Resource: The Best DevTools Pitches of All Time
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Much of this was sourced from too many folks to thank on
HN:
and Twitter:
The Best of the Best
- Ruby on Rails: 15 minute demo by DHH - inspired Elixir Liveview demo
- Docker: 5 minute demo by Solomon Hykes
- Twilio: Jeff Lawson short story, John Britton 6 min live demo - modern version
- Visual Basic 1.0: 3 minute demo by Bill Gates
Platforms
- AWS: Jeff Bezos pitching EC2 in 5 minutes, and AWS in 40mins, and Jeff Barr's We Build Muck So You Don't Have To blogpost (modern version is "undifferentiated heavy lifting")
- Honorable mention: 12 min Q&A (can we find a better link?). On S3: "It is hard to come up with a web application that doesn't need to remember things".
- Google Cloud Spanner: HN Recollection
- Google BigQuery: Felipe Hoffa examples (can we find better links?)
- Stripe: "7 lines of code" (demo link needed)
- Netlify: blogpost and 40min conf talk
- Heroku: 12factor.net and
git push heroku master
- Cloudflare: TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 16min pitch
- Firebase: Googler Recollection, HN Launch
OSS
- React: Rethinking Best Practices by Pete Hunt.
- Compare with original Jordan Walke talk - Pete Hunt's retrospective
- honorable mention - David Nolen's Introducing Om
- and Hackflow)
- Next.js: Guillermo Rauch - 34min talk at React Conf
- Svelte: 35min conf talk
- Node (48min JSConf 2010) and Deno (26min JSConf 2018)
- Redux: 30 min React Europe 2015
- Meteor: 10 minute demo
- Kubernetes: the Kelsey Hightower "Tetris" demo - 44mins
- Kafka: the Log blogpost by Jay Kreps
- TypeScript: just the website in 2022 is convincing to some
- Rust: "Fearless concurrency", or the Sawstop safe table saw as Steve Klabnik put it
- MongoDB: Good podcast pitch
jQuery landing page honorary mention.
AI/ML
- OpenAI Codex: 30 min live demo creating a fully functioning game in JavaScript using just plain old english.
- GitHub Copilot: definitive demo needed
- Explosion AI: blogpost - convincing
Editor's picks
Smaller projects that aren't as well known but do something well:
- Stackblitz: 6min demo, tweet
- Anaconda PyScript: demo by Peter Wang
- Remix.run: website uses some nice scrollytelling
Developer Adjacent and Misc Demo Inspiration
- Developer Adjacent:
- Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos: wiki, 1h 40min video
- Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle: 54min talk
- Steve Jobs NeXT demo of interface builder and enterprise object framework (HN comment, Video) and of course the 10 minute iPhone pitch
- Drew Houston' s Dropbox demo
- Todd McKinnon's Why I'm Not Crazy presentation for Okta
- Photosynth TED talk demo
- Idea Pitches:
- CQRS and Event Sourcing - 1h talk, HN citation
- Unix Chainsaw by Gary Bernhardt
- Light Table: HN
- Let's Encrypt twitter.com/mbleigh/status/1537866383710511..
- Figwheel-Clojurescript youtube.com/watch?v=j-kj2qwJa_E&t=598s