Want to make cool stuff? Remix existing apps to create your own masterpieces with Gomix.
If you don't really know what you're doing, the prospect of building an app is more than a little overwhelming. What you need are some rock-solid examples that you can learn from and remix, gradually figuring out how they work and using that knowledge to build your own skills.
Which is why Fog Creek has launched a brand new tool that's designed to make it much easier to learn to create and deploy your own apps. It's called Gomix, and it's inspired by the early days of the internet when you could learn how stuff worked by simply looking at the source.
Much as it's become much harder to teach yourself web design from looking at the source of existing pages, it's not at all easy to find and pick through the source of an interesting app, but Gomix is a platform built to let you do exactly that.
It combines a load of working example apps that you can copy, tweak and remix, with a code editor to do it all in and instant hosting and deployment that enable you to see the effects of your tweaks immediately.
Pick an interesting project and learn by remixing it
There's plenty you can do with Gomix's example projects, whether you want to create an instant Bootstrap website, build your own Slack bot or even teach Amazon's Alexa personal assistant some new tricks.
You can write games, make tools, create the assorted building blocks you'll need for larger web projects and much more, all while teaching yourself to code in the time-honoured way of messing about with someone else's code.
Gomix instantly deploys your code so you can see if it works
It's a brilliant way to learn coding, and once you've picked up some skills Gomix is still useful; it's a fully-functioning developer environment that you can use to host and deploy your projects without any headaches.
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Gomix is in beta at the moment and completely free to use with no setup required; Fog Creek say that they may introduce premium features further down the line but that there'll always be some kind of free plan. If you've always harboured a desire to code but never really known where to start, this might just be the place; check it out!
Jim McCauley is a writer, performer and cat-wrangler who started writing professionally way back in 1995 on PC Format magazine, and has been covering technology-related subjects ever since, whether it's hardware, software or videogames. A chance call in 2005 led to Jim taking charge of Computer Arts' website and developing an interest in the world of graphic design, and eventually led to a move over to the freshly-launched Creative Bloq in 2012. Jim now works as a freelance writer for sites including Creative Bloq, T3 and PetsRadar, specialising in design, technology, wellness and cats, while doing the occasional pantomime and street performance in Bath and designing posters for a local drama group on the side.
