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Glitch, the web apps creating tool, has made a series of major announcements yesterday. Glitch is a tool that lets you code full-stack apps right in the browser, where they’re instantly deployed. Glitch, formerly known as Fog Creek Software, is an online community where people can upload projects and enable others to remix them. Creating web apps with Glitch is as easy as working on Google Docs.

The Glitch community reached a milestone by hitting 2.5 million free and open apps, more than the number in Apple’s app store. Many apps on Glitch are decidedly smaller, simpler, and quicker to make on average focused on single-use things. Since all apps are open source, others can then remix the projects into their own creations.

Glitch raises $30M with a vision of being a healthy, responsible company

Glitch has raised $30M in a Series A round funding from a single investor, Tiger Global. The round closed in November 2018, but Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch said he wanted to be able to show people that the company did what it said it would do, before disclosing the funding to the public; the company has grown twice in size since.

Glitch is not your usual tech startup. The policies, culture, and creative freedom offered are unique. Their motto is to be a simple tool for creating web apps for people and teams of all skill levels, while fostering a friendly and creative community and a different kind of company aiming to set the standard for thoughtful and ethical practices in tech.

The company is on track for building one of the friendliest, most inclusive, and welcoming social platforms on the internet. They’re built with sustainability in mind, are independent, privately held, and transparent and open in business model and processes.

They are building a healthy, responsible company and have shared their inclusion statistics, and benefits like salary transparency, paid climate leave (consists upto 5 consecutive work days taken at employee’s discretion, for extreme weather), full parental leave and more in a public handbook. This handbook is open-sourced so anyone, anytime, anywhere can see how the company runs day to day. Because this handbook is made in Glitch, users can remix it to get their own copy that is customizable.

As the community and the company have grown, they have also invested significantly in diversity, inclusion, and tech ethics. On the gender perspective, 47% of the company identifies as cisgender women, 40% identify as cisgender men, 9% identify as non-binary/gender non-conforming/questioning and 4% did not disclose. On the race and ethnicity front, the company is 65% white, 7% Asian, 11% black, 4% Latinx, 11% two or more races and 2% did not disclose. Meanwhile, 29% of the company identifies as queer and 11% of people reported having a disability.

Their social platform, Anil notes has no wide-scale abuse, systematic misinformation, or surveillance-based advertising. The company wants to, “prove that a group of people can still create a healthy community, a successful business, and have a meaningful impact on society, all while being ethically sound.”

A lot of credit for Glitch and it’s inclusion policies goes to Anil Dash, the CEO. As pointed by Kimberly Bryant, who is the founder of BlackGirlsCode, “’A big reason for Glitch’s success and vision though is Anil. This “inclusion mindset” starts at the top and I think that is evidenced by the companies and founders who get it right.”

Karla Monterroso, CEO Code2040 says, “It becomes about operationalizing strategy. About creating actual inclusion. About how you intentionally build a diverse team and an org that is just.”

 

Dash notes, “It’s the entire team working together. Buy-in at every level of the organization, people being brave enough to be vulnerable, all doing the hard work of self-reflection & not being defensive. And knowing we’re only getting started.”

Other community members and tech experts have also appreciated Dash’s resilience into building an open source, sustainable, inclusive platform.

 

People have also used it for activist purposes and highly recommend it.

Glitch now on VSCode offering real-time code collab

Glitch is also available in Visual Studio Code allowing everyone from beginners to experts to code.  Features include real-time collaboration, code rewind, and live previews. This feature is available in preview; users can download the Glitch VS Code extension on the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Features include:

  • Rewind: look back through code history, rollback changes, and see files as they were in the past with a diff.
  • Console: Open the console and run commands directly on Glitch container.
  • Logs: See output in logs just like on Glitch.
  • Debugger: make use of the built-in Node debugger to inspect full-stack code.

Source: Medium

For now the company is dedicated solely to building out Glitch and release specialized and powerful features for businesses later this year.

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Sugandha Lahoti
Content Marketing Editor at Packt Hub. I blog about new and upcoming tech trends ranging from Data science, Web development, Programming, Cloud & Networking, IoT, Security and Game development.