Blockly updates in 2019
Rachel Fenichel
Hi everybody,
2019 was a big year for Blockly! This year we made a big push to make Blockly easier to customize without forking it. Many of you spoke to us about pain points at the summit, and we’ve worked to resolve many of the common ones.
In no particular order, here’s what happened this year:
Monica and Sam joined the team, and Andrew moved on.
Rachel added insertion markers.
Abby added themes, including colorblind-friendly and dark modes.
Abby added keyboard navigation, making accessibility research easier and power users happier.
We removed the Closure UI library entirely.
Beka cleaned up our Field APIs and wrote documentation and code samples.
Navil built out a sample server and client for realtime collaboration
We ran our second annual Blockly Developer Summit, and many of you attended!
If you were unable to attend, you can watch the talks on YouTube.
We started publishing on NPM, and Sam wrote samples for a variety of frameworks.
We rewrote our renderer to make it easier to customize.
Sam built out the Zelos renderer, which looks like MakeCode and Scratch.
Zelos will be included in the next release
The Blockly community continued to grow and thrive this year. We saw lots of cool demos on the forum. You asked many questions, and you also answered them for each other. You filed bugs, and you fixed them. We saw lots of collaboration happening at the summit, as people swapped ideas about how to solve common problems and showed each other their projects. We’ll see you again next year!
Last but not least: Erik Pasternak is leaving the team to work on other education-related projects at Google, and I’m taking over as team lead. Four and a half years ago the Kids Coding Team was a twinkle in Erik’s eye and Blockly was a one-man project run by Neil. Thanks to Erik’s dedication we now have a full team working on Blockly and related projects, and we have strong relationships with many groups in the block-coding space. Thank you, Erik!
Cheers,
Rachel