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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
• Terraform: Armon Dadgar pitching Terraform in 18 minutes on a whiteboard

Historical Best

• Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos: wiki, 1h 40min video
• Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle: 54min talk
• Visual Basic 1.0: 3 minute demo by Bill Gates
• Steve Jobs NeXT demo of interface builder and enterprise object framework (HN comment, Video) and of course the 10 minute iPhone pitch
• Jeff Han demo of multitouch 6 months before iPhone demo

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
• GraphQL: Zero to GraphQL in 30 Minutes - citation
• Meteor: 10 minute demo
• MongoDB: Great recent pitch from Mark Porter - historical pitch needed (pls recommend)
• 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:
  • 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