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)
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
It is actually pretty awesome in practice, although my bugs tend to be way more trivial.
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.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...
Kind of changed my whole view about programming and it's future.
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?
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.)
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.
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
“I only have a minute left, which is more than enough time to build the undo stack”
Make it easy for people to try, have good use cases, etc... is the best you can do.
An example article: https://hoffa.medium.com/static-javascript-code-analysis-wit...
- 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
- 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!
I don’t even remember what was actually demoed (maybe .net?) At least it left us all referring back to it for decades.
almost nothing new, but a clear mastery of combining existing tools into high leverage
Straight to the point and shows everything you need to know.
Key points: * Simple to get it (without external knowledge) * Demos * Content sections and small focus time
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
"Toran Billups - test-driven development by example"
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
In this, second, 20 minute video I build a production-ready blog admin panel the same way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFTqhuL83QE
which eventually shipped as Expression Blend.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-pro...
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.