Raising Hands and Helping Others
Ever since we launched Glitch Help last year, we’ve seen a tremendous response from the community in helping each other. Here are some of those stories! 😃
We know that trying new things can be intimidating. But the truth is, we’re all learning new things every day. No matter your level of experience, you’re a newbie in some way.
Along with our active forum, the Glitch Help feature makes getting support with your code from another community member as easy as raising your hand. And so far, thousands of hands have been raised and problems solved!
From anywhere in Glitch, if you’re editing a file, simply highlight the line or lines of text that you’re having trouble with, and you’ll see a 🙋 button appear. Then, describe your problem and click “Ask for Help” and you’re all set! Your request for help will appear on the Glitch homepage so helpful people can offer their assistance.
It’s proven to be a great way to get help with code. Take the experience of Atlanta-based front-end engineer, Alicia Barrett, for example. She first heard about Glitch through a community of people who care about support.
“I’m part of this community called Support Driven, and someone who used to work at Fog Creek told me about the company. I started browsing around and came across Glitch, and have started to play with it ever since then.”
“I was working through the [React Starter Kit], and I had an issue with…making a list, basically. And so I just raised my hand, and I got a response, and I thought that was so cool,” says Alicia.
Even better, Alicia received help in only a few minutes!
“It was super fast, and I thought it was cool because I didn’t have to go to a forum or leave what I was working on. I could just ask for help right there… I really appreciated that.”
“[Glitch Help] is just so easy, and that’s not to downplay the value in working through a challenge — especially with coding — but it’s just easy to get up and running,” Alicia says. She went on to build her personal website on Glitch, including links to some of her projects and the story of her journey as a front-end developer (it’s available to remix if you’d like to make a website of your own!)
But another important aspect of Glitch Help is showing appreciation for those who are taking their time to help others. We wanted to be thoughtful about it and so we built in the ability to thank others from the get-go. This inspired web developer and designer, David Francisco. Although he initially was reluctant to try Glitch, he was soon drawn in by the friendly community.
“I did a couple of projects and eventually I started helping other people using the help feature,” he says.
Helping others spurred David to create his own dedicated tool called Newbie Talk — a fantastic way for people to chat and get help with all kinds of projects.
It’s been exciting to the see the response to this new type of help tool. Beyond getting your problem solved, people have been heartened by the willingness of others to jump in and help:
And community members haven’t just stopped at helping others, some have gone beyond that and built tools to make it easier to start helping too. Like David Cole’s glitch-bat-signal and Nicholas Grenié’s glitch-notifier projects. Both tools alert you when there is a new help request on Glitch. Glitch-bat-signal uses Zapier to send an alert to the app of your choice, and glitch-notifier sends you a message on Slack.
With these apps, you can be notified whenever someone in the Glitch community needs help with their projects. They’re being used by helpful individuals, as well as DevRel teams wanting to support their products and even specialist communities like Botmakers, who have glitch-notifier integrated into their community Slack so they can help out with bot-specific problems.
We know just how difficult and frustrating learning to code and coding can be. But it gets a whole lot easier (and more fun!) when you do it alongside a helpful, supportive community 🤩.
We can’t wait to see what you build on Glitch, and remember — if you get stuck, just raise your hand!
