WoofJS.com One Year Later

Steve Krouse
3 min readOct 19, 2017

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We launched WoofJS as an open source JavaScript framework on July 12th, 2016. A few months later, we launched a first version of WoofJS.com as playground to try out the library. You couldn’t create an account, save your work, or anything.

One piece at a time

We weren’t sure if anyone would ever use the tool so we built it slowly, piece by piece over the last year.

First we made it so that you can create an account to save your work…

..and search through our Scratch-like documentation

…and even customize the colors of the text-editor.

You can ask us questions on chat when you get stuck

…and code collaboratively with your friends.

There are literally dozens of new features we’ve added in the past year, but ultimately the best way to see what we’ve built is to check it out for yourself!

Metrics

A few months ago, we set our goals for WoofJS.com. Last week I logged into Google Analytics and was surprised to see that we’ve already accomplished them!

Looking Ahead

Social Network

We’re hard at work creating a “social network” for WoofJS.com where students can heart and comment on each other’s games, just like they can on Scratch. Be on the look out for this in the coming weeks!

Teacher Accounts

WoofJS.com is and always will be free for students. We are exploring creating Teacher Accounts with premium features for after-school programs and schools around the world to use, like automatically generated progress reports that can be sent to parents. We’re excited about this because it would financially support dedicated people to contribute to the project.

Hiring!

Speaking about contributors, we are looking for someone to help us take WoofJS to the next level. While we’ve been successful in slowly growing WoofJS in our free time over the past year, we think it could be a really successful small business for the right programmer/entrepreneur who wants to lead the project full time. If you or a programmer you know is looking for a full time software role where you can grow an educational open-source project into a self-sustaining community and business, please reach out via steve at futureofcoding.org.

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Steve Krouse

Enabling computational thinking by building tools for thought at futureofcoding.org. Co-creator of thecodingspace.com and woofjs.com