Glitch reminds me of GitHub, but fun
• ~300 words • 1 minute read
I used to go to the GitHub explore page when I wanted to peruse fun and interesting projects by people in the open-source community as a form of constructive procrastination. It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly when it happened, but at some point looking at that page became less... fun. Maybe it's when the trending repositories started to consist mostly of lists, notes and products heavily anchored to a specific service or company. Their showcases are awesome, but feel kind of stagnant
Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but I remember GitHub feeling like more "fun" at some point. I remember perusing things people were actually building and not an endless barrage of "Hello Worlds" and reinvented wheels in ever-changing frameworks and languages.
Lately I've poked around on Glitch and find it's a much more fun way to waste/spend that same time. Glitch has somewhat different goals than GitHub — I like their answer to what inspired them in their FAQ — and really compliments the service more than competes with it. Still, it's fun to poke around things people have actually built instead of introductory examples that don't often do anything very interesting or useful.
Ultimately, everything on GitHub feels like it has an agenda. It's where frameworks battle for supremacy, recruiters and employers go to (unfairly) assess candidates and giant companies like Facebook and Google get QA testing, bug patches and promote themselves for free.
Glitch is just fun. For now.
To help make it more fun I published Kiku — the project I collaborated on last year for the 2016 10k Apart contest. You can edit it and remix the project here:
https://glitch.com/edit/#!/kiku
You can play it here: