Replit's Cafe Origins

A story about how Amjad's experience coding in internet cafes in Jordan led to creating Replit.

"Every time I wanted to do homework, I had to spend an hour setting up the environment. At the time, the web was moving fast - we had Google docs, Gmail, these client-side JavaScript applications. I thought, 'Why can't I type code into the browser and run it?'

I started looking around and discovered nobody had solved this problem. There were some experiments, but it was crazy to me - it was almost like finding a $100 bill in New York Grand Central Station. I found an idea nobody was paying attention to.

I felt that problem really deeply and started working on it. I discovered why it was hard - you can run JavaScript but you can't run Python in the browser. So we started writing interpreters and compilers to run on JavaScript. It took us a couple of years to get a few languages running. It was a rough prototype, but people started using it.

In 2011, we had a breakthrough - we were the first to compile Python, Ruby, and most of our languages to JavaScript and run them straight in the browser. We open-sourced it and put it up on Hacker News, and it went super viral. That was my first experience of going viral on the internet. It was an amazing rush - I still feel that rush."