8 ms·

Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?

314 points by swyx 4y ago

Hey folks! I'm trying to actively get better at pitching developer tools. So I had the idea of collecting an inspiration list of the "best of all time". Would like to crowdsource this! The vibe I'm going for is pitches that left you with a clear "before" and "after" division in your life where you not only "got it" but also keep referring to it from that point onward. Obvious candidate for example is DHH's 15 minute Rails demo (and i've been told the Elixir Liveview demo is similar) and Solomon Hykes' Docker demo. What other pitch is like that? (or successfully pitches a developer tool in a different way, up to your interpretation)

dandevs 4y ago
Howdy swyx. Long-time follower, first time writer. Following this thread! I have a hunch we'll see improvements to the Temporal workshops (like the Go one posted today).
- swyx 4y ago
  hi back! posted today? i dont see it on the youtube how do you like my old "in 7 mins" pitch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HjnQlnA5eY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HjnQlnA5eY happy to take feedback
zarmin 4y ago
Rich Harris - Rethinking Reactivity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao
- cloogshicer 4y ago
  This is a really really great presentation.
WalterGR 4y ago
There was a massive amount of excitement around Light Table when it was first demoed. I remember one or more pretty amazing videos. I don't have link(s) on-hand. Project: http://lighttable.com/ http://lighttable.com/ HN search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=light%20table&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... The top submission there is the place to start.
- randlet 4y ago
  This is the one that immediately sprang to mind for me too. Hype around it was huge and then seemed to die away pretty quickly.
- codetrotter 4y ago
  > The top submission there is the place to start Thread in question, from April 13, 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836978 The submitted link returns 404 but the Internet Archive has snapshots of it. Here is a snapshot from the day after it was submitted. https://web.archive.org/web/20120414175814/http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table---a-new-ide-concept/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120414175814/http://www.chris-... The embedded video from the above link does not play for me in the Internet Archive snapshot, but it's still available on https://vimeo.com/40281991 https://vimeo.com/40281991 And here is what the Light Table website looked like in 2013 https://web.archive.org/web/20130120114346/http://lighttable.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130120114346/http://lighttable... Submissions about Light Table linking to pages on the Light Table website https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lighttable.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lighttable.com
- ibdknox 4y ago
  Huh, not sure why the original link changed. It's still on my blog here: https://chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table-a-new-ide-concept/ https://chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table-a-new-ide-c...
  - WalterGR 4y ago
    Thanks!
  - hyuuu 4y ago
    what happened to the idea?
    - capableweb 4y ago
      I think the closest we got to a closure of Light Table is this: https://chris-granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/ https://chris-granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/ Which includes: > Light Table will continue to go on strong. We haven’t talked too much about it lately, but it’s used by tens of thousands of people and still growing. We use it every day to help us build Eve and thanks to the awesome people in the community that has sprung up around it, it gets better every week. Judging by GitHub contribution data (https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/graphs/contributors?from=2019-09-20&to=2022-06-17&type=c https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/graphs/contributors...), it seems there has only been 25 commits (from one author) since Sep 20, 2019.
swatcoder 4y ago
Huh. 25 years of this work and I've never experienced what you're describing. I didn't even know it was a thing. Generally keeping abreast of the industry, announcements generally just look like incremental innovations or productizations of familiar patterns that were already getting proven out manually. I don't mean to spoil on your efforts or interfere with you getting helpful answers (I'm sure you're not alone in how you experience the industry), but this is just a really interesting question to see someone pose.
- swyx 4y ago
  this may come out of my bias of working at early stage startups where a good pitch can make or break your entire future :)
swyx 4y ago
i also asked this on twitter so just putting some replies here: - Doug Engelbart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos - Twilio https://avc.com/2016/06/best-seed-pitch-ever/ https://avc.com/2016/06/best-seed-pitch-ever/ - Stripe - "7 lines of code" - Netlify - https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static-website-generators-next-big-thing/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static-websi... - Heroku - https://12factor.net/ https://12factor.net/ and git push heroku master - Cloudflare - https://mixtape.swyx.io/episodes/cloudflare-at-techcrunch-disrupt-2010-matthew-prince https://mixtape.swyx.io/episodes/cloudflare-at-techcrunch-di... - Node (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY&feature=youtu.be) and Deno (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA) - Firebase (reportedly) - https://twitter.com/_davideast/status/1537864335715860482 https://twitter.com/_davideast/status/1537864335715860482 smaller companies/less impactful pitches that i still like - Redux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsSnOQynTHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsSnOQynTHs - Stackblitz https://twitter.com/sulco/status/1537867531511287808?s=20&t=C-LwWGNsmIrQVqOu9U7OfA https://twitter.com/sulco/status/1537867531511287808?s=20&t=... - Comm https://www.notion.so/commapp/Comm-4ec7bbc1398442ce9add1d7953a6c584 https://www.notion.so/commapp/Comm-4ec7bbc1398442ce9add1d795... - Mongodb https://twitter.com/mongodb/status/1192530877148008448 https://twitter.com/mongodb/status/1192530877148008448 - Let's Encrypt https://twitter.com/mbleigh/status/1537866383710511104 https://twitter.com/mbleigh/status/1537866383710511104 - Figwheel-Clojurescript https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-kj2qwJa_E&t=598s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-kj2qwJa_E&t=598s - Svelte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao
- johns 4y ago
  This is the Twilio demo you should watch https://avc.com/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product/ https://avc.com/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product/
- creativenolo 4y ago
  Great question. Extra points for this comment too!
- swyx 4y ago
mikewarot 4y ago
I've never been sold a tool in that manner... I hated Turbo Pascal at first... but quickly grew to love it. GIT seemed weird, but got used to it. Make it easy for people to try, have good use cases, etc... is the best you can do.
johns 4y ago
This deserves a top-level comment. John Britton's NY Tech Meetup demo of Twilio[0] in 2010 is legendary. The CEO had been doing it in small groups for a little while, but the whole dynamic of it changed in such a large venue. Epitome of "show, don't tell." Hard to overstate what an impact it had on the company at the time (I think we were about 25 employees). [0]: https://avc.com/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product/ https://avc.com/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product/
- swyx 4y ago
  great tip - thank you. i have a pet saying that with developers, the classic advice of "talk benefits, not features" doesnt work (https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1361279902889086980?s=20&t=AWGEYKDwkBTy9eyjJZra5Q https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1361279902889086980?s=20&t=A...)
  - swyx 4y ago
    (author here) I've now added this to my tracking list of pitches: https://dx.tips/pitches https://dx.tips/pitches thanks for the suggestion on John Britton's talk!
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  A great sign of this being a classic is that I have heard about this a dozen times before, but this is the first time I actually saw the video. Absolutely great demo, also because it’s so low profile: it’s the type of demo we can all imagine ourselves doing at a meetup, it’s not the kind of super-smooth demo that only a charismatic Steve Jobs-type personality can pull off. It lets the product do the talking. But that’s also the caveat of this demo: it’s typically very difficult to figure out how to engage your audience in such a way with your product, and Twilio being in the mobile space makes that a lot easier.
  - wyclif 4y ago
    it’s not the kind of super-smooth demo that only a charismatic Steve Jobs-type personality can pull off And that's exactly why I like this demo so much more than even the original iPhone demo.
The_Colonel 4y ago
Intellij flow analysis as demoed here was pretty mind-blowing: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2019/11/intellij-ideas-static-analysis-vs-the-human-brain/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2019/11/intellij-ideas-stati... It is actually pretty awesome in practice, although my bugs tend to be way more trivial.
jedberg 4y ago
The first time I saw a demo for Google Cloud Spanner I felt this way. All they did was pull up a massive dataset, and then start running queries on it, but from someone who had dealt with datasets of that size, it was just plain impressive. Pretty much every answer here is a form of, "present a problem that no one thought was solvable, then show the solution you've already built".
- swyx 4y ago
  i think thats great because you had the context for what the state of the art was at the time, and then were presented with something clearly beyond. i'm interested in how to do that, but with extra added context for those without your context. maybe like a "ghost" view (like how people do in speedrun games) of where you'd be/what you'd have to do without the thing.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    Right it worked well because it was done at a conference on big data, so everyone in the audience was primed. But finding targeted audiences is a good way to shortcut the context. Also important is knowing if your tool is early or late in the innovation cycle. If you're early on, then the biggest part of your job is convincing people they have a problem they need solving in the first place (arguably blockchain is in this phase right now, where a lot of what those companies have to do is convince people they are solving a real problem). If you're later on, like Cloud Spanner, people already know they have a problem and will be excited about a solution.
tmcneal 4y ago
Is it possible to personalize your pitches to individual users? At our startup [1] we try to get straight to point when pitching the product and demo something that is as close as possible to how the person we're talking to would actually use the product. For example, here's a video I just recorded a few minutes ago for someone that I've been talking to via email: https://www.loom.com/share/01fd4a6963a04258908f7b12e2afaa3a https://www.loom.com/share/01fd4a6963a04258908f7b12e2afaa3a One advantage we have is that it only takes a few minutes to show the product, and it works on any publicly available site so with a little research it's pretty easy to show something that's pretty close to how they'd use the product themselves. [1] https://reflect.run https://reflect.run
- swyx 4y ago
  i think that absolutely qualifies. also its pretty neat that the Loom video just unfurls inside of HN because i have the Loom extension installed! nice hack Loom.
  - mkmk 4y ago
    to each their own – i found it a bit obnoxious as it goes over the line of what i expected their extension to do for me...
layer8 4y ago
You might get some inspiration from Bret Victor’s videos/demos: http://worrydream.com/ http://worrydream.com/ Personally I do not remember ever having the experience you describe, but that’s probably because in my formative years videos mostly didn’t exist yet on the internet, and I learned new tools from reading books, software documentation, forums and blog posts. And once you’ve reached a certain experience level, it becomes much more difficult to get your mind blown by some new tool, because the ideas usually have all been there in some form already, and you also see the limitations and possible drawbacks more quickly.
- ripley12 4y ago
  This. Bret Victor’s Inventing on Principle talk changed my life. And the funny thing is, he’s not pitching a tool or even his own specific principles; it’s largely a talk about how you can work toward a cause of your own choosing. But Bret’s principle and the tools he built to demonstrate it are so compelling that they’ve lived in my head rent-free for years.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is even better (albeit it isn't only a product pitch): https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII
- gorkemcetin 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing this, absolutely lovely content here.
agumonkey 4y ago
The Unix Chainsaw by Gary Bernhardt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQnyApKysg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQnyApKysg4 almost nothing new, but a clear mastery of combining existing tools into high leverage
- topaztee 4y ago
  that was a great watch
mtmail 4y ago
Way back when AWS EC2 was announced by Jeff Bezos. He showed a graph where a startup needed to scale fast because startup's launch went viral and they were able to add more power (machines, cpu etc) quick. OK, nice. But then the first launch hype was over and EC2 allowed them to scale down equally fast to safe money. That was the killer feature for me: servers rented by the hour.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  Reminds me of this Jeff Bezos interview from 2006 where he talks about S3 and goes, "It is hard to come up with a web application that doesn't need to remember things". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdQt0hF8jOo&t=355 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdQt0hF8jOo&t=355
- swyx 4y ago
  if anyone could find this graph/talk, i would very much appreciate it!
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    May be this one where Bezos speaks about Animoto at Startup School 2008: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uIc-VB-ke9o https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uIc-VB-ke9o Here's the full talk (which was titled, AWS: We make electricity, so you don't have to): https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/6nKfFHuouzA https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/6nKfFHuouzA
    - swyx 4y ago
      ahh brilliant! I was just linking off to https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/we_build_muck_s/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/we_build_muck_s/ which is Jeff Barr's recap of Bezos' pitch at the time
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
lynndotpy 4y ago
The TypeScript website is very convincing: https://www.typescriptlang.org/ https://www.typescriptlang.org/ I was just learning JavaScript, heard a lot about TypeScript, but scrolling on this page was what convinced me to learn TypeScript. (And I am deeply skeptical of Microsoft and I've was hesitant at the time to learn JS tools and frameworks.) Not sure if it's a contender for "best of all time" but I remember it as strikingly good
- swyx 4y ago
  given that TS is one of the most popular languages of all time, i'd say that works :) thanks! although a website isn't as "permanent" as a blogpost or talk which is kinda what im looking for but hey i'll take anything for my inspo
gm3dmo 4y ago
If it’s the pitch then you don’t have a product. Google wave had what might be the greatest pitch of all time. I was certainly all in. It’s 2022 and all we have to save us from email is Slack which is a pale imitation of Wave wearing a sparkly tutu stolen from IRC.
- deleted 4y ago
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ghoomketu 4y ago
I loved Openai's codex JavaScript game making live demo(1) where they actually created a fully functioning game in JavaScript using just plain old english. Kind of changed my whole view about programming and it's future. (1) https://youtu.be/SGUCcjHTmGY https://youtu.be/SGUCcjHTmGY
frakkingcylons 4y ago
I can’t remember the exact blog post or video that drew me in, but Felipe Hoffa has written/recorded many excellent examples of using BigQuery which use one of their public datasets. I was very impressed when I first played around with it on the free tier back in 2015. The pricing seemed really reasonable and I was amazed with how quick it was on large datasets. An example article: https://hoffa.medium.com/static-javascript-code-analysis-within-bigquery-ed0e3011732c https://hoffa.medium.com/static-javascript-code-analysis-wit...
spitfire 4y ago
Steve Jobs demo of NeXT's interface builder and enterprise object framework. The IB demo has him building an interface without touching code. He goes on to demo a simple app without code. This was in 1989, I'm still waiting for Linux to get close to that. The EOF demo has him building a CRUD app with queries and joins from IB. Again in 1990. Imagine the original rails tutorial but 15 years earlier. Still waiting on this one too.
- wantoncl 4y ago
  I think this is it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA
  - spitfire 4y ago
    That's one of them. There's a few more with really dark screens floating around that go into a bit more detail.
  - eismcc 4y ago
    he shows a db interface builder at: https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?t=1387 https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?t=1387 the video on the whole is pretty mind boggling.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  What’s interesting is that NeXT and Apple dropped the ball on essentially all of that stuff. IB was never as nice to use for UIKit as it originally was for AppKit. Bits of EOF made it into macOS (I think this was the origin of KVO?) but as I understand it, most of it went into WebObjects, which got ported to Java and eventually end-of-lifed. If IB had kept up with UIKit/CoreAnimation/Autolayout — or the frameworks had made sure to make IB an integrated part of those features, I’m convinced that SwiftUI wouldn’t exist because there would have been no need.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > The IB demo has him building an interface without touching code. He goes on to demo a simple app without code. This was in 1989, I'm still waiting for Linux to get close to that. Close to what? Building an interface without touching code? You could do it for over a decade, at least.
wantoncl 4y ago
Not a dev tool, but I was very impressed with this demo of Photosynth: https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosynth_can_connect_the_world_s_images https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...
- Titan2189 4y ago
  Oh yeah, I remember that and have watched and recommended this video countless times over the years
- deleted 4y ago
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tmsh 4y ago
- Rich Hickey early Clojure talks - Lee Robinson-style tutorials - https://threejs-journey.com/ https://threejs-journey.com/ and https://www.3dfordesigners.com/ https://www.3dfordesigners.com/ (which incidentally one can use as the basis for dynamic threejs learning pages) I think that's the biggest thing. Create a mini course on how to use the tool (e.g. a smaller version of https://css-for-js.dev/ https://css-for-js.dev/). That's a big lift, but then if you make that free and there's tangential benefits of learning related best practices when going through it, I think developers would be inclined to click through and see how it works. https://docs.temporal.io/go/run-your-first-app-tutorial https://docs.temporal.io/go/run-your-first-app-tutorial is cool but can you sandbox so I can just play it like a game without having to really install stuff? Developers know intuitively if it's easy enough to walk through and wrap your head around in a browser, it's maybe easy enough to get positive feedback from and overall value, and integrate into prod systems. Just an idea.
- swyx 4y ago
  yes the temporal sandbox is one of the first things i requested when I joined :) it will come eventually just unfortunately is not a priority vs getting the rest of Temporal Cloud ready just to meet the insane demand
jbandela1 4y ago
Another is Bill Gates Visual Basic 1.0 demo It was revolutionary. Before that, making a Windows GUI was pretty low level with calls to C APIs and callbacks and registrations. Visual Basic changed all that with point and drag and drop and you could make a GUI in a matter of minutes. https://youtu.be/Fh_UDQnboRw https://youtu.be/Fh_UDQnboRw
- intrepidsoldier 4y ago
  The original LowCode demo.
  - protomyth 4y ago
    Steve Jobs NeXT development demos were out before 1991.
- WillDeAth 4y ago
  Having Visual Basic as the first language I ever wrote, this is awesome to see the pitch!
ssalka 4y ago
Not about dev tools per se, but this talk by Greg Young on event sourcing & CQRS forever changed how I think about modeling systems, preserving history, and supporting multiple read models/versioning. Really clear walkthrough of the types of problems that benefit from an event sourced system, how event sourcing addresses them, and exploration of new use cases it enables. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHGkaShoyNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHGkaShoyNs
- azeirah 4y ago
  I liked his talks a lot, ended up using a rudimentary event sourcing system in my own hobby project. It's not super big, but there are over 30 million events in there. It's all just running on mariaDB so no fancy software in there, there's this `stored_events` table and it just keeps on trucking. Software running fine :) It's quite nice to keep history. I never made tables for actual payments, but I did store paypal events in this table. Only recently did I realize this data is actually useful for me as support for my users so I made a UI loosely based on this query, and it just works SELECT somestuff FROM stored_events WHERE event_type='paypalIPNSuccessfulEvent'; I made this event easily over 5 years ago, today the data is useful. Thank you event sourcing! Edit: Oh and I shouldn't forget that in between this time I was constantly thinking about how big of an architectural mistake this was. I was just keeping a bunch of data, not using it, using some abstraction sold to me by some guy on YouTube... Well, it has its advantages, but the biggest issues lied with how I thought the table had large performance issues. Turns out it doesn't really have performance issues, I just didn't know how to use indices :| The aforementioned SELECT statement runs in milliseconds, where there are a couple thousand of that specific event out of 30m+
ckluis 4y ago
https://remix.run https://remix.run frankly is an amazing dev pitch.
- WillDeAth 4y ago
  Was at the Conf in SLC last month, Michael Jackson pitches Remix amazingly
  - swyx 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_nxvVTNY9s&t=2400s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_nxvVTNY9s&t=2400s for those looking
propter_hoc 4y ago
Firebase did an amazing job at this when they launched. Not a surprise to see their massive growth and quick acquisition. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877
astuyvenberg 4y ago
Hey Swyx! So many. - Serverless Framework. Write 5 lines of YAML and have an API endpoint that scales to infinity and back to zero. Still blows my mind. (I am biased though) - Fullstory/real user monitoring/session replay tools. Such a clear way to see what someone was doing when they ran into a bug. - Github Copilot. Still amazes me!
- swyx 4y ago
  hey Aaron! yeah Serverless has a great demo for sure. very fast move by Austen to spot and grab that opportunity as fast as he did, feels like someone wouldve figured it out eventually. i feel like this is a list of "products that demo well". obviously a nice advantage but am also looking for "great demos of products that would have been hard to demo", if that jogs any ideas and dont feel constrained to just demos, sometimes a verbal pitch alone is enough to give someone the mind virus
- capableweb 4y ago
  > - Serverless Framework. Write 5 lines of YAML and have an API endpoint that scales to infinity and back to zero. Still blows my mind. (I am biased though) If you're actually pitching your own product as "scaling to infinity" and you're doing that to developers, I'd suggest to scale back on the exaggeration a bit.
  - astuyvenberg 4y ago
    I'm speaking specifically to the question asked - the first time I saw a demo. I worked there after it already existed, and am no longer employed there.
carapace 4y ago
Steve Klabnik comparing Rust to the Sawstop safe table saw. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26514114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26514114
- steveklabnik 4y ago
  Glad you like it :)
  - carapace 4y ago
    Cheers! You left me 'with a clear "before" and "after" division in your life where you not only "got it" but also keep referring to it from that point onward.' Fourteen months later it was the first thought that came to mind. ;)
henning 4y ago
The original Rails demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY Everyone went nuts when this dropped in 2004.
- latortuga 4y ago
  Thought of this one as well, the original "whoops!" demo for Rails.
  - rlt 4y ago
    Oh man that “whoops” brings me back.
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johnhenry 4y ago
I thought this was a pretty good pitch for charm's tools https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRgHKofrupU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRgHKofrupU
bsima 4y ago
Emacs Rocks has some great demos, they are very well-structured https://emacsrocks.com/ https://emacsrocks.com/
- sandinmyjoints 4y ago
  There’s a video of Magnars giving a presentation where he starts with some slides in org-mode and then live codes the slide manager in Emacs as part of the talk—-that was very inspiring while I was new to Emacs!
egl2021 4y ago
TECO (Tape Editor/COrrector): enter your name as a command. what does it do?
beefman 4y ago
The original Meteor pitch was pretty great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsi0aJ9yr2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsi0aJ9yr2o Got them an $11M Series A from a16z, which was big at the time. But who's in this video? Geoff and Matt?
- swyx 4y ago
  thanks for digging this up! i got my start on Meteor and cant believe i never saw this video the title is even adorably typoed, lol
segf4ult 4y ago
The original Dropbox demo[1] is great. [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-product/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-pro...
- trhoad 4y ago
  My favourite bit was where half of HackerNews shat all over the idea.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    That's not even true. While it's true the infamous "You can just build it yourself with X & Y" probably spawned from there, the first submission about Dropbox actually has a lot of positive comments about the idea. There was way less than half of them being critical to the idea (not sure "critical" is even the right word, maybe "suggesting alternative approaches for some" is better).
leetrout 4y ago
Kelsey Hightower comparing the kubernetes scheduler to Tetris was awesome for cementing a mental model. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlAXp0-M6SY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlAXp0-M6SY
- yen223 4y ago
  As much as I like to whinge about Kubernetes, I must admit Kelsey Hightower demos make a very good case for why Kubernetes is useful.
beefman 4y ago
I remember being really impressed by this 2005 demo of Microsoft's Sparkle interface builder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFTqhuL83QE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFTqhuL83QE which eventually shipped as Expression Blend.
neilv 4y ago
The extended Apple+IBM Taligent demo I saw in early-1990s was impressive and also stylish. It let you do things that seemed beyond the current convention with OO GUI toolkits and application frameworks. And there was also a bit of humor: I recall some demo of example application for some business approval workflow having something like an animation of a rubber stamp thumbs up, which was a real crowd-pleaser. (This was around when a handful of Internet nerds and university students started trying Mosaic (maybe Netscape Navigator was also out?), but Web browsers at the time were mostly just a subset of LaTeX article.sty hypertext on a gray background, without even tables or frames, much less JS and CSS. So even those aware of the Web were still thinking non-Web-browser desktop applications, or writing a Web hypertext browser.)
- deleted 4y ago
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rr808 4y ago
Its free and open source! Seriously devs hate paying for tools.
olalonde 4y ago
I was mind blown when I first saw an expert using Vim. It convinced me to invest time in learning it. I don't remember the particular video but there are a few similar ones on Youtube.
- MPSimmons 4y ago
  When you watch an expert vim user, first it seems like nothing happens, then _everything_ happens.
janejeon 4y ago
Not an answer to OP, but I just wanted to say thank you for this thread (and everyone for answering). I've been insanely burnt out by random bullshit at work, wondering why I'm even in this business to begin with, and after watching a few of these it really motivated me, brought back the old memories of wanting to build cool stuff and ideas to solve real problems (a lot of the ideas that I still hold onto), and made me realize that I'm unhappy with work because all I was doing was just people bullshit and bureaucracy bullshit every day, and not actually out there, building stuff; that I just became "yet another white collar worker" and not a hacker and an engineer. And that has allowed to see what went wrong, and plan for how to get out of this "ditch of boring, stressful politics and human pit". Seriously, thank you. Without this thread, I would've likely continued to slog on at work without remembering my buried ambitions.
jamesgpearce 4y ago
Lee Byron on Immutable/React/Flux: https://youtu.be/I7IdS-PbEgI https://youtu.be/I7IdS-PbEgI “I only have a minute left, which is more than enough time to build the undo stack”
dezzeus 4y ago
This video of the UNIX OS: https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0 https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0
franciscop 4y ago
I was recently blown away with Vocaloid 5's introduction video, they make it seem so easy I was thinking all the time "I can do that!*": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAtVGHl1AFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAtVGHl1AFM * But I know the software is a beast so I probably don't, and I have no need at all for the product but almost instant-bought it
harryvederci 4y ago
This is probably not exactly what you're looking for, but I remember being very impressed with this guy's TDD workflow on Emberconf 2015: "Toran Billups - test-driven development by example" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b1vcg_XSR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b1vcg_XSR8
whateveracct 4y ago
I write most of my Haskell doing the dishes.
pyreal 4y ago
The SQL on Rails demo: https://youtu.be/0_PK1eDQyVg https://youtu.be/0_PK1eDQyVg
al_borland 4y ago
Jeff Han’s multitouch demo is one I always remember. https://youtu.be/ac0E6deG4AU https://youtu.be/ac0E6deG4AU
phelm 4y ago
Dan Abramov - Hot Reloading with Time Travel https://youtu.be/xsSnOQynTHs https://youtu.be/xsSnOQynTHs
Too 4y ago
If you believe in all publicity is good publicity you can refer to Steve Balmer, jumping around all sweaty and screaming developers developers developers. I don’t even remember what was actually demoed (maybe .net?) At least it left us all referring back to it for decades.
adrianthedev 4y ago
I'm glad you mentioned DHH's Rails demo. Along the same lines and taking that productivity even further is this demo for Avo. An extendable framework that helps developers build production-ready apps with configuration. The pitch is that every app has a way of managing the data. You have a page where you view a list of some items (Index table), a place to see the details of those items (Show view) and some page to update those records (Edit view). Why go and build those things everytime. When we start building apps we don't go building our framework. We don't build Rails for every project, but we use something like Rails, Laravel, NextJS, etc. Going forward with this, why build the admin panel when most of the time you end up with something similar. The views from before, a way to filter things, to sort them, to apply actions, etc. This is 15 minute long and goes through most (not all) of the features. In the demo I build a room booking app. This is the application the customer will use and not some obscure admin panel where only the support team will reach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK47E7TMXn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK47E7TMXn0 In this, second, 20 minute video I build a production-ready blog admin panel the same way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgNK-oINFww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgNK-oINFww
- adrianthedev 4y ago
  Disclaimer, I’m the founder of Avo and it’s a paid product. I work a lot on keeping the product up to date and bring new features on.
jacke 4y ago
In my opinion the greatest example is Bret Victor's keynotes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4 Key points: * Simple to get it (without external knowledge) * Demos * Content sections and small focus time
michaelsalim 4y ago
I personally love this pitch/demo of Ultorg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31219324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31219324 Straight to the point and shows everything you need to know.