amasad

Replit | Engineers, managers, and designers | REMOTE | https://replit.com/site/careers

Replit is the fastest growing developer platform. It’s a great time to be joining the company because we’re still relatively small and growing fast. If you’re talented, like working on hard problems, having a great impact on developer productivity and CS education, and like working with smart, motivated, and kind people then you should apply!

What do you recommend?

Hi James -- we do pride ourselves on our customer support and as you've seen on Twitter I do a lot of support personally too, and have my email publicly to help people.

In this case, it was a technical issue -- we're still trying to understand what and why it happened but GMail automatically trashed your email and so Front didn't assign it to our support staff.

Here is a screenshot from Front: https://imgur.com/a/POb5hEE

Nonetheless this is good feedback and we'll do better in the future and make it easier to contact us from the site.

dang — did the title change unintentionally dock this story? It was at the top and in a second jumped down at least 20 spots.

This is impossible. There was never a time where the Replit editor didn't capture the tab key (that would be dumb). It must've been something else. Maybe it was a homemade "REPL" the company you were interviewing with made?

Online programming environment, community, and platform: https://replit.com

Awesome to see a Replit app on top of HN! Our hosted apps proxy requests per second doubled (3k to 6k) by virtue of this being on HN.

This app is fully made and hosted on Replit using Replit DB too:

Frontend: https://replit.com/@piemadd/url-lengthener

Backend: https://replit.com/@piemadd/ax56api

Check out other Replit Apps here (launched yesterday): https://replit.com/apps

Yeah point to the blog for now. If we have a landing page we’ll make the blog redirect to it. Thank you!

Kobra is awesome! They're part of the Replit Venture program (https://blog.replit.com/ventures). The company is started by 16 year old hackers. There is a cool demo of the product here: https://kobra.dev/demo

Off the top -- things that make Replit better make Apps better:

- more modalities: you can make CLI apps, web apps, even native apps (like PyGame)

- more language support

- more complete platform: auth, db, etc

- bigger community

On Apps more specifically, the hashtag, trending, and the general exploration UX aspect is going to be huge for communal creativity.

Awesome Brian! I love hearing stories like this. And interesting game. I love the stick-figure animation.

>I wouldn't call the IDE great. It's all on the web and subject to unsurprising latency. I ran into a couple of weird bugs.

We have a big IDE quality sprint coming -- we just hired amazing engineers fully focused on it (and still hiring https://replit.com/careers) and we're going to be making big gains soon :D

You can always email me feedback directly as well amjad@replit.com

We have a comment section?

Great to see this on HN again, since we posted this article we started building CLUI into our product with great success.

I posted some videos on Twitter on how we use it in our app. Basically any place where you can image a lot of UI bloat, it's replaced by a CLUI bar: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1390005374741143554

It's not a "JavaScript library" it's an entire toolchain. In the same way that `git` generated billions of dollars worth of value in the form of companies and productivity, Rome will do the same. Possibly even bigger.

It’s better, more robust, faster, and more flexible. Bigger user base and network of creators and apps to draw on.

Node support is A* and deno is still experimental.

You're right -- thanks for the feedback.

Create React App is a crime against computers. It's an absolute resource hog, which maybe is okay for Facebook engineers with $3000 MacBooks, but we can't give that much resources to free users. To use React on Replit you should use Vite. We were on HN just yesterday talking about it, it's an absolute delight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26972400

If you really want to use CRA on Replit, you should buy the hacker plan for $7/month which also lets you boost select repls and it will then be very usable for you: https://blog.replit.com/boosts

Some companies host bots, internal tools, and increasingly micro-services. But primarily side-projects and increasingly early-stage startups (e.g. https://blog.replit.com/blubbr).

One fresh thing is plenty of developers in India are hosting covid support apps on Replit. This particular app has done 1m+ hits in the past 24 hours: https://covid.army/

You can add __repl after any app to get the source: https://covid.army/__repl

Our marketing so embarrassingly out-of-date right now but yes we have a very robust hosting offering. It's still meant for side-projects and maybe early-stage startups.

I wrote something on what it feels like to host an app from your editor: https://amasad.me/hosting

Nearly an order of magnitude reduction. What do you think of that?

I'm sure it's less disk space because it has less deps but the most of the RAM and CPU usage in CRA is Webpack so I'd be surprised if that changed much.

I don't think Vite has a testing story yet. As for the rest, yes, it totally is straightforward. We only had to change one line of configuration in the base template for it to work on Replit. See https://replit.com/@templates/Reactjs

Some stats not mentioned in the post. Create React App (webpack) vs Vite (esbuild) on Replit containers:

- 1 second start up time on Vite vs 15 seconds for CRA

- React.js hello world project is 234mb on CRA and only 34mb on Vite

- 1GB RAM for Vite dev server vs 3GB+ for CRA

This is a perfect example of how fast and efficient tools can be, and I think we can do even better! Super excited about the future of JavaScript tooling ecosystem with more focus on efficiency and speed.

In addition to the UX win, and I wish we measured this, but I bet this saved us thousands of dollars in monthly cloud spend.

My trick: read books as if you’re doing research for your own writings. Sometimes I’ll actually publish an essay based on what I’m reading or just keep it for myself.

I think it gets at the same thing this article is getting at: have an objective for reading.

And btw, it works for other habits too. Having goals or milestones to strive for.

Any tips on how to read while walking?

It’s a bug tbh. It used to be aliased to Node.JS and seems like it doesn’t now. Will fix.

I had a similar concern, that's why we started with Python initially (see my top-level comment). However, Kaboom's programming model is actually quite simple. It doesn't suffer from any callback hell. You should give it a go.

It's modeled a bit after the block-like paradigm introduced by Scratch, which I guess you can call "async" but seems really intuitive for kids.

Yes, no boilerplate but also the library is pretty straightforward. All in this one file: https://github.com/replit/kaboom/blob/master/src/kaboom.js

We love Phaser, but while possibly more powerful, we felt it's a lot more complex and harder to get started with. To demonstrate try comparing the hello world examples from Phaser vs Kaboom.

Cool to see Kaboom on HN again! Kaboom is the culmination of multiple attempts at creating a game programming environment aimed at new coders.

It started in 2018 when we noticed that many kids come to Replit from Scratch ready to transition from blocks to coding and get lost trying to find the best way to make games. There are many ways to make games with Replit -- pygame, html, love2d -- but based on our research there was still a big gap between the focused and intuitive experience at something like Scratch and anything that we offered at Replit. It felt like we were letting them down.

We thought in order to meet their needs we needed something that satisfied the following constraints:

1. required no setup, importing modules, or any other scaffolding before you start coding

2. had powerful primitives to make something interesting in a handful of lines of code

3. simple programming model

4. easy to import and use images and other assets

Our first attempt at this was a Python library called Play (https://github.com/replit/play). Play satisfied many of the constraints but because it was written in Python, and we execute Python on the server and stream graphics down to the client via VNC (https://blog.replit.com/native-graphics-love), the experience wasn't uniformly good for everyone using Replit. For example, for kids in India it was really bad (since then we started replicating our servers in India and other places in the world https://blog.replit.com/global).

Our second attempt was a classic BASIC implementation. BASIC was easy to get started with, it had zero bloat, and you could get something on the screen quickly. Sadly, users grew out of the language really quickly. BASIC made simple things straightforward but anything slightly more advanced was hard to impossible to make. I kept trying to evolve the language until it became kind of like QBASIC (optional line numbers, labels, etc). But it felt like sisyphean task.

BASIC HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052050

BASIC docs: https://docs.replit.com/misc/basic

Last year, around the same time I gave up on "completing" BASIC I saw a job application come in for a designer from an indie game dev Tga. Tga was not only a great designer but also an awesome programmer, so we hired him. I pitched him on this project, we started prototyping it in Replit and got something working fairly quickly (early prototypes here: https://replit.com/@gameenv). When we rolled out an alpha version the most surprising thing that happened was that people on our team got addicted to making games. We weren't the target audience, but that's always a good sign. Then kids in our community started having a lot of fun with it -- the more we tested the more conviction we had that we had a solution to the problem.

The last few months we spent working on the Kaboom environment on Replit. It has an awesome asset editor, and a kick-ass debugging tools. And pretty soon we're going to have great autocomplete and intelisense.

To learn more check out the following:

- Kaboom blogpost: https://blog.replit.com/kaboom

- Show HN by designer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774

- Repo: https://github.com/replit/kaboom

Some games from the community:

- ReplJewled https://replit.com/@ConnorBrewster/ReplJeweled

- Flappy Mark https://replit.com/@slmjkdbtl/flappymark

- Bamboo Ninja https://replit.com/@RoBlockHead/KaboomJam

- Cookie Vs Oreo https://replit.com/@Coder100/COOKIE-VS-OREOS-KABOOMJS-BOOMOM...