
Show HN: Tool Time - how well do you know your dev tools? - yonasb
http://tooltime.stackshare.io/
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Illniyar
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.

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yonasb
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.

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

~~~
laumars
_> 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.

~~~
k__
There are two links on every answer.

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

~~~
laumars
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.

~~~
yonasb
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.

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daenney
"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.

~~~
OJFord
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.

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

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

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ubertaco
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.

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

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

React? nope, PrestaShop

wut?

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

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brbsix
"took down many large sites when it failed"

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

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

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Chris2048
you should put the descriptions around an image of doge.

