Meet the CodeSandbox Community’s New Home
We are giving an exciting new home to our growing community!
At CodeSandbox, we run your code in our cloud infrastructure, configure the environment for you and keep your code always ready, behind a shareable URL. Give it a try with this Next.js example or import your GitHub repo!
Today is a day of celebration for CodeSandbox and our extensive community because we have just launched our brand-new community home 🎉
Community is the heartbeat of human society. And even if each can define it differently, like contributors, users, or supporters, we consider the community as one of the pillars that drives us to build a better product—more accessible, more empowering, and more collaborative. Having spent 13 years in open source communities, I truly believe being part of a community is the best way to grow and connect.
Over the years, CodeSandbox has grown into a vibrant community of more than 2 million developers who have created over 45 million apps in CodeSandbox. By launching our new community home, we are making it easier than ever for community members to learn, explore, and connect. Have a look at codesandbox.community and keep reading to learn what’s new!
Creating a new home
As we grew CodeSandbox into the powerful cloud development environment it is today, we kept listening to our community and learning how to make our offering better for everyone.
While Discord gave us an excellent platform to chat with our users directly, it also made it difficult to maintain the different channels and go beyond the standard chat functionality. So, taking years of successes, mistakes and feedback into consideration, we created a simple, transparent, open platform for every member of the CodeSandbox community.
As we explore below, we structured this platform to empower you to find all the resources and help you need, share feedback, and showcase all the cool projects you’re working on.
Preview of the new CodeSandbox community platform.
Product Resources
To make it easier for new community members to get up and running with our product, we created a “Getting started with CodeSandbox” course using some of our best videos and guides.
You can keep up with the latest product news and releases on the Announcements space and we also created a Sandpack space where we share all that's going on with Sandpack.
Finally, we highly encourage you to share a testimonial of your experience using CodeSandbox, so that you can tell your story to the world and inspire other CodeSandbox users!
Helping and getting help
At CodeSandbox we strongly believe that we can create the best, most accessible coding and development experience by keeping our ears close to the ground and listening to the thoughts, feedback and ideas of our users.
One of the big issues from the Support side that has helped drive this new community project forward was the continued frustration that we’ve had trying to support CodeSandbox users on Discord. Even with a dedicated help channel those with genuine issues would often post about them and air their frustrations in other areas which often resulted in problems getting missed. Less than ideal. We want to get you back to developing as soon as we can!
So in our new community we went back to the drawing board. We had a long discussion about how we’ve seen issues reported and how we can best guide people to provide the information that we need to solve them. There was no re-invention of the wheel here, in fact almost the opposite as we came to the conclusion that a key problem was that people didn’t have a clear place to go to make their other helpful suggestions… other than a general help channel.
So we decided to split “help” into two new channels with clearer purpose:
- Bugs — A place to report genuine "blockers" or issues that you encounter.
- Give feedback — A more general area to air ideas and thoughts that you have about the CodeSandbox experience.
- Feature requests — For when those ideas and thoughts come together into a suggestion you have to improve CodeSandbox!
As we said, hardly reinventing the wheel. But a needed change to help us to hear you and then in turn make CodeSandbox better.
We also wanted to make it much easier for our users to let us know what they would like us to prioritize. To this end our new community has a voting system that will allow you, our users, to 'upvote' the submissions that you most want us to see. We can then in turn triage these problems or suggestions with a greater awareness of how much they matter and are affecting you.
Of course, if you have an urgent issue or need to discuss your account or payments please contact Support instead of posting on our community. Due to Data Protection we can’t discuss specific accounts in a publicly accessible place.
Finding community resources
We also created a more specific community section where we will put the spotlight on the content and activities we create for our community, as well as cool projects built by the community itself. Here you will be able to ask others for help, share your work and get feedback. Each Friday we highlight one project done by our community with a community highlight on social media and we include some of them in our community newsletter.
We will add events we are organizing or attending—this will cover conferences we speak at, meetups we contribute to, or our own series of public panels and AMAs. Want us to speak at an event near you? Feel free to write us about it.
To wrap up this section, we have an “Engineering insights” space, where we will gather informative articles and cool projects from the web ecosystem. This is the perfect space to share something nice you read that made an impact during your learning or maybe something you wrote in order to help others and share.
Always feel at home
Today marks an exciting milestone in the journey of CodeSandbox and our incredible community. We believe that this new community platform will redefine the way we connect, learn, and grow together. A place that we hope will enable the soul of our community—the people!
Each of you, whether you're a contributor, user, or supporter, has shaped the way we build a better, more accessible, more empowering, and more collaborative product.
Let's continue to shape the future of CodeSandbox, and by extension, the future of our global developer community. We invite you to join, introduce yourself, share bits from your experience by sharing the projects you’re working on, and add feature requests that you think might help others too.
See you on codesandbox.community! Come say hi!
