make much sense, especially to new users. It used to be unclear what "publishing" really even did. I'm excited to share that we've completely revamped the publish flow. Not only is the sharing experience more streamlined, but creators have more control over how people actually consume their work.
Tue, May 31, 2022“Generate code”: state what you want, get code back
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). At Replit, our mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. We think that in order to achieve that mission, we need to bring the time from idea to running code to as close to zero as possible. Along with the many features we already offer, we think code generation is a major step in that direction. If you're a beginner, you can use code generation to get a starting point from which to build your idea. If you're an experienced programmer, you can use code generation to quickly get snippets of code without having to leave your repl. And no matter what your level of experience is, you'll likely find that using code generation is a ton of fun! If you're a Hacker Plan subscriber, head to the workspace and pick the “Generate code” feature from the context menu. Tell it what you want, and it will automatically detects the language of the file you're in and give you back its best attempt at what you requested.
Mon, May 30, 2022Announcing Kajam 2022! Here's how to get started...
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. This year, we're leveling everything up - including the prizes. The total prize pool is over $35,000 and will be split up amongst 7 different prizes. Kajam registrants will have 7 days to hack together the best dang game they can dream up. How do I participate? To start off, you'll need to register for Kajam which you can do here. Kajam will officially take place from June 25th to July 2nd. Once you're done with the final touches on your game, you'll need to make sure it's submitted. To submit your game, you'll need to do two things. First, post the repl of your game to replit.com/community with the hashtag #Kajam2022. Once posted, you'll also need to submit your game through the submission form on the official jam site. Your game must be submitted by 11:59 PM PST on July 2, 2022. When the hackathon ends and all games are submitted, we'll give the judges 3 days to choose winners. The judges will be choosing winners based on the prize categories listed on the jam site. Be sure to tune in to our closing ceremony livestream on YouTube on July 9 to hear us announce the winners live!
Wed, May 25, 2022Announcing the Replit Ventures Builder Kit
A few weeks ago, we announced Replit Ventures. 12 teams from across the world will receive: A $10,000 grant Ten weeks of mentorship Expertise from guest speakers, including Y Combinator This is a 10x investment from our last Replit Ventures… but we did not stop there! Supporting creators & builders is core to Replit, but we are not the only ones that feel that way. Since the announcement, we have been working with best-in-class partners to provide a set of tools for our selected teams to build faster!