Out in the Open: How Animated GIFs Can Turn You Into a Web Coder

revisit.link

Animated GIFs. Those endlessly looping online images are always good for a laugh. But that’s not all they’re good for. They can also turn you into a bona fide web developer.

Take a look at revisit.link. It’s a simple online engine for building animated GIFs and other wacky images. You upload an pic. You select a few visual effects that can twist, turn, and otherwise transform it. And out pops your very own weirdly mangled creation. Though some can be mesmerizing, others seem pointless. But this is more than just a way to waste your afternoon. It can teach you how to build web services, including the ins and outs of using open source software—which has become the bedrock of modern internet creations.

Basically, all the site’s image effects are stored by a community of developers, much like any other open source software. Anyone can not only use these effects, but build their own and share them with the community by way of the code hosting and collaboration site GitHub. “Since everyone likes glitch art and animated GIFs, it’s a creative outlet for developers to create something new that’s outside their usual field,” say Jen Fong-Adwent, the creator of revisit.link. “But it’s also a way for new people to learn basics.”

If you’re building a modern web service, you aren’t just creating a program that will run on one machine. You have to learn how to deploy code to online servers, and teach your programs to talk with other applications. revisit.link is a good way to learn these skills, since the effects servers are simple and lightweight and can be written in any language. And once a server is built, the developer can learn how to use GitHub and how to make small changes to someone else’s code and submit those changes for review—all in a low-pressure environment with a very low barrier to entry.

Gif: revisit.link

This could be a boon to beginners, says software developer Angelina Fabbro, who teaches for the educational initiative Ladies Learning Code. “Looking back on it now I wish something like revisit.link had been available to me,” she says. “Something like this helps you build a mental model of how the various services you use around the web work together.” Fabbro, who is building a tool for revisit.link that will turn photos into music, says she’s thinking about using the site as a teaching aid.

Fong-Adwent created a predecessor to revisit.link called Great Brain back in 2010 when she was learning Node.js, a platform for running the programming language JavaScript on servers instead of in web browsers. “It was a good way to help people who were shy about contributing to open source,” she says. “It just doing that made their confidence go up.”

But once she felt comfortable with Node.js, she gravitated away from the project. Then, last year, she built Meatspace, an oddball web-based chat system where every message includes a brief animated GIF captured from the sender’s web cam. A community of people building weird bots and other hacks for the chat room inspired her to build a more advanced version of Great Brain. Most of the people building revisit.link effects are members of the Meatspace community. But Adwent-Fong says anyone can contribute. And because the code is open source, anyone can host their own revisit hub and create their own community.