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?
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
Mon, Jun 20, 2022Embedding 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
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.
Tue, Jan 18, 2022Use Replit At Work With Teams Pro
For the past 6 months, we have been testing Teams Pro while in private beta. Today, we are excited to release it to the world. Teams Pro is Replit for work. If your company wants to have a collaborative repository for sharing and editing code, create a team now. Here's what some of our users are doing: Host slack bots, cron jobs, web scrapers, scripts, webpages, and more
- Thu, Dec 23, 2021
2021 Kajam Winners
Kajam Winners It was a dark room with mystique and seriousness that accompanied the feverous whispers. Seven people stood in the room, held down only by the weight of responsibility they carried with them. One by one they were handed a link to a website- what they would find they did not know. And one by one the links were opened. Colors and music filled the empty air. Excitement gleamed in each of their eyes, their fingers danced across the keyboard, their mouse moved sporadically as though if it stayed still for too long they would surely meet their doom. And yet after another moment, the link was closed, and the display subsided. Each individual scribbled something down, and the cycle repeated four hundred times. After days of deliberation, the people consulted each other and wrote one final list. The list was placed in a red envelope, stamped with a wax seal of the Replit logo. The doors to the darkroom opened, and the individuals left. Leaving the letter behind. Today we will enter that room and open the red envelope, to announce the winners of the 2021 Kajam Game Jam! What was Kajam? Starting October 18th, the Kajam game jam began. On October 25th, Kajam ended. During that time, people rushed to create a game relating to the theme "HUGE". People could interpret that however, they wanted- and we certainly had a lot of unique interpretations. Our seven judges voted on the submissions for each of the seven awards that we had. Most Creative, Best Story, Most Polished, Most Hilarious, Most Theme-fitting, Best Kaboom Game, and of course the grand prize Most Fun. All the categories were worth $1,000, except for the grand prize. The grand prize was worth a whopping $10,000 U.S. dollars.
Wed, Dec 8, 2021$80m to bring the next billion software creators online
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. Our mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. To advance towards this mission we will be investing in the following areas: Build the world's most ubiquitous programming environment. Inspire creativity and generate value for creators through community.
- Wed, Dec 1, 2021
Replit Blocks Adult Content and Malware
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. While this is powerful, it poses a few problems for us. There are some types of programs, like cryptocurrency miners and spam bots, that either use too many resources or damage the community as a whole, and as a result we can't allow them. This is especially important considering that a substantial portion of users on Replit are teenagers, many of whom use Replit at school or under parental supervision. We want to continue giving everyone computing superpowers, while still finding a way to protect our users from inappropriate content. That's why, starting this week, we are blocking all internet access to adult content and malware. That means if you run a web browser on Replit, you won't be able to access any objectionable or NSFW websites. How does it work? We did this by enabling the use of Cloudflare's family-friendly DNS resolver by default in all user repls. Visit their website for more information on this resolver and the type of content it blocks. Using Replit as a proxy to bypass school or parental filters violates our Terms of Service. We actively shut down repls that do this, with both automated tools and manual intervention.
Wed, Oct 27, 2021Replit Art Gallery: An introduction to Replit's Illustrator - Joe Baker
Who makes Replit art? Hi! Thats me! My name is Joe and I’m Replit’s illustrator. I have been making art/graphics/multi media for the last 10 years. I studied Visual Media and excelled in experimental artwork. I draw for fun almost daily and I can’t stop thinking about aesthetics and concepts. It started with colouring in books when I was a kid I went from there basically. I have a huge love for making and appreciating art. I’m specifically drawn to art that rocks you to your core! Anything with wild colours, strange or abstract concepts, stuff that makes you feel something. My major influences come from surrealist art, psychedelic comics from the 70’s, 90’s cartoons, pop art, large scale public installations (sculpture and murals) and any festival artwork! My work is a fusion of these influences and I’m so lucky that I now get to create art for Replit on a full time basis.
Mon, Sep 27, 2021Replit + Codex - Beta Release
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. At Replit, one of our fundamental goals is to make programming easier. When we got a first glimpse at OpenAI's new Codex model, our instinct was to think of how it could help people understand programs better—especially beginners. We've tested ideas before that used OpenAI's more general model, GPT-3, to ask questions about code. Amjad wrote about some of these explorations on our blog last year.
Wed, May 12, 2021Replit Apps
In a few years, you’ll be able to build your own operating system. You’ll have a place to browse the web, find people to hang out with, play games, learn, and do deep work. You’ll be able to discover apps from all over the world, modify them, and build your own with your friends– a true multiplayer computing experience that you can customize and call home. Today, the launch of Replit Apps marks the first step towards that future. Apps, right now, is a gallery to browse and discover new repls from the community. Everything from games, to generative art, to machine learning models are on here. We have a vibrant group of creators and we're directly trying to break down the walled gardens that we're so familiar with on mobile app stores. Even GPT-3 knows we're going in the right direction.
- Sun, May 2, 2021
Replit Empowers Synctera to Find Hidden Talent
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. Synctera is a new startup that connects FinTech companies to community banks. When a company wants to offer a new financial product, like a debit card or loan, to their customers, Synctera's marketplace and APIs make it easy for them to find the right bank with the right offering. As a result, Synctera's customers can move faster and build better products. Based on this vision, Synctera raised a $12 million dollar seed round in December 2020 from high profile investors, including the CEOs of Plaid, Affirm, and Carta. Now they're expanding (planning to go from 30 to 120 people) and already seeing strong early growth. We spoke to Kris Hansen, Synctera CTO, about how he's using Replit to build a world class engineering team.
Thu, Mar 11, 2021Replit Case Study - Catalyst Coding Club
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. Working on projects and organizing discussions are only a couple of the ways we go about exploring computer science. Whether it is the intricacies of a Python Loop, the making of a div in HTML, or the application programming in Java, we strive to inspire genuine interest in our students over the span of a school year. With the rise of COVID-19 in the United States, many states were forced to shut down schools and resume operations online. This has been detrimental to the learning capabilities of students, especially the younger ones. Now that most resources have been moved online, schools and organizations have been looking for programs that can help aid them in teaching various concepts to students and help those especially at a younger level learn about various concepts using simulations. Our organization was many of many that needed a way of teaching coding online to our students. Transitioning to online learning as a club has been difficult for us because usually in a normal environment, we would be able to help students debug their issues in person. Adding on to that most of the issues beginners and students face is with the editor itself. We searched for resources that can help us teach these passionate students about CS for several weeks, and that is when we stumbled upon Repl.it. Repl.it is a solution that fixed most, if not all of our problems. We didn’t have to worry about editor issues thanks to the built-in editor Repl.it has that supports several languages, from Python to Java to HTML. Not only does it have a built-in editor, it also has a unique suggestion system which helps us teachers pinpoint problems in the students’ code. Repl.it is built with many features that all in all really help us teach our students and make learning CS a lot easier and complex algorithms more understandable.
Wed, Feb 17, 2021Series A to Revolutionize Computing
Our mission is to give everyone in the world computer superpowers. We build powerful yet approachable tools & platforms for developers, students, and educators. We see a new generation of hackers and entrepreneurs rising to seize the power of computers and the internet to create software that empowers them and their communities. They refuse to be programmed by the software priesthood that wants them to endlessly consume ads. Instead, they build a more free society where computers work for and under human users, not the other way around. The world we're describing is coming, and we exist to accelerate the shift. Join us! Replit is a multiplayer computing environment that makes it fun to learn how to code, build, and share apps with other people. You can create a cloud-powered computer in milliseconds -- we call them "repls" -- and you can create as many of them as you'd like, all for free. Repls come with storage for your code and files, a database for your data, and a multiplayer editor & console to code with your friends. For $7/month, you'll get more powerful machines and, with one-click, make them run forever.
Mon, Nov 30, 2020How Far We've Come
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! Towards the end of September, we had multiple incidents where latency across Replit rose to unacceptable levels (the median request to the site could take 10 seconds). We were embarrassed. We had embarked on a stability sprint and the site felt worse. Increased load on Replit and in particular our legacy Classroom product seemed to have tipped us over a cliff. We added followers to our Postgres database and allowed people to export their classrooms into the much-more-stable Teams for Education, but it wasn't enough. We wanted to stop reacting to growth and put the web app on a solid footing. So we took the time to evenly distribute Postgres connections across all follower databases, cached the most frequently queried objects, and put rate limits in place. Since then latency has looked flat and boring. When you visit a repl, your browser opens a websocket connection to a running container. Despite this being a crucial step (if you can't connect to the container, you can't do much of anything in a repl), we had never measured how often it succeeded. The actual numbers weren't great but also weren't dire: if you tried to connect to the Replit backend in September, you would succeed 97% of the time (1 out of every 33 times you simply wouldn't connect). Now connections succeed 99.5% of the time (you'll only fail to connect 1 out of every 200 times).