Compilr Blog
Student Evangelists Selected
Pavel is a Romanian student doing his fourth year in Web Development. He is studying at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland, and has an interest in advanced Object Oriented PHP, Design Patters, JavaScript, and content markup. Pavel is passionate about Ubuntu (Linux++), and enjoys guitar, cooking, and traveling.
Satya was born in Visakhapatnam (A.P., India) on July 11th 1985. After graduating with a degree in Electronics & Communication Engineering, he spent 4 years working for Indian MNC's in various software technologies. Satya is currently studying Applied Computer Science at Northwest Missouri State University, where he is working on iPhone application development as his graduate directed project. He is also working as a graduate assistant, helping students with their labs in Java.
Shejia Zhu is a 2nd-year student in Oberlin College. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Mathematics. She is a Sophomore Representative of the Computer Science Major Committee in Oberlin. In addition, she is a Cisco Certified Network Associate. She is familiar with both Windows and UNIX/LINUX platforms. She has a couple of years' experience with Java, and is actively learning C, C#, C++, and HTML right now. She is very excited to participate in the Compilr Student Evangelist Program and hopes to gain some precious experience.
Charan is a graduate student at Northwest Missouri State University majoring in Applied Computer Science, currently working on a project involving development of MIGYM administration tool and API with solstice-consulting. He has done his Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Charan is passionate about programming and has strong analytical skills. He likes playing with gadgets and exploring new things on internet. Charan loves playing racquet ball, cricket, dancing, going on long drives and listening to music.
Rafeh was born in Pakistan and completed his initial studies under the supervision of University of Cambridge. Rafeh is currently a software engineering student at the university of Ottawa and has been programing since 14 years of age. Programming has always intrigued him. The ability to create real world applications just by using your fingers and a computer, led him to pursue it as a career. In the past 6 years he has introduced himself to a variety of languages, but he is always willing to learn and improve. He has created several management softwares and games.
Youyang is a first-year student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pursuing a double-major in EECS and Mathematics. He came to the US when he was 7 from China and grew up in Urbana, Illinois. He spent two years at the University of Illinois Laboratory High School before moving to Palo Alto, CA and enrolling at Gunn High School. He is currently also working at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, using Common Lisp to automate the extraction and categorization of various news articles related to cyber security. In his spare time he enjoys biking, web design, supporting the Chicago Bears and collecting Starbucks cards. He hopes to one day go into entrepreneurship and apply what he has learned to tackle world challenges.
Alexandria attends Trent University and is enrolled in a double major in Computer Science and English, as well as a minor in French; she is in the second year of her studies. The programming language which she has been working with while in school is C#. For hobbies, she participates in community theatre and volunteer at Tri County Community Support Services. She also sings and plays piano.
Surya is a second-year Computer Science Specialist at the University of Toronto. He's an international student from Chennai, India with keen interest in building interesting and engaging web-apps (involving PHP, Python and JavaScript) and cyber security. Surya likes to play around with different technologies for the pure-fun of creating new things. He's very excited to be a part of Compilr.
Python & JavaScript Support!
Compilr is pleased to announce that you may now code in both Python and JavaScript with Compilr! Python has been our most widely requested language by far. At the moment we support basic syntax-highlighting and code storage, with the ability to compile your Python code from the browser coming in the future. For Javascript we've integrated syntax-highlighting and and code storage and the ability to run your JavaScript from your browser!
If you have feedback on where to take our Python / Javascript implementations from here, please let us know in the comments!
Student Evangelist Program: Fall Intake Now Open!
XNA Integration
We are proud to announce the initial release of XNA 4.0 projects for the online IDE.
This initial release supports the online development of Windows XNA 4.0 Games, we plan on adding support for Windows Phone 7 in the near future.
We have created online project templates for both XNA C# and XNA VB.NET. This is especially cool for all those VB.NET developers who want to develop XNA games it is now easy to get started without any hacks.
NOTE: You'll need to install XNA Redistributable 4.0 to run the files: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=a88c6dec-aeae-42cd-a108-d35c013c3b97
Lessons Learned from the Hacker News Bump
What were some of the lessons we learned from our post on Hacker News?
- Make sure your server can handle the traffic
We were naïve to the fact that our server may not be able to handle the amount of traffic that Hacker News would soon be sending us. The issue was that they were sending so much traffic in such a short amount of time that our server just simply couldn’t keep up. But keep in mind that focusing too much on scaling early on is no reason not to launch now! - Respond to comments
Nothing looks more disinterested than someone showing off their startup on Hacker News and not responding to feedback. By actively responding to the comments you are engaging the community in your product. - You get lots of awesome feedback
To be honest we weren’t expecting that much feedback related to our product. Actually, we thought we may get some negative feedback from the whole premise of a fully online IDE / online compiler. The feedback was awesome, and is coming from fellow entrepreneurs. - Press is never scalable
From my experience running a few different startups, press is never scalable. You will receive a huge spike of temporary traffic and sales, but afterwards, the traffic usually fades away. You’ll even find more specific niche magazines or blogs like Hacker News will drive more traffic than broad magazines like Entrepreneur Magazine or the New York Times. You can see our before and after below, in which we saw a 6% gain in visits after reaching out to Hacker News.
- Post now, not later!
If you are working on something, post about it now. Don’t post about it later! No one cares that your design could use some work or that you’re missing—what you perceive—is the most important feature. You’ll get crucial feedback at the most crucial stage of your product. Don’t wait until you’ve spent years of your life working on your secret startup, then post about it and realize that most people think the idea is missing a crucial feature.
Big Changes at Compilr
Over the past year our team has been working hard to bring more features to Compilr and improve your online compiler experience. Adding the capability to compile from all major browsers, a brand new site design, support for external libraries and platform references, the ability to compile windows forms instead of just console applications, we have expanded the social networking capabilities along with so much more.
You can read our whole story here on Reddit or here on Hacker News.
All of these changes have dramatically increased the usability of our product and in just the past year our traffic grew 400%. Our user base has also expanded from a mere 3,000 users to 32,000 users! By the end of this year, we will have well over 100,000 users.
With such a large growth expected over the next year, we have to reduce the capabilities of our free accounts. All of our existing free accounts are now limited to 3 public projects, 1 private project and 250 MBs of storage. New free accounts will be the same except they will have no private projects.
So, now we’ve launched a few different account packages which our free users can upgrade to. All of the upgrades include more space and more projects. In addition, if you upgrade, you’ll get that funny feeling knowing you are helping us keep Compilr running and help us employ more staff to add more cool features. We already have our eyes on online XNA, Intellisense, and SVN/GIT integration, which may require a paid account to enjoy.
Explore Tab Heavily Updated & More...
If you have checked out the Explore page, you probably noticed it sucked!
Well, we've added a number of features to make it suck less. For starters, projects are sorted differently instead of alphabetically. This will hopefully force a number of Hello World projects to the bottom of the list. Projects can also be ranked. Ranking a project will help where it shows up on the explore tab.
You can help us out by visiting the Explore page and ranking your favourite projects. If you really like the project you can even share it on Facebook and Twitter now.
There were a few minor changes made to improve the backend. When you use our online Java compiler it now properly references other libraries within the jar. Another function, is the ability to delete your account, which will remove all of your projects.
If you would like to see any other features in the online compiler be sure to add them to:
http://compilr.uservoice.com/
PHP, C/C++, Ruby, External Libaries, Upload & Download now available on Compilr
Woah, talk about new features! This update includes support for an online PHP IDE, an online C/C++ compiler and an online Ruby IDE although these languages currently don't support the ability to be executed. Our team is working hard on that functionality, but at least now you can stop using Notepad and start using Compilr online IDE.
As of today you can now upload and download source code from any public projects or projects that you control. This makes it easier to work from your existing code or download any of our public projects. So, if you have any old code sitting on your computer why not upload it to a public project and share it with the world?
Java and .NET projects now support the ability to upload and reference external libraries. This should help you develop rich applications, easier!
Social Profiles, Public Projects and More...
Exciting news everyone! Lots of new cool features added in today. Social Profiles, being one of my personal favourites. This feature can act as a personal resume or place to show off your code. It lists some personal information which you can customize from the My Account tab and your public projects. You can check mine out here: http://compilr.com/users/piwh1000
Be sure to share your URL with your friends to drive traffic to some of your public projects! To edit your profile login and click on My Account, then edit. Be sure to check out both tabs Account and Personal Information. Another feature, in it's infancy, is the Explore tab. Now you can view a number of projects that are publicly visible by category. It's still missing a lot of features, but we wanted to give you a feel for how the Public Projects will be shown throughout our website.
A few features added to the online IDE is auto-save and making sure you still have a connection to our server. The auto-save function doesn't over write your files, it's basically a way for you to recover if your browser crashes or if your Internet goes down.