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Launch HN: GitDuck (YC S20) – Zoom for developers with real-time code sharing

264 points| borisandcrispin | 5 years ago

Hi everyone! We are Dragos and Thiago from GitDuck (https://gitduck.com). We are building GitDuck, a Zoom for developers with direct integration to the IDE so software developers can talk and collaborate in real-time.

It all started by accident, Dragos and I were working on something else, a screen recording tool and we started to use it internally to record short videos of our code. At first it was just for quick code reviews and to debug, but soon we realized how helpful it was to have a video explanation of the code. Kind of rubber duck debugging with video. ;)

After talking to almost 300 developers and learning that other people were facing similar collaboration issues we decided to focus 100% on building this tool. We are the first users and we use GitDuck internally for quick assistance, pair programming, code reviews or just discussing ideas.

It has the features you would expect in a video call tool — like audio, video chat and screen sharing, but the UX and the integrations were built exclusively for developers. You can easily share your code and do pair programming. We are building integrations for all the IDEs. This enables you to collaborate without screen sharing (so it's faster and and consumes less bandwidth), directly from your IDE and independently of the IDE that other people are using.

Whenever you join a GitDuck meeting, your IDE extension wakes up and allows you to share your code with the other meeting participants (or join the already shared code from other meeting participant). When your peers join your code, they can see and edit your files in real-time, similar to the Google Docs experience. At any given point you can also go to your peers position so you can see in which file and line they are.

Check a 1 min demo (https://gitduck.com/watch/5f1808919552aefe64ce0751)

GitDuck currently has integrations to VS Code and VSCodium. In the next few days we are going to release the integrations to all JetBrains IDEs. Vim, Sublime and others coming after that.

One important aspect to mention is security. We are the first users of the service so we focus a lot on building something that we would trust to use ourselves. All the files shared from your IDE are always shared via peer-to-peer and are end-to-end encrypted. No piece of code never touches our servers, so we never have access to your code.

All calls are encrypted and p2p (if 4 or less participants). If 5 or more people join we switch to a cloud infrastructure in order to maintain the quality, but the media are always encrypted and we never have access to your calls. You can read more about it here (https://gitduck.com/security) and we are always open for your suggestions to improve.

We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. What are your ideas about tools like this?

Thank you!

110 comments

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[+] kyleashipley|5 years ago|reply
I was a big fan of Floobits a few years back. Tuple and Screen.so are great, but we have devs split between VSCode, vim 8, and Neovim, with different configurations. I would definitely pay for cross-editor collaboration that works.

I’ll give this a shot tomorrow with some friends and see how it goes!

[+] blntechie|5 years ago|reply
I have no idea why it’s called GitDuck. Code != Git?
[+] borisandcrispin|5 years ago|reply
It's because of the rubber duck methodology and in the early days we thought it would be cool to have a command `git duck` that starts a video to explain a commit.
[+] gerbal|5 years ago|reply
How is this product "Zoom for Developers"? What makes GitDuck like a video conferencing platform which supports 100+ concurrent users?

To me "Zoom for x" implies video calling as a primary feature.

[+] random_dork1|5 years ago|reply
'zoom' tells you that you can video/audio call people, 'for developers' tells you that it has features that help with development. It's quite clear for me.
[+] borisandcrispin|5 years ago|reply
We could have said "Google Meet for developers", but Zoom is shorter. :)

But yeah, the point is that you can video chat and we are adding other integrations for developers. Pair programming is one, terminal and server sharing is coming.

[+] inetsee|5 years ago|reply
The very first paragraph lists one of the features as "direct integration to the IDE so software developers can talk and collaborate in real-time". It doesn't sound to me as if it's aiming to support "100+ concurrent users". If it can help two programmers working remotely be as productive as they would be if they were sitting side by side, then I think it's a very useful product.
[+] MCorbani|5 years ago|reply
Best tool ever for remote / pair programming - debugging gets (almost) fun thanks to you guys :)
[+] naderkhalil|5 years ago|reply
I also found solving conflicts fun for the first time! Absolutely love using GitDuck with my cofounder.
[+] tucif|5 years ago|reply
Definitely a step forward in sharing by allowing each person to use their own editor. Looking forward to the vim plugin.

I find myself also sharing consoles too, I'd like to see this extended to terminal sessions, perhaps the session could be rendered in other people's editors? Kind of like a live asciinema.

I'd love to try this at work, unfortunately streaming Corp's code through an unapproved 3rd party service is a no-go. This would've been really useful in college. Hope this catches on!

[+] drag0s|5 years ago|reply
GitDuck founder here. The use-case you’re describing is definitely in our roadmap!

Your concerns are totally understandable and we’re more than happy to discuss how to get GitDuck approved on your Corp.

Security is one of our top priorities! [1] As Thiago said, code is shared on a P2P e2e encrypted way (code never visits our server) and we can always discuss on-prem options (100% hosted in your infra) so no data at all leaves your network and you can control all inbound/outbound traffic.

Feel free reach out if you have any other question or concern!

[1] https://gitduck.com/security

[+] borisandcrispin|5 years ago|reply
Terminal sharing is super important and we will work on it soon. This is one of the things that we need the most when we use GD internally.

Connections are P2P btw, no code touches our servers. But yeah, I understand this is not enough to get approval.

[+] somishere|5 years ago|reply
I've never thought much about pair programming within the same file, seems like a super interesting concept. Obviously co-editing e.g. google docs makes sense, but there's no user-facing concept of validity here. How does saving work, is the idea that someone codes while someone watches? This already causes all sorts of fun with collisions in git, how do people work around that locally with things like hot reloading?
[+] borisandcrispin|5 years ago|reply
The way it works is that you are sharing your local files to the other people and when they edit the file, all the changes are being applied to your file. So in the end you are the one saving all the changes and making the commits.

You can be working in parallel in different files or just following around. It really depends on what you are trying to achieve.

One cool thing to try with GD is mob programming. :)

[+] cepp|5 years ago|reply
How is this better than Visual Studio (Code) Live Share [1]?

Adding a third party dependency for code-sharing seems like a non-starter for large enterprise companies which already have a hard enough time with the first party offering.

[1]: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/

[+] borisandcrispin|5 years ago|reply
The main advantage is that you can collaborate with people using other IDEs. So I could be using VSC, other person Webstorm and a third one Vim.
[+] brawnelamia|5 years ago|reply
I tried live share. It didn't work. It didn't not work with a clear error message either. It didn't work by having a loading bar that simply never finished.

The browser version of live code did work, but no. I'm not doing that.

I used to use zoom for pair programming. It got banned because, as you said, Large Enterprise Company. Microsoft lobbied them with "trust us: the company behind skype knows how to write secure software. force uninstall zoom on all your employee computers if you know what's good for you". Microsoft corporate sales are wizards.

Since zoom bombing was a thing and we couldn't be trusted to set our own passwords, I also tried using Microsoft Teams to pair program. It was absolutely unusable (e.g. if you type the keyyyyyyyssssss willlll stickkkkk).

GitDuck is probably lovely. It's a shame neither of us can use it.

[+] zapita|5 years ago|reply
I don't use VS Code, and I'm not going to switch IDEs for code sharing. I am more likely to try GitDuck since my colleagues who use VS Code can also use it.
[+] nicoslepicos|5 years ago|reply
Having used both VS Code Live Share, and trying out GitDuck last week for the first time, I'd say it felt like a much more immersive experience than the VS Code Live Share experience.

For VS Code Live Share I kept finding myself opening up Zoom and then in parallel trying to get Live Share running, which also feels somewhat finicky at times. The GitDuck experience felt a lot more complete by integrating at a different level. It also felt like it could eventually be a more suitable experience for things we often do in interviews like try to do coding interviews by combining tools like CoderPad & Zoom - though CoderPad has the nice side effect of preservice links to the interviews themselves.

[+] swyx|5 years ago|reply
nobody's mentioned them so i'll toss them in here - https://tuple.app/ is also focused on the pair programming problem.

I don't believe they have IDE integration, but like others have said, Tuple + Live Share would be a competitor to GitDuck. Glad to see more attempts at the space though!

[+] vaer-k|5 years ago|reply
Seems very odd to assume that every single engineer is using VS Code, thus making this a third part dependency.
[+] slykar|5 years ago|reply
I guess they are probably just starting and the claims on their website are too far-fetched. I might give it a try if they come up with integration for JetBrains IDEs.
[+] vxNsr|5 years ago|reply
cross IDE compatibility. VSLS only works with MS products
[+] newscracker|5 years ago|reply
I get why you’re saying “Zoom for...”, but I see Zoom as a poorly designed, user hostile and anti-privacy platform. It’s good to see that your description also mentions security. But it doesn’t mention anything about the word “privacy” explicitly, and that’s a huge missed opportunity for any solution that claims to be a Zoom replacement or alternative.
[+] rainboiboi|5 years ago|reply
For those searching for the pricing. Here you go:

Startup Unlimited calls Up to 20 people in a call Unlimited rooms

$20 per team member / per month

[+] ashton314|5 years ago|reply
Looks really cool! Any plans for an Emacs client?
[+] borisandcrispin|5 years ago|reply
Definitely! We'll support it very soon. You would be surprised with the amount of people requesting it.
[+] JackMcMack|5 years ago|reply
I'd love to try it, but your terms of service seem to completely ignore GDPR.

https://gitduck.com/terms

  2. Communications
  
  By creating an Account on our Service, you agree to subscribe to newsletters, marketing or promotional materials and other information we may send.
  
  ...
  
  
  11. Analytics
  
  We may use third party services (including Amplitude, Segment, Crisp and Google, and their respective affiliates) that collect, monitor and analyze this Log Data to provide analytics and other data to help us increase our Service’s functionality and to help us advertise our products and services. These third party service providers may use cookies, pixel tags, web beacons or other storage technology to collect and store Log Data or information from elsewhere on the internet. They have their own privacy policies addressing how they use Log Data and we do not have access to, nor control over, third parties’ use of cookies or other tracking technologies.
[+] bigtech4gdpr|5 years ago|reply
Gotta love a legislation which makes it much harder for startups while favoring the fully lawyered-up big tech.

Never forget what the GDPR fan boys claimed about this legislation being some kind of Big Tech "killer", and now go and look at Big Tech stock prices.

[+] jaequery|5 years ago|reply
So most devs are on VSCode and they already have LiveShare which works pretty well.

Is the point of this for the non vscode crowd? Trying to understand what is the justification of paying for something like this.

[+] susa59001|5 years ago|reply
This looks great.

We're trying to build something like this for sales team. Could you shed some light on the video tech you have used?

[+] tommyderami|5 years ago|reply
I appreciated the copy of the landing page--my literal first question after 'what is this?' was why would I use this when slack video and live share has been fine...it's still a tough value proposition but I'll certainly give it a spin and really would love to see a dev-built company like yours suceed!
[+] borisandcrispin|5 years ago|reply
> was why would I use this when slack video and live share has been fine

To be able to share your code with people not using VSC. We are also optimizing a lot the video quality and we are going to add more integrations soon to the video chat. As we are focused only on developers we can do a lot of things that Slack video can't.

[+] fuddle|5 years ago|reply
The video is a bit annoying, as it keeps switching between Chrome & VS Code. It would be easier to watch if the windows were side by side.
[+] beckingz|5 years ago|reply
This is really cool.

A couple of thoughts:

The screen share cannot be fullscreened(?), which makes it hard to see fine details.

The pair-programming code sharing didn't work VSCode to Pycharm (Or my coworker didn't get the plugin configured correctly in Pycharm).

Overall though, GitDuck seems like a great tool.

[+] todd3834|5 years ago|reply
I might not be your target audience but is there any plan to support VIM users? Or perhaps even better a tmux plug-in?
[+] Aperocky|5 years ago|reply
I saw vim in the article so apparently the answer is yes, one of the highlights.

But honestly I feel like this maybe more useful in tutoring/interviews vs. working. My team of about 10 people is stretched over 1000s of files in about 100 packages and we also have planning to make sure we're not stepping on someone else's toes.

[+] lytedev|5 years ago|reply
they mention a vim plugin, but tmux would be even more useful!
[+] athorax|5 years ago|reply
Site and demo won't load for me.

The naming and references to 'Zoom' are odd. Instead of "Zoom for developers" maybe explain exactly what that means? Is is screen sharing and group meetings?

When you compare yourself to zoom I immediately set the bar that the usability/performance/security/etc. must at least be to their level.

[+] random_dork1|5 years ago|reply
The article is quite explicit. Here is a small sample:

It has the features you would expect in a video call tool — like audio, video chat and screen sharing, but the UX and the integrations were built exclusively for developers. You can easily share your code and do pair programming. We are building integrations for all the IDEs. This enables you to collaborate without screen sharing (so it's faster and and consumes less bandwidth), directly from your IDE and independently of the IDE that other people are using.

[+] borisandcrispin|5 years ago|reply
What error did you get when loading the page and demo?

By Zoom we mean a video chat tool, but built for developers. I think it's hard to have a tool for every type of work and I can think some use cases that Zoom is great (like in big conferences) and others that is really bad (for debugging for example).

We are just focused on having a great experience for developers, so no big conferences or webinar features.

[+] abhijitnathwani|5 years ago|reply
This looks really coool! however, the pricing is little too high?
[+] borisandcrispin|5 years ago|reply
You can use it for free! The premium features are there if you are part of a big team or need more advanced things.