Fog Creek Software, today launched Glitch for Platforms, a collection of tools that helps Developer Relations teams ensure that any developer can succeed with their API or SDK. The tools allows Developer Relations teams to leverage the power of Glitch and provide sample apps to kickstart developers.
Trello, Stack Overflow and Glitch creators, Fog Creek Software, today launched Glitch for Platforms, a collection of tools that helps Developer Relations teams ensure that any developer can succeed with their API or SDK.
Fog Creek is a software company that was founded in 2000 by duo Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor. Lead by CEO, Anil Dash, the company is known for developer products such as FogBugz, Stack Overflow and Trello.
Glitch for Platforms allows Developer Relations teams to leverage the power of Glitch and provide sample apps to kickstart developers building on top of their APIs. There is a range of free and paid-for tools, which they can use to create unlimited sample projects, allow people to import GitHub repos with just one click, and embed a ‘Remix on Glitch’ button in their documentation. They can even create apps with automatically populated customer API keys so that developers can instantly begin working with a real app that uses their own data, cutting the all important Time to Hello World (TtHW) metric from minutes or hours to seconds.
“There’s a huge bug in the way we do developer relations, ” Dash says. “If we compare it to the hyper-optimized customer funnels used on e-commerce sites, the current tools we use for acquiring and working with platform developers are downright absurd.”
Without dedicated tooling, Developer Relations teams have to date struggled to measure the impact of many of their efforts, limiting investment. This is at odds with the wider trends in spending on software development and recruiting developers. That’s why a key part of Glitch for Platforms are advanced analytics, which teams can use to show the impact of their efforts. The tools also include Glitch Help – the ability for developers to get help in real-time, so members of the developer relations team can jump into a project when a prospect is stuck and help them directly.
Dash says “You can already see the power of Glitch for Platforms in action on Facebook’s Messenger API documentation right now. Check out their Quick Start guide, and time how long it takes for you to get from clicking the ‘Remix on Glitch’ button to having working, running code in your browser”.
“It’s not just the biggest companies or platforms that need this stuff. We’ re seeing teams of all sizes make great use of Glitch for Platforms as we’ ve been previewing the features” adds Dash. Other earlier adopters of these new tools include Mozilla’s Aframe, Howdy’s Botkit, Wistia, and Slack.
