Simon Willison’s Weblog

Saying Bye to Glitch (via) Pirijan, co-creator of Glitch - who stopped working on it six years ago, so has the benefit of distance:

Here lies Glitch, a place on the web you could go to write up a website or a node.js server that would be hosted and updated as you type. 🥀 RIP 2015 – 2025.

Pirijan continues with a poignant retrospective about Glitch's early origins at Fog Greek with the vision of providing "web development with real code that was as easy as editing a Google Doc". Their conclusion:

I still believe there’s a market for easy and fun web development and hosting, but a product like this needs power-users and enthusiasts willing to pay for it. To build any kind of prosumer software, you do have to be an optimist and believe that enough of the world still cares about quality and craft.

Glitch will be shutting down project hosting and user profiles on July 8th.

Code will be available to download until the end of the year. Glitch have an official Python export script that can download all of your projects and assets.

Jenn Schiffer, formerly Director of Community at Glitch and then Fastly, is a little more salty:

all that being said, i do sincerely want to thank fastly for giving glitch the opportunity to live to its 3-year acqui-versary this week. they generously took in a beautiful flower and placed it upon their sunny window sill with hopes to grow it more. the problem is they chose to never water it, and anyone with an elementary school education know what happens then. i wish us all a merry august earnings call season.

I'm very sad to see Glitch go. I've been pointing people to my tutorial on Running Datasette on Glitch for 5 years now, it was a fantastic way to help people quickly get started hosting their own projects.