Dec 9 22 2:15PM PST: Jeremy Press (Product Engineering Manager) AMA

[bardia]

Product Engineering Manager, Jeremy Press, one of Replit’s first engineers, will be hosting an AMA on 2022-12-09T22:30:00Z

Post your questions below and add it to your calendar!

[not-ethan]

How do you decide if a feature gets implemented? Based on support from the community or if it’s possible to make?

[RayhanADev]

Jeremy, why are you the bee man? B)

And also on a more serious note, how does Replit actually manage GCP containers? I have a poor understanding of how conman and pid1 work on a Repl level, much less across multiple Repls and a quickie rundown would be pretty sweet :D.

Another question, why write your backend in Golang? At the time you adopted it (to my understanding) it was still quite overlooked int the development world - what led the team to choose Golang and stick with it?

Last question , what is Replit work culture like off shipping season? Seems hectic during shipping season but I can’t imagine its completely relaxed either off shipping season.

Have fun with your AMA! Good luck

[brettsmith212]

Wondering what the tech stack looks like for replit.com and also for the new mobile app?

Also wondering if there has been talk/plans made to try and allow 3rd party extensions so that developers can customize their Replit experience? (Been wanting to have Tailwind CSS IntelliSense for while!)

Thanks!

[jeremy]

Hey not-ethan!

It’s a process we’re always improving, but we look at a few things

1. How much does the feature help our users and our business. Lately we’ve been focused on things that increase the “power” of replit. A lot of these ideas come from the team, and a lot directly from our community!
2. How big is the opportunity? This helps us decide if we want to spent a lot of time on a big overhaul, or try to experiment at making something better

[jeremy]

Yo Ray!

I’m the bee man because I found that photo when I was testing profile picture uploading on Replit, and it stuck !

Platform questions.

These are really best for someone on the platform team , but I can share my basic understanding.

1. We have a pool of containers ready to be allocated by people using Replit
2. When we need to scale up or down, we ask GCP for more or fewer machines
3. When GCP needs to take a machine, we magically move the repls over to other machines
4. We also have a service that maps Repls on replit.com to their underlying containers, including for hosting!

Why go?
Also just my opinion, but Go strikes a great balance of being efficient, low level to control memory, nice to work with for developers, and has features like channels that fit our infrastructure well.

We also have experimented with rust and other cool trendy languages on small parts of our infrastructure!

“Off shipping season”
We definitely believe in a culture of working hard, and shipping seasons allow us to ebb and flow. In between big projects we try to take time to polish, improve our quality and knock out tech debt, and learn from our community and users about what to focus on next.

Thanks for the questions!

[jeremy]

Hey Brett!

replit.com and the mobile app share the same back end, so I’ll start there.

We have a postgres database, and then a large Next.js/express server. We write as much as we can in typescript. For our API, we use the Apollo framework to write graphql.

On the web front end we use our internal design system called RUI (Replit UI) and it’s connected to our next.js app.

On the mobile side, it’s a shiny react native app calling our graphQL. It’s awesome to see how much a small team built quickly!

[brettsmith212]

Thanks for the response! That is really cool that they were able to make such a great app quickly with react-native.

Do you also know about any 3rd party extensions in the mix? I love using Tailwind CSS IntelliSense and I haven’t been able to find a way to have customized intellisense in replit, maybe having an outlet for devs to integrate extensions into replit would be possible someday?

[jeremy]

Whoops I forgot that part :).

We have a closed beta for extensions! You can email bardia@replit.com for more info.

One thing I’ll say is that we’re prioritizing UI extensions that live along side your code. The extensions directly for your editor will be available soon! But yes I would love to see a rich marketplace of all kinds of editor extensions.