HN Explorer

Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?

314 points by swyx ↗ HN
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)

128 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] thread
dandevs
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).
WalterGR
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
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
> 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
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...
hyuuu
what happened to the idea?
capableweb
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/LightTable/LightTable/graphs/contributors...), it seems there has only been 25 commits (from one author) since Sep 20, 2019.

ibdknox
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/

swatcoder
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
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
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
Great question. Extra points for this comment too!
mikewarot
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
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/

stingraycharles
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
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.

anildash
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
ooh - any other favorites that come to mind from the NY Tech Meetup scene?
kevstev
Personally I saw Dropbox launch there and was blown away by it. The utter simplicity of the interface and just drag and dropping into a web page, for the time it was ground breaking. Iirc they were preceded by a guy demoing an alarm clock webpage and just the contrast was striking...
kilroy123
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?
rlt
My theory is tech downturns are more fun because it flushes out the people who were only there for the money, leaving those truly passionate about technology.

But it’s also possible I’m just older and more jaded.

jayzalowitz
I can hear myself wooing in the background! (The semicolon bit too, because I was a php dev back then!)

I am old now.

Im pretty sure @alexisohanian was there too.

dmor
Came here to post this <3

It’s funny, the impact this had internally. It’s like we all believed in what we were doing even more when we felt that magic. I hadn’t watched this again since it happened, still gave me chills.

johndbritton
Aw, shucks. Y’all are very kind.

This was also a pivotal moment in my career, so much good stuff traces back to this five minute demo.

mmcnl
Live coding always makes me so nervous, even if it's just a simple example.
capableweb
Best way to get better is to just practice, practice and practice (if you want to get better). But even then, always have a snippet in some tab/window behind everything when you're presenting, so in case you get stuck, you can copy-paste a snippet you know is working. Also removes a bit of the edge as you know you have a backup.
jedberg
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.

ripley12
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.

gorkemcetin
Thanks for sharing this, absolutely lovely content here.
mtmail
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.
swyx
if anyone could find this graph/talk, i would very much appreciate it!
ignoramous
May be this one where Bezos speaks about Animoto at Startup School 2008: 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

lynndotpy
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

swyx
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
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.

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ghoomketu
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

frakkingcylons
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...

spitfire
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.

KerrAvon
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
> 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.

tmsh
- 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
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
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

WillDeAth
Having Visual Basic as the first language I ever wrote, this is awesome to see the pitch!
ssalka
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
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+

astuyvenberg
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
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
> - 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
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.