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Engineering Articles

Engineering articles about Engineering from the people building Replit. Page 4.

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20221 entry
202110 entries
AK

By Alex Kotliarskyi

7m read
Cover artwork for the article “Implementing RUI, Replit's Design System”.

Implementing RUI, Replit's Design System

At Replit, we have a small engineering and design team supporting millions of users. Our secret is investing in good tools that make us more productive. In this blog post we'll give you an insider look into how we implemented one such tool - the Replit design system (or RUI for short).

MECBTA

By Moudy Elkammash, Connor Brewster, and Tyler Angert

3m read
Cover artwork for the article “Repl Space and Templates”.

Repl Space and Templates

When we want to support a new technology, we're faced with the question: "Do we (the Replit team) build this capability into the Replit directly, or can our users add it themselves?". Usually, we want the answer to be the latter. Repls are like personal computers for your projects. And the more these personal computers can be customized, the more they'll be used in creative, unexpected ways.

CB

By Connor Brewster

8m read
Cover artwork for the article “Will Nix Overtake Docker?”.

Will Nix Overtake Docker?

In many discussions about Nix, the comparison of Nix and Docker comes up frequently. This question could be dismissed by saying that Nix and Docker are different tools that solve different problems. One is a toolkit for building and deploying containers and the other is a package and configuration manager. However, these tools do have some overlap: they can both be used to create reproducible environments. A reproducible environment is one that can be recreated from scratch in an identical way (ideally bit-for-bit). Practically, this means having the same tools, versions, and configuration between the environments.

LC

By Luis Héctor Chávez

5m read
Cover artwork for the article “Announcing File Persistence in Hosted Apps for Hackers”.

Announcing File Persistence in Hosted Apps for Hackers

We mostly think of repls as being full computers in the cloud, and one of the goals of the platform team at Replit is to enable people to build almost anything in replspace. In the past, when a file was stored in a repl, it would only be saved when the editor was opened. This went against our goal and made it impossible to write certain servers that changed files at runtime. This was especially hard for newcomers, because that's the easiest way to persist information. Starting today, Hacker and Teams subscribers will be able to write services that accept file uploads or store data in a local database (think SQLite) or text file, regardless of how the repl was started.

DS

By Dan Stowell

4m read
Cover artwork for the article “Betting on Nix: donating $25K to the NixOS Foundation”.

Betting on Nix: donating $25K to the NixOS Foundation

As building software grows more like snapping Legos together, how people find and use those Legos becomes more important. That's why we are donating $25,000 to the NixOS Foundation and betting on Nix as the future of software distribution.

SRAKTA

By Søren Rood, Alex Kotliarskyi, and Tyler Angert

12m read
Cover artwork for the article “Solidity on Replit: Diving into Web3”.

Solidity on Replit: Diving into Web3

Today, we're announcing our official Solidity development template. Solidity is the language used to create smart contracts, which are programs that run on the Ethereum blockchain. This is important for the Web3 commmunity because there's finally an accessible and collaborative way to learn Solidity, which will unlock thousands of new developers in the decentralized web.

FM

By Faris Masad

2m read
Cover artwork for the article “A New Code Editor for Mobile - CodeMirror 6”.

A New Code Editor for Mobile - CodeMirror 6

Today, we are thrilled to announce CodeMirror as the new code editor on Replit for mobile devices. CodeMirror is a versatile code editor that has been specifically designed with mobile in mind, providing an excellent touchscreen experience. This change is the beginning of a focused effort on mobile development here at Replit; the editor is just the first step! The editor supports all the features you expect from a code editor, and we're working on making it even more powerful.

AM

By Amjad Masad

6m read
Cover artwork for the article “The Internet of Fun”.

The Internet of Fun

Yesterday, I accidentally built a chat app. Surprisingly, it wasn't the first time it happened.

20201 entry
MC

By Mason Clayton

2m read
Cover artwork for the article “We've Been Pwned”.

We've Been Pwned

As long as I can remember Replit has been receiving a large number of vulnerability reports. We're very grateful for these and take them extremely seriously. However, 99% of them stem from a misunderstanding of what we do. Our main product is RCE (remote code execution) and naturally this leads to a whole lot of RCE vulnerability reports.

20181 entry
AM

By Amjad Masad

4m read

Don't Let Your Development Environment Rot

Most systems -- both natural and artificial -- decay, rot, and eventually die. Software is no different. A lot has been written about fighting "software rot" but there's another type of rot related to software that's not talked about much -- the development environment rot.

20171 entry
AM

By Amjad Masad

4m read

Building Towards a Holistic Development Service

Software development is one of the first -- if not the first -- examples of what J. C. Licklider called the Man-Computer Symbiosis. A "cooperative interaction" between people and computers where the person is concerned in what may be classified as the creative aspect of the work such as setting the goals, formulating the hypothesis and evaluating the results while the computer does all the "routinizable work".

20162 entries
AM

By Amjad Masad

5m read

API Docs

[Update Oct 2022: We have retired our API, we are excited by our previous work but we do not have the resources to support this at the moment.]