Learning with Glitch in the New Year

Every New Year, a lot of us realize we want to learn to code, or to get up to speed on the newest ways of making cool stuff on the Internet. Resolutions can be great motivators, or they can be stressful if they don’t work. So in 2018, the Glitch community is doing something different to help everybody start the year right.

“This year, I’m going to learn how to code.” Or maybe “this year, I’m going to learn that new programming framework”. These thoughts pop into our heads on January 1st because of a wonderful, optimistic tendency to think, “New Year, New Me!” At the same time, it can be intimidating to try new things because resolutions can run into trouble when regular life gets in the way.

At Glitch, we look at what works to help people really learn new skills and build amazing things on the web. And it turns out, it’s the same two things you need to stick to a New Year’s resolution:

1. Community. You need to have people around you who are trying the same things, making some of the same mistakes, learning from each other, and supporting each other’s efforts.
2. Resilience. Maybe you could consider this “forgiveness”, but it’s the basic idea that, if you make a mistake, or you miss a day here or there, you’ll still be able to keep going and it doesn’t mean that you should give up on achieving your goal.

To start this year off right, we’ll be bringing the entire Glitch community together to help each other start making amazing things in 2018. You’ll see example projects to remix, articles describing how to use Glitch to create your ideas, cool new toolkits or frameworks to try out, and interviews and conversations with some inspiring people whose perspectives will inspire you.

Everybody Can Learn

The basic idea behind Glitch is simple: Everybody, at every skill level, should be able to easily create things on the internet, and share them with the world. Our belief is that this kind of creation and learning is fun, if we get rid of all the technical obstacles and make sure the community is welcoming and friendly. It shows up in every detail of how people create on Glitch, including the simple idea that if you get stuck, you can just raise your hand, and people in the community will help each other out.

If that sounds like a good way for you to finally stretch out and learn some new technical skills, then join us, and tell your friends to join us on Glitch, too. You can check back in each day on Glitch as we share inspiration, resources and ideas that will help you learn new coding skills or build the app or website of your dreams. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Ready to get started? We’ve got just the thing: An introduction to HTML, which you can use to build a list of New Year’s Resolutions (or any other kind of list!) Just jump in, read the linked instructions, and start typing to remix the project and begin making it your own!