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.
Recently, Glitch, one of our competitors focusing on JavaScript, has blocked pinging services from reaching user apps. Among other things it means they broke the Discord bot experience for their users. We don't have any insight on why they did that but it seems part of a larger change they're going through which also resulted in layoffs.
That resulted in a user influx to Replit so I wanted to write this to welcome you to Replit and tell you a little about us.
Replit has existed since 2011 and we've been growing the service in a sustainable way that doesn't result in disruptive changes. Building a service like ours is hard, especially for a small team like ours, and we're constantly improving and making things better. But our absolute top priority is being a place coders can depend on -- we will try our absolute best to never let you down.
Because many people are asking us, as co-founders & CEO I want to make a promise to you that we will never block pinging services or make any abrupt changes that will break your apps. We built our infrastructure in a way that doesn't make it super expensive on us to ping your repl to keep it up.
We have a new feature coming out for Hacker plan subscribers that will make repls even more reliable that they wouldn't need pinging in the first place. But we will never ban pinging to force people to upgrade by taking away features.
Quick start
Here are a few resources for you:
- First import your Glitch projects
- While many projects will work out of the box, some might not. So to learn about Replit and how it works hit up our documentation
- If you run into any problem you can post on our Q&A forums
- Join our Discord community
- Learn how to make and host bots on Replit: Node.js, Python, Go, and you can find others on the internet.
What is Replit?
REPL stands for "read-eval-print-loop" which roughly means an interactive programming environment. Replit was started in 2011 to provide repls for as many languages as humanly possible. With time we also added hosting, collaboration, graphics, domains, Git, and much more that made Replit not only a great programming environment, but also a place to build and host apps. You can explore what our awesome community is making here.
Our mission is to make programming more accessible, and to build tools for creators and makers like yourself. While we have fun building our service, we take our mission and goals very seriously.
While we're already one of the largest coding websites on the internet, we're only getting started. We want to make the most fun and engaging way to learn how to code, to build apps, and to connect and collaborate with other hackers.
My email is always open, [email protected], and I'd love to hear from you, please don't hesitate to get in touch. Happy hacking!
