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I'm so excited for the team at Repl.it! A million users in the last month is phenomenal, and evidence of a great product. Congratulations! Ps. I love your /jobs.
Am I missing something, or is this basically the programming equivalent to MoviePass? Surely as soon as they start trying to be profitable, people will find some other startup to give them cloud services for free.
See, e.g., Koding, who went through this exact cycle a few years ago: they started out getting tons of users by giving away cloud servers for free so people could learn programming, then they tried to monetize by building out IDE features and cloud filesystems and orchestration, and pretty much no one bought them.
What are the pros/come versus using a mature online editor such as Cloud9, that supports direct terminal access to the backend instance and FTP/SFTP support? Though I will admit I was disappointed when AWS acquired Cloud9.
Repl.it is also what's no called "Serverless" in that it's logically always available and you don't have to worry about the underlying resources. We're not doing because we wanted to ride a fad, we've always done it this way, we think that's the future of computing.
When we build Repl.it we always think what's a "web native" way to do online coding. We think it's a) instant! b) social c) simple yet powerful.
The previous generation of online IDEs -- C9, Nitrous, Koding -- were awesome, yet most pivoted or shutdown. It's good to ask why that is? We think it might be that they were not "web native."
the jobs link is interesting. Takes you to a functioning command line but has no other hints or instructions. An interesting gating function: those who don't know how to proceed further (or can't problem-solve sufficiently to find out) aren't likely to succeed in the role and can safely be excluded. Might also have the added bonus of being safe from headhunter bot scrapers.
For me, it seems to be stuck at 'Connecting'. If I mash buttons I can get a glimpse of the command line, even see flashes of messages if I enter two-letter commands quick enough. Is this a bug or part of the test?
This is awesome I hope they invest some of that into rebranding as I do believe Repl.it is probably the worst name for anything. It almost sounds like a nefarious file format or like some software company for the early 90s; maybe that’s the vibe they’re going for. Even the word Replit looks like “reptile”. I guess it’s very developer-y it’s just grammatically grating on the nerves.
This is awesome I hope they invest some of that into rebranding as I do believe Repl.it is probably the worst name for anything. It almost sounds like a nefarious file format or like some software company for the early 90s; maybe that’s the vibe they’re going for. Even the word Replit looks like “reptile”. I guess it’s very developer-y it’s just grammatically grating on the nerves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, it seems to be stuck at 'Connecting'. If I mash buttons I can get a glimpse of the command line, even see flashes of messages if I enter two-letter commands quick enough. Is this a bug or part of the test?
Hmm, weird. What browser/OS? Also any errors in the JS console?
Reminds me of the IMHO under-appreciated https://glitch.com , but for more languages.
1. A REPL-first environment. We believe when hackers start coding they generally start sketching things out and a fast iteration loop makes it easy to make progress. That's why Repl.it starts out as a REPL. This also makes it less intimidating and more useful for newbies. Everyone's first program is a text-based program as GUI is really hard to get started with.
2. We're building a generic toolchain that could be decomposed and used in different ways. We built a highly dynamic IDE[0], and a super fast container orchestration system that works as both a development environment and a hosting platform[1]. We're starting to explore what that means by building plugins to other editors and making it available on the cli[2].
3. Repl.it's has an awesome community of hackers collaborating, helping, and building stuff for each other. We have a Hackernews-like forum where people can share their creations, ask questions, or teach others and, it's creating an awesome positive-feedback loop in the community[3].
[1]: https://repl.it/blog/deploy
[2]: https://github.com/replit/repl.sh
[3]: https://repl.it/talk