[HN Gopher] Launch HN: GitDuck (YC S20) - Zoom for developers wi...
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Launch HN: GitDuck (YC S20) - Zoom for developers with real-time
code sharing
Hi everyone! We are Dragos and Thiago from GitDuck
(https://gitduck.com). We are building GitDuck, a Zoom for
developers with direct integration to the IDE so software
developers can talk and collaborate in real-time. It all started
by accident, Dragos and I were working on something else, a screen
recording tool and we started to use it internally to record short
videos of our code. At first it was just for quick code reviews and
to debug, but soon we realized how helpful it was to have a video
explanation of the code. Kind of rubber duck debugging with video.
;) After talking to almost 300 developers and learning that other
people were facing similar collaboration issues we decided to focus
100% on building this tool. We are the first users and we use
GitDuck internally for quick assistance, pair programming, code
reviews or just discussing ideas. It has the features you would
expect in a video call tool -- like audio, video chat and screen
sharing, but the UX and the integrations were built exclusively for
developers. You can easily share your code and do pair programming.
We are building integrations for all the IDEs. This enables you to
collaborate without screen sharing (so it's faster and and consumes
less bandwidth), directly from your IDE and independently of the
IDE that other people are using. Whenever you join a GitDuck
meeting, your IDE extension wakes up and allows you to share your
code with the other meeting participants (or join the already
shared code from other meeting participant). When your peers join
your code, they can see and edit your files in real-time, similar
to the Google Docs experience. At any given point you can also go
to your peers position so you can see in which file and line they
are. Check a 1 min demo
(https://gitduck.com/watch/5f1808919552aefe64ce0751) GitDuck
currently has integrations to VS Code and VSCodium. In the next few
days we are going to release the integrations to all JetBrains
IDEs. Vim, Sublime and others coming after that. One important
aspect to mention is security. We are the first users of the
service so we focus a lot on building something that we would trust
to use ourselves. All the files shared from your IDE are always
shared via peer-to-peer and are end-to-end encrypted. No piece of
code never touches our servers, so we never have access to your
code. All calls are encrypted and p2p (if 4 or less participants).
If 5 or more people join we switch to a cloud infrastructure in
order to maintain the quality, but the media are always encrypted
and we never have access to your calls. You can read more about it
here (https://gitduck.com/security) and we are always open for your
suggestions to improve. We would love to hear your thoughts and
feedback. What are your ideas about tools like this? Thank you!
Author : borisandcrispin
Score : 56 points
Date : 2020-08-20 20:54 UTC (2 hours ago)
| koolba wrote:
| This name violates the git trademark policy: https://public-
| inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...
|
| I do like the "duck" part of it though!
| 1f60c wrote:
| Do GitHub, GitLab, Gitea and other "gits" have an agreement
| with "the" Git?
| athorax wrote:
| It explains that in the link they posted...
|
| So GitHub is essentially outside the scope of the trademark
| policy, due to the history. We also decided to explicitly
| grandfather some major projects that were using similar
| portmanteaus, but which had generally been good citizens of
| the Git ecosystem (building on Git in a useful way, not
| breaking compatibility). Those include GitLab, JGit, libgit2,
| and some others. The reasoning was generally that it would be
| a big pain for those projects, which have established their
| own brands, to have to switch names. It's hard to hold them
| responsible for picking a name that violated a policy that
| didn't yet exist.
| rzzzt wrote:
| There were two related issues on the Gitea project page about
| this:
|
| - https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/4175
|
| - https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1516
|
| In the latter, someone mentioned that a few of these projects
| were grandfathered in/have written permission from the
| Software Freedom Conservancy and so may use a portmanteau as
| the name.
| athorax wrote:
| Site and demo won't load for me.
|
| The naming and references to 'Zoom' are odd. Instead of "Zoom for
| developers" maybe explain exactly what that means? Is is screen
| sharing and group meetings?
|
| When you compare yourself to zoom I immediately set the bar that
| the usability/performance/security/etc. must at least be to their
| level.
| borisandcrispin wrote:
| What error did you get when loading the page and demo?
|
| By Zoom we mean a video chat tool, but built for developers. I
| think it's hard to have a tool for every type of work and I can
| think some use cases that Zoom is great (like in big
| conferences) and others that is really bad (for debugging for
| example).
|
| We are just focused on having a great experience for
| developers, so no big conferences or webinar features.
| random_dork1 wrote:
| The article is quite explicit. Here is a small sample:
|
| It has the features you would expect in a video call tool --
| like audio, video chat and screen sharing, but the UX and the
| integrations were built exclusively for developers. You can
| easily share your code and do pair programming. We are building
| integrations for all the IDEs. This enables you to collaborate
| without screen sharing (so it's faster and and consumes less
| bandwidth), directly from your IDE and independently of the IDE
| that other people are using.
| spartas wrote:
| If this project takes off, I see a lot of people mis-typing
| gitdick instead. Probably should either look at changing the name
| or at least also registering gitdick.com pre-emptively
| 1f60c wrote:
| It's already taken. _shrug_ It points to someone's GitLab
| instance.
|
| As a word of warning, the home page does feature a vector image
| of something that looks quite phallic.
| gerbal wrote:
| How is this product "Zoom for Developers"? What makes GitDuck
| like a video conferencing platform which supports 100+ concurrent
| users?
|
| To me "Zoom for x" implies video calling as a primary feature.
| borisandcrispin wrote:
| We could have said "Google Meet for developers", but Zoom is
| shorter. :)
|
| But yeah, the point is that you can video chat and we are
| adding other integrations for developers. Pair programming is
| one, terminal and server sharing is coming.
| inetsee wrote:
| The very first paragraph lists one of the features as "direct
| integration to the IDE so software developers can talk and
| collaborate in real-time". It doesn't sound to me as if it's
| aiming to support "100+ concurrent users". If it can help two
| programmers working remotely be as productive as they would be
| if they were sitting side by side, then I think it's a very
| useful product.
| random_dork1 wrote:
| 'zoom' tells you that you can video/audio call people, 'for
| developers' tells you that it has features that help with
| development. It's quite clear for me.
| random_dork1 wrote:
| Cool stuff! Will try it.
| somishere wrote:
| I've never thought much about pair programming within the same
| file, seems like a super interesting concept. Obviously co-
| editing e.g. google docs makes sense, but there's no user-facing
| concept of validity here. How does saving work, is the idea that
| someone codes while someone watches? This already causes all
| sorts of fun with collisions in git, how do people work around
| that locally with things like hot reloading?
| borisandcrispin wrote:
| The way it works is that you are sharing your local files to
| the other people and when they edit the file, all the changes
| are being applied to your file. So in the end you are the one
| saving all the changes and making the commits.
|
| You can be working in parallel in different files or just
| following around. It really depends on what you are trying to
| achieve.
|
| One cool thing to try with GD is mob programming. :)
| ashton314 wrote:
| Looks really cool! Any plans for an Emacs client?
| borisandcrispin wrote:
| Definitely! We'll support it very soon. You would be surprised
| with the amount of people requesting it.
| peff wrote:
| Sounds neat, but I think your name runs afoul of Git's trademark;
| see https://git-scm.com/trademark
| swyx wrote:
| how? i just read through. nobody would "assume a greater degree
| of association between you and the Git Project than actually
| exists."
| cepp wrote:
| How is this better than Visual Studio (Code) Live Share [1]?
|
| Adding a third party dependency for code-sharing seems like a
| non-starter for large enterprise companies which already have a
| hard enough time with the first party offering.
|
| [1]: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/
| borisandcrispin wrote:
| The main advantage is that you can collaborate with people
| using other IDEs. So I could be using VSC, other person
| Webstorm and a third one Vim.
| slykar wrote:
| I guess they are probably just starting and the claims on their
| website are too far-fetched. I might give it a try if they come
| up with integration for JetBrains IDEs.
| borisandcrispin wrote:
| JetBrains is coming in the next few days! We are already
| using it internally.
| swyx wrote:
| nobody's mentioned them so i'll toss them in here -
| https://tuple.app/ is also focused on the pair programming
| problem.
|
| I don't believe they have IDE integration, but like others have
| said, Tuple + Live Share would be a competitor to GitDuck. Glad
| to see more attempts at the space though!
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(page generated 2020-08-20 23:00 UTC)