Would love to see how key projects were built

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1

Remixing is awesome, but after a while, I want to see how something was made. Especially for key apps (like the ones you see when you click New Project or the ones in the react-starter-kit), it would be nice also to see how to create those from scratch (including any console actions required).

For example, right now, I’m trying to understand how to get webpack to work from scratch, and it would be nice to see a “how it’s made” video of a simple project that included webpack. I like remixing to see if something’s useful, but once I start using it, I like to start from scratch to make sure I understand it. Two sides of the same coin, really.

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You mention the react starter kit. In that we provide some explanation of the code in https://glitch.com/edit/#!/starter-react for example. But you’d like this to go line-by-line or just be more detailed?

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I guess It’s more the “environment” stuff - if you go to console for the first react example and the look under node_modules, there’s a ton of stuff there. That means if I build it myself, it’s not the same.

What motivated this for me was ultimately an issue with pnpm (enable-npm resolved it). But I couldn’t know that, since there was different residue. I didn’t know if there was some magic step that happened to make that react example work, so that I had to start with a remix.

I still wonder that with the basic express project, frankly. I can’t remember what it was, but I tried turning a static site into an express site, and I got tripped up somewhere. There’s plenty of other things to do, so I wandered off … but I think it would be useful to know “these are the exact steps that went into setting up this project - and you can recreate them instead of remixing if you prefer” (or explain why you can’t if/when that’s ever the case). I think that would be super educational.

Thanks Gareth!

4

Thinking about this even more … y’know what helps? Rewinding! So when I remix and rewind https://glitch.com/edit/#!/starter-react I can see where it started … but I still don’t know two things:

  1. where did THAT project start from - would be nice if it specified the project it was remixed from

  2. were there any console commands run that were key to getting the project into its current state

The second might have useful product implications. The first could just be a convention: make the very first edit in readme.md and just say where you remixed from.

Also, could be handy to have a read-only rewind without having to remix, but that’s a bit of a quibble.

And one more thing - easily including named “checkpoints” (by somehow “tagging” the current state of my project) would make this kind of “exploratory” rewinding way more useful. I’d love to walk through the main checkpoints of a project I’m interested in.

Thanks,
Patrick

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Yeah, we’d hoped that would be a useful part of Rewind (more detail here: https://medium.com/glitch/celebrating-the-creative-process-warts-and-all-342336679d19).

I’ll raise a feature request for the named checkpoints.

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