Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools?

tooltime.stackshare.io

31 pointsyonasb20 comments

The title made me think this will be a quiz about rarely known commands or feature in some IDEs.

That would be nice.

Instead it's a quiz where there are 8 subjective barely descriptive words (such as good ui, has app, etc..) and 4 saas products that I barely heard of and never used.

So, nice idea of the aim was to get people to discover new SaaS products using a playful game.

One of the creators here. Fair point regarding expectations. But I'm pretty sure if we had said "SaaS tools" people would have been thrown off since there's a fair amount of non-SaaS. And the subjective words are submitted by people who've used the products, so they're more feedback than anything- we probably should have made that clear in the UI.

It seems biased on SaaS tools. But I like it, found out about cool services :D

> It seems biased on SaaS tools

Yeah, that bothered me a little. I was expecting something like interesting lesser-known features of popular standalone tools, from command line tools to plugins for text editors and IDEs. Instead it felt more like sponsored ads loosely presented as a quiz.

I probably wouldn't mind so much if the examples were then discussed. I might have missed it, but I couldn't even find a "read more" link about any of the products so if I hadn't heard of the examples then I've gained nothing from the exercise.

There are two links on every answer.

One to a StackShare profile and one to the website of the product.

You're right, my apologies.

It still might have been nice to have a little information on the quiz answers though. It breaks the flow of the site if I constantly have to navigate away just to find a summary of the product. The questions are pretty vague a lot of the time and often full of marketing double talk, so you don't glean much new information from the quiz site itself. However I do understand and agree with having those links for contestants who wish to learn more than a summary about any specific product.

Yes, I think so too.

It already crawls the tags from stackshare, so it could also crawl the description.

Good idea! We originally had the descriptions there for the options but that gave away the answer. Showing the description once you answer would be helpful, we'll add that.

"If you know http you know Sintatra". I wonder which option I should pick? Sinatra?

There's a lot of those, especially with AWS products, where all but the product name is mentioned in the descriptions.

It's fun to play though :). Also amazing how many things there are.

It's also entertaining to get the keywords:

    Great community support
    Flexible, powerful, simple
    Superb api
    Easy to learn and powerful to work with

mmk. Just shows how fluffy and not _actually_ useful SaaS descriptions can be - the only real clue here is "api", since one of the options was nginx, that helps a tiny bit.

Yeah that's our bad- we need to make it clear that the descriptions are coming from users of the products, not the companies.

Oh okay - I cynically assumed that these were keywords/phrases pulled off landing pages.

There's also a lot of times where the keywords are like this:

"Free plan, nice ui, easy to use"

And there's 4 SaaS apps that I've never heard of--not that I could distinguish if I had heard of them.

A lot of the ones I saw were a mix of way too vague to be guessable ("easy to use", "simple", "pleasant") or way too obvious because of the clues ("backed by Microsoft" -- the only Microsoft one in here is C#) ("If you know HTTP you know Sinatra" -- guess it's Sinatra then), with a couple that were just misleading (why is "Scala" given as a clue for a Git hosting platform?)

That being said, it's a fun little quiz, and I definitely understand that getting good clues is hard. Writing good clues for a quiz by hand is hard enough; using scraped/machine-collected clues makes it harder.

It's like a reCaptcha to catch non-programmers :)

Free, Powerful, Customisable, Scalable, Easy to understand code, Great community

React? nope, PrestaShop

wut?

Hi, interesting quiz. I might discover some new tools here. I would suggest a "I don't know" button.

"took down many large sites when it failed"

^ Describing AWS Lambda. May want to fix that one.

Cool. There are many tools which I don't know about. My Current Score is: 3 :)

you should put the descriptions around an image of doge.

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