This is the first edition of Replit Updates - where we get to share what we’ve been up to in the past week! What have we built for you? What have we fixed for you? It’s all here. Read to the end for a peek behind the Repls and into the lives of the engineers building Replit!
This week we merged 496 pull requests, pushed 1224 commits, and added 349,343 lines of code to our codebases. See what we shipped: 👇
What we shipped
Ghostwriter launch
Earlier today we launched Ghostwriter to the public after months of closed beta-testing, and last week the team shipped some final pre-launch improvements to make Ghostwriter faster and more reliable.
This was a major team effort:
- Alex and Giuseppe built Complete Code,
- Jonathan and Krish built Generate Code and Transform Code,
- Jonathan and Arnav built Explain Code, and
- Muhammad and Samip worked on the AI model backing Complete Code.
When we launch a new product line like Ghostwriter, it takes more than just engineers building the feature itself: Jonathan, Ted, Devin, and Aman built out the onboarding experience and purchase flow you’ll go through as you try the 14-day free trial.
Mobile app magic
It’s been two weeks since we launched our amazing mobile app for both Android and iOS and we’ve been shipping improvements based on all your wonderful feedback! Last week:
- Abdel and Matthew lowered the sensitivity of the
shake to provide feedbackfeature and gave active users the ability to turn off theshakefeature entirely. - Ian fixed your mobile keyboard: it no longer covers up the editor or console.
- Matthew also improved TypeScript and JavaScript code suggestions.
- And the entire team, led by the incredible Laima Tazmin, made improvements to both stability and speed.
We're always shipping new features and fixes, so be sure to update your app!
New File History Viewer
This week we moved the entry point for our new History feature from the nav header to the bottom of each file. Brian, Tyler, and Moudy collaborated on this redesign, making an already helpful feature dramatically more convenient to access by file.
You used to find History here - and pressing the button took you to an entirely different page:
Now you can find the History icon in the lower-right-hand corner of the tab you're working in. And you can use it without leaving the editor:
Bradley made all the things faster
You may have noticed something this week: Replit is faster.
Like, a lot faster.
You can thank Bradley. Bradley, as one does, discovered a way to cut our web tail latencies in half. Overnight our 95th percentile latency dropped from 1+s to less than 500ms. Check out this absolutely bonkers chart:
The top line represents the slowest 5% of requests to Replit.com Before Bradley (BB). The bottom line is the slowest 5% After Bradley (AB). Bradley is our hero.
We salute you, Bradley.
Become a teacher on Replit
If you’ve done any of the 100 Days of Code lessons, you’ve seen the special internal feature we built that lets us design interactive tutorials directly on Replit. We thought it was too good a feature to keep to ourselves, so now you can create your own Replit-native tutorials. There’s even a contest with prizes:
What we polished
- Eddie Nuno modified the repl auth token expiration time for better user-experience.
- Toby Ho improved the publishing flow to ensure templates are built before they’re published, which makes them faster for every person who uses them - no more installing packages every run!
- Madison made every teacher’s week when she shipped an improved/more performant Project Overview page. This new version stays speedy even under peak load!
- We’ve also made our updated brand kit available here: http://replit.com/brandkit . Please Meme Responsibly™️.
Behind the Repls
We love building Replit, and we work really hard. But we have fun too. Every week at the end of the update, we’re going to share a little peek into some of the other things we’ve gotten up to.
Comic Sans-sanity
A few weeks ago Talor and Jonathan made a deranged bet. The first bet we’re aware of, by the way, made in Cycles:
The challenge: who can code in Comic Sans the longest? Yes, we agree: this is madness. Just look:
And, yes, this bet extends to writing code on Replit:
Editor's note: They’re both 100% committed to winning, so it’s likely that many of the new features we ship over the next year will have been written in (shudder) Comic Sans. We would not inflict this on anyone, so please keep Talor and Jonathan in your thoughts.
Keep track of this unhinged experiment on this Repl:
Debate over the best mechanical keyboard switches rages on
We talk about the important things too: like which mechanical keyboard switches are best. Gian thinks MX Browns are little too heavy. Luis thinks Gian might want to tune them, but Giuseppe insists “Kailh Box Whites are the pinnacle of switches” and the conversation eventually devolved into us laughing at reflections of ourselves in this YouTube parody.