[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?
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Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?
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)
Author : swyx
Score : 147 points
Date : 2022-06-17 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
| egl2021 wrote:
| TECO (Tape Editor/COrrector): enter your name as a command. what
| does it do?
| tmcneal wrote:
| 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
|
| 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
| swyx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| zarmin wrote:
| Rich Harris - Rethinking Reactivity:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao
| cloogshicer wrote:
| This is a really really great presentation.
| spitfire wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think this is it?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA
| eismcc wrote:
| he shows a db interface builder at:
| https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?t=1387
|
| the video on the whole is pretty mind boggling.
| spitfire wrote:
| That's one of them. There's a few more with really dark
| screens floating around that go into a bit more detail.
| beefman wrote:
| I remember being really impressed by this 2005 demo of
| Microsoft's Sparkle interface builder
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFTqhuL83QE
|
| which eventually shipped as Expression Blend.
| ckluis wrote:
| https://remix.run frankly is an amazing dev pitch.
| WillDeAth wrote:
| Was at the Conf in SLC last month, Michael Jackson pitches
| Remix amazingly
| swyx wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_nxvVTNY9s&t=2400s for those
| looking
| beefman wrote:
| The original Meteor pitch was pretty great
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| astuyvenberg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > - 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.
| WalterGR wrote:
| 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/
|
| HN search:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| The top submission there is the place to start.
| randlet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > The top submission there is the place to start
|
| Thread in question, from April 13, 2012:
| 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-...
|
| 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
|
| And here is what the Light Table website looked like in 2013
| 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
| ibdknox wrote:
| 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-c...
| WalterGR wrote:
| Thanks!
| hyuuu wrote:
| what happened to the idea?
| capableweb wrote:
| I think the closest we got to a closure of Light Table is
| this: 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/Lig
| htTable/LightTable/graphs/contributors...), it seems there
| has only been 25 commits (from one author) since Sep 20,
| 2019.
| ibdknox wrote:
| There was actually quite a lot of discussion on the
| mailing list (primary community back then) when we had to
| shift priorities. https://groups.google.com/g/light-
| table-discussion/c/XNNi2yx...
|
| The LT blog also had a few updates as the community drove
| the project forward for a few more releases.
|
| http://lighttable.com/2015/12/10/light-table-0-8-0/
|
| http://lighttable.com/2017/01/27/light-table-
| roadmap-2017/
|
| http://lighttable.com/2019/03/31/New-year-old-plans/
| johns wrote:
| 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/
| swyx wrote:
| 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=A..
| .)
| swyx wrote:
| (author here) I've now added this to my tracking list of
| pitches:
|
| https://dx.tips/pitches
|
| thanks for the suggestion on John Britton's talk!
| stingraycharles wrote:
| 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.
| anildash wrote:
| Was one of the first I was going to mention. Being on the board
| of the NY Tech Meetup, and in the room for the demo, it was
| electric. Set the bar for every similar demo that followed.
| swyx wrote:
| ooh - any other favorites that come to mind from the NY Tech
| Meetup scene?
| kilroy123 wrote:
| So much nostalgia. I feel like tech was so much more fun back
| then. I've been working for software companies for 15 years, it
| just felt more fun back then. Maybe I'm older and more jaded?
| carapace wrote:
| Steve Klabnik comparing Rust to the Sawstop safe table saw.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26514114
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Glad you like it :)
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Intellij flow analysis as demoed here was pretty mind-blowing:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| henning wrote:
| The original Rails demo.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY Everyone went nuts
| when this dropped in 2004.
| latortuga wrote:
| Thought of this one as well, the original "whoops!" demo for
| Rails.
| segf4ult wrote:
| The original Dropbox demo[1] is great.
|
| [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-
| pro...
| trhoad wrote:
| My favourite bit was where half of HackerNews shat all over the
| idea.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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).
| layer8 wrote:
| You might get some inspiration from Bret Victor's videos/demos:
| 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.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Bret Victor's _Inventing on Principle_ is even better (albeit
| it isn 't _only_ a product pitch): https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII
| ripley12 wrote:
| 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.
| wantoncl wrote:
| Not a dev tool, but I was very impressed with this demo of
| Photosynth:
|
| https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...
| Titan2189 wrote:
| Oh yeah, I remember that and have watched and recommended this
| video countless times over the years
| swatcoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| this may come out of my bias of working at early stage startups
| where a good pitch can make or break your entire future :)
| tmsh wrote:
| - Rich Hickey early Clojure talks
|
| - Lee Robinson-style tutorials
|
| - https://threejs-journey.com/ and
| 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/).
| 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 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| intrepidsoldier wrote:
| The original LowCode demo.
| WillDeAth wrote:
| Having Visual Basic as the first language I ever wrote, this is
| awesome to see the pitch!
| swyx wrote:
| i also asked this on twitter so just putting some replies here:
|
| - Doug Engelbart
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
|
| - Twilio https://avc.com/2016/06/best-seed-pitch-ever/
|
| - Stripe - "7 lines of code"
|
| - Netlify - https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-
| static-websi...
|
| - Heroku - https://12factor.net/ and git push heroku master
|
| - Cloudflare - https://mixtape.swyx.io/episodes/cloudflare-at-
| techcrunch-di...
|
| - Node
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY&feature=youtu.be)
| and Deno (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA)
|
| - Firebase (reportedly) -
| https://twitter.com/_davideast/status/1537864335715860482
|
| smaller companies/less impactful pitches that i still like
|
| - Redux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsSnOQynTHs
|
| - Stackblitz
| https://twitter.com/sulco/status/1537867531511287808?s=20&t=...
|
| - Comm
| https://www.notion.so/commapp/Comm-4ec7bbc1398442ce9add1d795...
|
| - Mongodb https://twitter.com/mongodb/status/1192530877148008448
|
| - Let's Encrypt
| https://twitter.com/mbleigh/status/1537866383710511104
|
| - Figwheel-Clojurescript
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-kj2qwJa_E&t=598s
|
| - Svelte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao
| creativenolo wrote:
| Great question. Extra points for this comment too!
| johns wrote:
| This is the Twilio demo you should watch
| https://avc.com/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product/
| swyx wrote:
| (me again) I've now added this to my tracking list of pitches:
|
| https://dx.tips/pitches
|
| will keep this live as stuff comes in!
| mtmail wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| swyx wrote:
| if anyone could find this graph/talk, i would very much
| appreciate it!
| lynndotpy wrote:
| The TypeScript website is very convincing:
| 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
| neilv wrote:
| 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.)
| johnhenry wrote:
| I thought this was a pretty good pitch for charm's tools
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRgHKofrupU
| gm3dmo wrote:
| 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]
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ghoomketu wrote:
| 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
| agumonkey wrote:
| The Unix Chainsaw by Gary Bernhardt
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQnyApKysg4
|
| almost nothing new, but a clear mastery of combining existing
| tools into high leverage
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| 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-wit...
| ssalka wrote:
| 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
| azeirah wrote:
| 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+
| rr808 wrote:
| Its free and open source! Seriously devs _hate_ paying for tools.
| leetrout wrote:
| Kelsey Hightower comparing the kubernetes scheduler to Tetris was
| awesome for cementing a mental model.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlAXp0-M6SY
| dandevs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 happy to take
| feedback
| propter_hoc wrote:
| 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
| jedberg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bsima wrote:
| Emacs Rocks has some great demos, they are very well-structured
| https://emacsrocks.com/
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(page generated 2022-06-17 23:00 UTC)