Show HN: GitDuck – Learn from other developers by watching how they work | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: GitDuck – Learn from other developers by watching how they work

gitduck.com

Hi HN!

I'm Thiago, GitDuck co-founder and I'm here to answer any questions. We built GitDuck to help developers to learn from others as if they were in the same room.

We have been working remotely for a while and always struggled when we had to explain something about our code. "Should we talk in Slack? Wait, let me find the commit link... Let's do a Zoom? Oh, the person is offline now... :$" We miss how easy it was in the office to just stand up, watch another developer working and directly ask a question. We built GitDuck to solve this.

Check some examples: Bug fixing live: https://gitduck.com/watch/5d6fbc7d5e065d2267a2789e Working in our extension https://gitduck.com/watch/5d6f9a675e065d1394a2789a Asking for help: https://gitduck.com/watch/5d11eda36cee9c35f57de99b

It works directly from VS Code (soon other IDEs) and combines both screen and source code sharing in one place. Besides being focused on developers, that's the main difference from doing a screen sharing call or uploading to YT/TW.

Let us know what you think, thanks!

Any plans to support Jetbrains?

Very soon! A lot of people are asking for it (23% of the registered) and we internally also use WebStorm.

Looks from the github repos like this is MacOS only right now, is that right?

I'm guessing mostly based on https://github.com/gitduckhq/aperture-node. If you're running in VS Code though I think you might be able to use web APIs to do this easily, e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt....

Have you tried that? Either way, any ETA on Linux support? :D

Hey there, I’m Dragos, the other co-founder of GitDuck.

> Looks from the github repos like this is MacOS only right now, is that right?

You guessed right, only MacOS (for now) because that's what we use ourselves

> I’m guessing mostly based on https://github.com/gitduckhq/aperture-node.

We started using this package in our first implementation but we got rid of it as it was not really suiting our needs. We’re using FFmpeg now.

> If you’re running in VS Code though I think you might be able to use web APIs to do this easily, e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt... > Have you tried that?

We thought about that but afaik VSCode doesn’t expose those APIs to the extensions :disappointed:

> Either way, any ETA on Linux support? :D

Yeah, we’re working on it, we should come up with a version for Linux and Windows in around 2-3 weeks!

Thanks for your comment!

This is a really cool concept!

Btw, I found a typo while registering. The email confirmation page says "Help sharing GitDuck to have earlier access to the platform." The word "sharing" is the wrong tense, "share" or "by sharing" would fix it.

Thanks for spotting it! I've just deployed the fix.

So it's kinda like Twitch for coding?

The big difference is that we link the source code to the video. So you can click on the code and watch exactly when the developer wrote it. We are also making it work directly from the IDE and GitDuck is 100% for developers.

Could this be done as a twitch extension?

Not the full experience, you couldn't select/fork/interact with the code. In Twitch/YouTube the watching experience is linear (you watch a video from start to the end). In GD the code defines what part of the video to be played.

You have it in a nutshell. BTW, that's what I said when they explained it to me. :-)

support for Xcode?

Very soon! We started with VS Code and are following the demand from the people registered.

Also great for video documentation of your code!

Yes! One side effect that we learned is that there isn't much difference between something we wrote 3 months ago or today. As we can replay any coding session, legacy code feels like a brand new commit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com