Replit Blog
Mon, May 30, 2022Announcing Kajam 2022! Here's how to get started...
We are stoked to announce Kajam 2022 - Replit's second annual game jam! If you're interested in registering head right on over to the official Kajam site. This year, we're leveling everything up - including the prizes. The total prize pool is over $35,000 and will be split up amongst 7 different prizes. Kajam registrants will have 7 days to hack together the best dang game they can dream up. How do I participate? To start off, you'll need to register for Kajam which you can do here. Kajam will officially take place from June 25th to July 2nd. Once you're done with the final touches on your game, you'll need to make sure it's submitted. To submit your game, you'll need to do two things. First, post the repl of your game to replit.com/community with the hashtag #Kajam2022. Once posted, you'll also need to submit your game through the submission form on the official jam site. Your game must be submitted by 11:59 PM PST on July 2, 2022. When the hackathon ends and all games are submitted, we'll give the judges 3 days to choose winners. The judges will be choosing winners based on the prize categories listed on the jam site. Be sure to tune in to our closing ceremony livestream on YouTube on July 9 to hear us announce the winners live!
Wed, May 25, 2022Announcing the Replit Ventures Builder Kit
A few weeks ago, we announced Replit Ventures. 12 teams from across the world will receive: A $10,000 grant Ten weeks of mentorship Expertise from guest speakers, including Y Combinator This is a 10x investment from our last Replit Ventures… but we did not stop there! Supporting creators & builders is core to Replit, but we are not the only ones that feel that way. Since the announcement, we have been working with best-in-class partners to provide a set of tools for our selected teams to build faster!
Tue, May 17, 2022Tips for safer social repl development
Replit makes coding into a social activity, in many different ways. You can easily share your repl with our vibrant developer community to receive feedback, tips, and kudos. Our multiplayer features allow you to write, review and debug your code together with buddies. And with access to the full power of the Internet and dozens of powerful programming languages, you can even write code that brings other users into your repl in real time. This isn’t a new feature. In fact, our co-founder Amjad Masad has written about how a 12-year old user of Replit hacked the first chat app and community space on Replit way back in 2018. Amjad also explains how it didn’t take long for spammers and other bad actors to find this chat room, and how that spurred the development of moderation features and filters. Today, you can find any number of multiplayer games, chatrooms, and other social apps on Replit, many of which have faced similar challenges to remain free of spam, profanity, and other abuse. So if you’re developing a repl with social features, what do you need to know? While it isn’t intended as a comprehensive guide, this blog post will point you in the right direction to stay a step ahead of users with mischievous or harmful intentions. Safety by design The very best way to avoid the abuse of your repl is to think about the ways in which it could be misused while you’re still planning it out, so that you can take proactive steps to avoid such misuse. Every app is different, so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. But an example of a common safety feature for apps that allow messaging is to include rate limiting and filtering to prevent users from sending repeated, spammy, or abusive messages. If your repl also allows its users to chat with each other, allowing them to block unwanted communications is a good safety precaution to take. But an even better one may be to disallow direct messaging altogether, by limiting users to public group chats. This is an especially good idea if your repl is targeted at minors.
Sun, May 15, 2022Template Jam 2022
Since we introduced templates, many of you have asked to get in on the action. We have some amazing community templates already, but we want to get everyone involved. We've been hard at work revamping both the templates page and publishing flow so that everyone can create and publish a template. We're rolling this out over the next week, so keep your eyes peeled! To celebrate this new release, on May 23rd, we're bringing Template Jam back. This time there will be $10,000 USD in prizes and you'll have the power of Nix behind you. We're excited to see all the wonderful templates you create, and brand new ways for people to create on Replit. What are templates and how do I make one?
Mon, May 9, 2022Automating Minecraft on Replit
Replcraft is a library that allows you to automate parts of your base on a Minecraft server using code, directly from a repl. Replcraft allows you to get and place blocks, check for entities, move and craft items, read redstone, and more. This tutorial will cover a number of small projects you can build using Replcraft. If you'd be interested in joining an official Replit community Minecraft server, seeing more Minecraft-related content in the future, or you just want to leave general feedback, you can do so by commenting on this repl. Getting started Before you begin, you'll need a Replit account and a Minecraft account. To get started, fork the Replcraft template and join a Minecraft server running the Replcraft plugin. Next, create a special structure made up of a frame of iron blocks:
Wed, May 4, 2022Announcing Replit Ventures 2022
Apply to RV1 here Today, we are excited to announce Replit Ventures 2022 (aka RV1), and this year, we have huge news for our community: we are 10x’ing the program! Last year, we piloted the first Replit Ventures, and the results were enormous: 400+ applications in one week 6 teams selected $2,000 in Bitcoin or USD per selected team
Fri, Apr 22, 2022Winning projects of MadeWithReplit
Whats #MadeWithReplit? MadeWithReplit was our first ever ReplCon hackathon! Participants had the chance to win amazing cash prizes, share their work with the world, and hone their coding skills. We wanted this hackathon to celebrate and inspire our community members. As such, the prizes were $10k total, but making friends along the way and the pride of sharing inspired projects were priceless bonuses as well. Even more, there was no theme, so replers could code with unbounded creativity! Read on to check out our winning submissions! Honorable mentions Most Replity: ReplCraft
Mon, Apr 18, 2022How Do You Do, Fellow Teachers?
Hi everyone! I'm David Morgan (@LessonHacker), I'm stepping into the Teacher + Customer Success role and am ridiculously excited to be working at Replit and being part of this amazing community. I have been working as a secondary school Computer Science teacher in the UK for the best part of two decades, and am passionate about making CompSci education frictionless and accessible for all. I'm sure I had more hair on my noggin when I started teaching though… but, rather than blather on about myself, I thought that, by way of introduction and to show off my teacher-cred, I'd start off by showing you my favourite thing about Replit for teaching programming. Collaborate for the Win I don't think there's enough love given to the way that Replit multiplayer also allows collabotative communication between many users. As a teacher I find this sort of thing invaluable, and it's one of the big differentiators that makes Replit more powerful than any other IDE because you can collaborate on code exactly the same way you'd work on something like a Google Doc. Multiplayer is the superpower of Repls, and Teams for Edu turns multiplayer on by default.
Sun, Apr 17, 2022Your New Replit Profile
You may have noticed that the "My Repls" and "profile" pages look different. We decided to combine these surfaces into one unified page. The new profiles are fresh, more social, and more customizable than ever before. Go take a second and customize your profile! Add links, a banner, and pin your favorite Repl. What changed? We combined the My Repls and profile pages Live presence
- Sun, Apr 17, 2022
QLTY SZN 1
A commitment to quality One of our competitive advantages is making bets on technologies before the rest of the market catches on. One such bet we've made is on CodeMirror. We switched our editor from a proven but stagnant technology, Monaco, and towards CodeMirror. We know we made the right decision because: We can now make changes, most importantly bug fixes, much more quickly. The new search panel we were able to build is much better than the version that shipped with Monaco. The new editor's improved performance is already showing up in better user onboarding success. CodeMirror's extensibility will enable us to ship one of the most most long-awaited features: Themes!
Wed, Mar 30, 2022We Built a Search Engine
For the past few months, we have been building a Replit-native search engine. It is remarkably powerful, and we are really excited for you all to try it out. We believe that you should be able to find anything on Replit in less than 30 seconds. This might sound simple, but when you have 100 million+ Repls, it becomes complicated. :) When you search for something on Replit today, you'll see a page with relevant results from the following categories: Repls Templates Code (yes, code)
Mon, Mar 28, 2022Build a Speech-to-Text App with AssemblyAI on Replit
Transcription, or speech-to-text (STT), is a very helpful feature for various use cases, from AI assistants to video captioning. You can use it to create immersive virtual experiences and accessible interfaces unlike ever before. It’s no wonder STT-driven apps and services are in high demand. In this article, you’ll learn how to implement STT functionality in your own app with ease using AssemblyAI. Its API provides simple access to advanced AI models that can transcribe your audio or video files and even real-time streams. You’ll use AssemblyAI together with React, Next.js, and Replit to build a simple app for transcribing uploaded files. You can follow along with the repl here. What Is AssemblyAI Before diving in, take a moment to get to know AssemblyAI and its vast feature set. On top of both real-time and async transcription, AssemblyAI API provides many features related to general audio intelligence:
Fri, Mar 25, 2022Build Your Own Livestreaming Service with api.video
With the recent shift in the popularity of remote work environments, the demand for livestreaming services has increased. Even prior to the shift, many global companies have used livestreaming services for their organization’s all-hands meetings. api.video provides APIs and SDKs that make it easier to build your own livestreaming service and host it on your website. Additionally, they also provide solutions for uploading videos, encoding videos, video delivery, and video analytics. Here are some of the specific features of api.video: You can securely upload and store videos from your own user interface to api.video. The video can then be shared worldwide via their responsive video player. They also support progressive uploads that let you simultaneously upload large videos. You can customize your video player by choosing a video player theme, adding your own thumbnail image, and adding your own logo. You can create your own livestreaming service, which can either be done by using their API/SDK or by using their User Interface (i.e., you won’t have to code). You can access stats and analytics about your videos to learn more about your users and their engagement. Some of the use cases for api.video include:
Tue, Mar 22, 2022Making a Real-Time Chat App with Supabase on Replit
Firebase is arguably the most popular backend as a service (BaaS) offering. It’s created by Google and comes with almost everything you’d need to create a great app, including a database, file storage, user authentication, and real-time communication. However, it’s closed source, meaning all your and your users’ data is under Google’s control. That’s where Supabase can help. Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative that aims to provide a similar set of functionalities and development experience, without controlling your data. In this article, you’ll learn how to use Supabase together with Replit, a cloud-based IDE, to create a real-time chat app. You’ll see how powerful and versatile both Supabase and Replit are and how you can use them to create an amazing app in no time. You can follow along with the tutorial using this repl. How the Chat App Works Before diving into the code, let’s talk about the stack and how the chat works.
Mon, Mar 21, 2022Operating Principles
Mission first Computers are the most powerful tools to exist in the history of humanity. Sadly most people are mere consumers of these machines. Only a relative few–the professional software developer–can use this superpower to its fullest extent. It’s creating an unbalanced world where there are programmers, and then there are those who are programmed. The situation is analogous to literacy before the printing press, where only the powerful had access to books and written communication. The invention of the printing press led to democratic, scientific, and industrial revolutions, but it took about a century from creation to revolution, which meant that an entire generation of people had to grow up with new skills, outlooks, and ways of learning and communicating. Replit exists to enable the next billion software creators. Our bet is that if more people can create software more people would want to do it. If more people code, more people will be able to independently create and generate wealth on the internet, regardless of their background. If we’re successful, anyone who's willing to learn and generate good ideas will be wealthy. Advancing our mission is not only a business imperative—it’s also a moral one. Anything that distracts us from our mission will be ruthlessly cut. Think radical When we first put coding in the browser, people said it was stupid, and that nobody wanted what we were building. When we made coding multiplayer, they said no one would want to work this way. When we said we said learning and building is one and the same, no one wanted to fund us; they said we’re not focused enough. Every step of the way, we’ve questioned norms, we’ve taken contrarian technology bets that paid off years in the future, and we’ve hired people no one wanted to hire who are now industry leaders. We’re going to keep doing it especially when people tell us it sounds crazy.