What a month! Not only did we secure seed funding, fixed numerous bugs but also met each other in person at a StackBlitz team offsite! Well-rested and slightly-tanned, we are bringing you:
- StackBlitz in the wild: news from our community
- DX & Compatibility improvements: the change log
- Dispatch from the Balearic Islands
- Quick bites for the road
Before we begin, a quick announcement: we are one of the sponsors of the upcoming Write The Docs conference where we will showcase a new doc editing workflow tool. Come say hi! We have swag to share!
StackBlitz in the wild
- Okay, this is the type of video we hoped to see: Reiner Stropek uses StackBlitz and p5 to teach kids programming 🥰
- Listen to Rich Harris explain how awesome WebContainers are in this stream on the future of Svelte!
- What a lovely surprise at the end of a great talk: Misko Hevery ended his Reliable Web Summit presentation on Qwik by giving a shoutout to StackBlitz for “figuring out how to integrate Node.js into a browser” 🥺
- In this episode of GitHub’s Open Source Friday stream, Ben Holmes from the Astro team showcased Astro — needless to say, you get to see a lot of StackBlitz action!
- We are always happy to see new documentation pages that use StackBlitz for live examples — like this Storyblok page with starters in Next, Nuxt, SvelteKit, Vue, and React!
DX & compatibility improvements
As we’re working on new tools (stay tuned 🔥), we are finishing the month with a whole plethora of improvements:
- WebContainers:
- WebContainers are now enabled for Chrome mobile.
- SDK:
- We’ve released version 1.7.0 of
@stackblitz/sdk, with improved TypeScript support and new features for controlling the UI of embedded StackBlitz projects. - The SDK can now be used to change the editor’s color scheme at runtime (e.g. to react to a change of color theme in the parent page), open or close editor tabs, reveal or close the sidebar, etc.
- For a demonstration of what is now possible, check out the playground on the Contentlayer homepage. Thanks to Johannes Schickling for helping push the bondaries of what our SDK can do!
- We’ve released version 1.7.0 of
- Updates to starter projects:
- In the “Popular” starters section, we’ve replaced Nuxt 2 with Nuxt 3, now that Nuxt 3 has reached the “Release Candidate” stage. If you’d like to start a Nuxt 2 project instead, you can find it in the “Fullstack” section.
- Project sharing:
- When a project has several users with access (as co-owner, editor or viewer), the Share button icon now changes to indicate that. This is only visible to the project owner and to users with access.
- Guests can now update the visibility of a project that they created, choosing between “Public” and “Secret”.
- Bug fixes and improvements:
- When using our GitHub repository integration: fix a bug that could create unnecessary empty commits with default names.
- When a page is in
view=previewmode, opening the sidebar no longer triggers hiding the preview or editor. - In the Terminal, running the command
open path/to/filewill now reveal the corresponding file in the file explorer even if that file resides in a hidden folder. - We removed some UI elements in the Search sidebar that were inactive. Turns out we had implemented some UI buttons and inputs but not the underlying capabilities! In particular, we removed the project-wide “Replace” input, which wasn’t working. Our apologies for all the frustration that might have arisen from trying to use broken UI elements. 🥺
- Fixed an issue whereÂ
npm installwas not executed when the user had aÂ~/.jshrc file created in the virtual filesystem and shared between projects. - Fixed a bug that was preventing opening the sidebar in embeds on small screens.
- Using the Web Serial API inside the preview frame is now enabled.
- We’ve added some more explicit error messages when we fail to import a GitHub repository.
- Documentation:
- Our page on Supported Project Types for the SDK imports now links to their corresponding environments so the readers can quickly reference the capabilities of each environment
- We included a page with descriptions of our editor’s UI sections, to help users reporting issues with the StackBlitz UI.
So Happy Together!
Is there a more joyful way to celebrate spring and securing seed funding than a team-wide offsite on the Balearic Islands? As a team distributed across 13 countries, we don’t get many chances to hang out together. It was a truly magical time flavored with a weird feeling of meeting for the first time someone you know quite well!
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Beyond the working sessions, we also did a bit snorkeling, hiking, and pampered ourselves with amazing food. Although not everyone could participate in person, we made sure that everyone felt included and present. Until the next time!
Quick bites for the road
- A huge shoutout to our team member, Puru Vijay, for his first conference talk ever 🏆 Puru spoke at Svelte Summit on why he moved his app from React over to Svelte.
- Is Vite really magic? 🪄 If you wanna know the secret sauce, here’s a talk by Matias Capeletto (aka Patak) on the inner workings of Vite from this year’s DevOps.js Conference.
- Have you heard the great news on our seed funding? You can check out the announcement blog post by our CEO, Eric Simons, or the article on TechCrunch.
What’s next?
We are so excited for what the nearest future will bring - we are cooking something really special for you! In the meantime, stay tuned on Twitter or join our Discord community.
