Remember when the web was young? The salad days of AOL Instant Messenger, Geocities, and Netscape. Back then, when you wanted to dork around on the internet, you made your own web page. It was simple: You just clicked “view source,” then copy and pasted some stuff. And it probably didn’t look much worse than what the pros were doing. Fast forward 25 years: The web is overrun with “platforms.” Sites? Psh. When you dork around, you want to build apps and bots. But there’s no “view source” for that. How do you even get started?
Anil Dash feels your pain. “On a fundamental level, it’s just too hard to go from conceiving an idea to making it exist in code,” he says. “There used to be an immediacy to the web. It was something you made. But as the technology advanced and the complexity of the tools got layered on top of each other, it got harder to just get something up and running.”
Basically Glitch looks . . . amateurish. But in a good way: It’s a place to be an amateur, and have that be okay. Dash agrees: “The root of amateur is the Latin word for love, and our aesthetic follows from that quickly.” One of Glitch’s signature features is a “help” button signified by the ???? emoji. Press it when you get stuck, “and then someone else on Glitch can go in and edit code next to you, just like in a Google Doc,” Dash says. “The only thing you can do to establish a reputation in Glitch is to help people. If you want to build a Slack bot, the easiest place to do it is on Glitch, because it’s the place where you’ll actually get help–it’s just more fun than scrolling through a documentation site or getting scolded on a forum.”
For a newb like me–who’s also old enough to feel a pang of nostalgia for Glitch.com’s visual stylings–the “learn to code” section looks especially inviting. I mean, it’s pink: How could I feel intimidated? Plus, it says right at the top of the page: “Learn by doing, then breaking, then doing some more. You got this!” You’ll have to excuse me while I stop writing this post and start dorking around.