The New Koding. Private Beta Has Begun!

Home 46 Comments

We are so excited. For over a year, we’ve been working on a completely new Koding, totally built from scratch. Finally, we are getting close to our first big milestone… We’ve started a limited private beta for some of our most active users with a wider beta to soon follow.

In the beginning, Koding was what you could call a passion project… built because we saw that getting started with development is too hard. Developers have to do way too much work and spend way too much money and time to run their first line of code. Even after that, it’s just too hard to work with others. We had the vision of a future for developers where getting started was easy, and you could work, collaborate and run your apps without jumping through hoops and spending your hard earned money. We realized nothing like this existed, so we decided to create it ourselves.

What took so long?

Until about 6 months ago, Koding was a project that we dedicated all of our free time to, but we dreamed that one day we could make it our full time jobs. That day came in July, when we met some awesome, forward-thinking people who wanted to support our project and we got the funding we needed to make this dream a reality. As soon as that happened, we packed up from our various locations around the world and moved to San Francisco to get it done. We now have an amazing team working on something that we hope will change the way people build apps, and today we’re a big step closer to that goal.

What’s new?

Everything. You can expect to see the functionality you are used to with the current Kodingen and quite a bit more. It’s all been improved and rebuilt on a node.js stack, with our own custom back-end and front-end frameworks. Expect them to be open-sourced sometime in 2012… more on that later :)

Here are a few highlights of the new Koding:

A free development server that runs PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and Node.js out of the box

Online Code Editing with syntax support for over 20 languages

In-browser terminal

Full Git support with a tight Github integration… with other version control systems coming soon.

Sharing and Collaboration

This list is just a bit of what you can expect to see as a user of the new Koding. The best part… the basic public features of Koding you see here (and lots more to come) will always be free.

We’re also hard at work on additional private features, teams, bug tracking, integrated chat and a few secret projects.

What to expect

In the next few days, we’ll start contacting users to participate in our private beta. Many of you have already requested to be included. You can expect to hear from us soon… but please be patient. We’ll be letting users in slowly. Existing users can request to join the beta, just log in and click the link in the header.

After the private beta, depending on our progress, we’ll start to let everyone in. Once this happens, all of your existing data and user accounts will be migrated over to the new system. Lots more to share on this plan later.

Most importantly… thank you!

Probably the most important thing to mention is that we would never have been able to quit our day jobs and come together full-time to create the new Koding without the support of our users… (now up to over 35,000!) and we can’t thank you enough! We’re so excited to show you what we’ve been working on. Stay tuned!