DEV Community

Cover image for We built a GitHub-style social layer inside our cloud IDE — here's why
Augustine
Augustine

Posted on

We built a GitHub-style social layer inside our cloud IDE — here's why

Most IDEs are isolated by design.

Your code lives in a workspace. Collaboration happens somewhere else. Discovery happens somewhere else. Building in public happens somewhere else.

We wanted to change that.

That's why we shipped Cloudpen Community.

Cloudpen is a browser-based cloud IDE with built-in deployment and collaboration features. The Community layer sits on top of that and gives every developer a public presence tied directly to their work.

What's included

🧑‍💻 Public profiles

Every account gets a profile at cloudpen.dev/u/username.

Profiles include:

  • Pinned projects
  • Star and fork counts
  • Contribution activity heatmaps
  • Languages and skills
  • Followers and following

Your work has a permanent public home.

🔍 Explore & Fork

Browse public projects from other developers.

See something interesting?

Fork it directly into your workspace and start building immediately.

No cloning.
No local setup.
No environment configuration.

Just open and build.

👥 Follow Developers

Discover developers whose work interests you and follow what they're building.

Instead of finding projects through social media posts, you can discover them directly where they're created.

🤝 Direct Project Collaborators

Invite specific developers to collaborate on projects.

Permissions are granular, so you control exactly who can view, edit, or manage project resources.

** 🏗️ Public Teams**

Teams can be public and open for anyone to request joining.

Permissions are role-based:

  • Owner
  • Admin
  • Write
  • Read-only

All permission checks are enforced at the API level.

** Why we built it**

Open source proved that developers learn faster when work is visible.

But most development tools still separate coding, discovery, collaboration, and community into different products.

We wanted them to exist in one place.

Cloudpen is no longer just a place to write code.

It's also a place to discover developers, collaborate on projects, and build in public.

🔗 cloudpen.dev/community

Top comments (0)