September 2020 Summaries

The new feature allows educators to annotate code, making it easy for students and teachers to communicate and collaborate on coding projects remotely. Annotations enable real-time feedback loops, allowing educators to provide immediate guidance and support to students as they learn to code online. The feature is designed to mimic the 'shoulder-to-shoulder debugging' experience of traditional classroom settings, but with the flexibility of remote learning. By integrating annotations into their teaching workflow, educators can create a more scalable and effective way to teach coding skills.

At Repl.it, our mission is to make programming more accessible, more creative, and more fun, a place away from the modern software development grind. The company has grown significantly in recent years, with 120k concurrent containers, doubling its team every year for four consecutive years, and evolving into a world-leading collaborative coding environment focused on learning and prototyping. However, this growth has come at the cost of slower performance, crashes, and poor user experience, prompting the decision to pause new feature development until the foundations are solidified. The company is addressing these issues, with early wins including improved editing speed, faster running times, and reduced repl crashes. While some features, such as always-on repls and new languages, will be put on hold, the platform is expected to become more polished and user-friendly in the near future.

Repl.it is introducing its Database key-value store, built into every repl, which allows users to store data without setup or configuration. The database supports simple operations such as setting keys to values, getting values, deleting keys, and searching for keys. It provides clients for Python, Node.js, and Go, but can also be accessed from any language over HTTP. Users can start using Database immediately by importing one of the provided packages and starting to set keys in their database. This feature is designed to support a wide range of applications, including blogs, game backends, and email platforms.