
Launch HN: GitDuck (YC S20) – Zoom for developers with real-time code sharing - borisandcrispin
Hi everyone! We are Dragos and Thiago from GitDuck (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitduck.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitduck.com</a>). We are building GitDuck, a Zoom for developers with direct integration to the IDE so software developers can talk and collaborate in real-time.<p>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. ;)<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s faster and and consumes less bandwidth), directly from your IDE and independently of the IDE that other people are using.<p>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.<p>Check a 1 min demo 
(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitduck.com&#x2F;watch&#x2F;5f1808919552aefe64ce0751" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitduck.com&#x2F;watch&#x2F;5f1808919552aefe64ce0751</a>)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitduck.com&#x2F;security" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitduck.com&#x2F;security</a>) and we are always open for your suggestions to improve.<p>We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. What are your ideas about tools like this?<p>Thank you!
======
cepp
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/](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/)

~~~
swyx
nobody's mentioned them so i'll toss them in here -
[https://tuple.app/](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!

~~~
evv
Hah, Tuple's motivation headline laments that time "Slack stole Screenhero
from us".. I can certainly relate!

Fortunately the Screenhero founder has been freed from Slack, and has rebuilt
it! (with promises that it will not suffer the same fate)

[https://screen.so](https://screen.so)

~~~
marcinzm
Screen is an awful name. Recently I tried installing it. I knew the name and I
tried googling to no avail for the webpage (screen share, screen code share,
screen, etc.). So I went with a competitor.

~~~
blickentwapft
Screenking screenzilla screenolio screenmega screencaptain screenogogo
screeniac screenscreen screenempire screenmirror any of those would be better.

------
zelly
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially
by installing an x11vnc server on your host, setting up a SSH tunnel to a
remote server which forwards the host's VNC port, and sharing SSH credentials
with your colleagues who can use a VNC client to access your screen from
Linux, Windows or Mac.

~~~
mritchie712
Is this a Dropbox joke?

~~~
caballeto
This is the third result when searching for "Dropbox joke". But what is a
Dropbox joke?

~~~
mritchie712
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224).

It's the Dropbox Show HN from 2007 before Show HN was a thing. Someone made a
comment with the same feel as this one.

The "joke" is that of course a developer can replicate the early version of
most products, but that doesn't mean the product will fail (see Dropbox).

------
kyleashipley
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!

~~~
borisandcrispin
Let me know how it goes!

~~~
kyleashipley
Tried it out for a couple hours today! A quick experience report:

    
    
      - Collaborative editing was very solid, even with one of us using vim extensions and the other one not. (This has caused me some pain in Screen.so in particular.)
      - The leader/follower model was slightly unintuitive at times. I vaguely recall Floobits allowing either participant to e.g. create new files, but in GitDuck the leader has to share them to the workspace for them to become editable. (I might also be misremembering this from the Floobits days, but it was slightly confusing.)
      - Similar to ^ - when I was not leading, I couldn't summon the leader into a file I was editing, so I had to tell him when I was switching files. IIRC Floobits let you take yourself in/out of follow mode, even as the leader, so you would be automatically summoned when the other person switched files.
      - Looking forward to terminal support - glad that's on your roadmap :)
      - Our team is 50/50 between vim and VSCode right now, so we're looking forward to vim8/neovim support to really feel the power compared to Screen.so and Tuple.
    

Overall, had a surprisingly smooth experience for Day 2. Congrats on the
launch and looking forward to future updates!

------
blntechie
I have no idea why it’s called GitDuck. Code != Git?

~~~
borisandcrispin
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.

~~~
kstrauser
I'll be blunt here, but I really do mean this in the spirit of constructive
criticism: I hate the name. It's not related to Git in any meaningful way (why
not "VimDuck" or "ZshDuck"?), and at first glance I'd assumed it had something
to do with Cyberduck. Also, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue: "hey,
wanna hop on a Zoom?" flows better than "hey, wanna GitDuck?" Finally, the
name pretty much limits it to _only_ developers. Zoom was in a great place to
capitalize on schools that were moving to remote classes, but "Zoom" doesn't
really carry any semantic baggage. It would be awkward to explain to my boss
why I wanted our company to your product for a business meeting, even if it's
the perfect tool for it ("what's a git? What's it have to do with ducks?").

------
gerbal
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.

~~~
inetsee
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.

~~~
naderkhalil
I’ve never been on a Zoom call with 100+ users. While Zoom supports that, it’s
not the main use case. I think saying “zoom for x” is an appropriate and
efficient way to describe collaboration apps.

------
MCorbani
Best tool ever for remote / pair programming - debugging gets (almost) fun
thanks to you guys :)

~~~
naderkhalil
I also found solving conflicts fun for the first time! Absolutely love using
GitDuck with my cofounder.

------
tucif
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!

~~~
borisandcrispin
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.

~~~
Aperocky
As someone who's most used editor by far is vim (can't escape IDE when writing
java), I'm happy that you're doing this.

However I feel like your market may be more geared towards
interviewing/learning, I don't see how in my work environment that we'll ever
need this.

------
somishere
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
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. :)

~~~
somishere
Very cool! .. so does that also mean the remote worker can't / doesn't save?
Also are the changes reflected locally for both users for e.g. testing /
compiling or do you rely on compute of the remote host like VNC? How about
tracking changes?

~~~
borisandcrispin
Yes, the remote worker can save and the file will be saved in the host.

Tracking changes is coming soon! This is super needed.

We are going to add soon better tools to manage (and share) the local server.
So you as a guest can edit, save and see how this is impacts the local server
of the host.

~~~
somishere
Cool, thanks for all the info. I will be looking for a good opportunity to try
this out properly!

------
newscracker
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
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
Looks really cool! Any plans for an Emacs client?

~~~
borisandcrispin
Definitely! We'll support it very soon. You would be surprised with the amount
of people requesting it.

~~~
ctalledo
+1 for the Emacs client.

------
JackMcMack
I'd love to try it, but your terms of service seem to completely ignore GDPR.

[https://gitduck.com/terms](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.

~~~
joelellis
Specifically, section 2 ignores (The Privacy and Electronic Communications
Regulations)[[https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/what-
are-...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/what-are-pecr/)]
and section 11 ignores (the consent part)[[https://ico.org.uk/for-
organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...](https://ico.org.uk/for-
organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-
regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/consent/)] of GDPR, without giving
a different lawful basis for data processing.

~~~
chrismorgan
That section 2 part is illegal in a lot of the world, and it’s not recent like
GDPR. For Europe, PECR is from 2003. It’s illegal in Australia too since 2003:
informed consent is required for such commercial messages, and merely being a
customer is insufficient, it must be opt-in rather than opt-out (and that
means you can’t even pretick a newsletter checkbox). (There used to be an
excellent document outlining the legislation requirements at
[https://www.acma.gov.au/Industry/Marketers/Anti-
Spam/Ensurin...](https://www.acma.gov.au/Industry/Marketers/Anti-
Spam/Ensuring-you-dont-spam/spam-consent-ensuring-you-dont-spam-i-acma), but
that page seems to have disappeared recently with no obvious replacement.)

------
jaequery
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.

~~~
borisandcrispin
I'd argue that most developers are not on VSCode, although it's the most
popular IDE.

The advantage is that you can have the video chat with pair programming that
works with any IDE + the other integrations that we are building.

------
klc1
That's amazing check out our project at:
[https://kidslearncoding.jdevcloud.com/](https://kidslearncoding.jdevcloud.com/)

------
susa59001
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?

~~~
drag0s
GitDuck’s cofounder here. The video tech is pretty simple for now as we are
using [https://daily.co](https://daily.co) for that.

Daily was pretty easy to set up. If you have a React app, by following this
guide [1] you can have a simple video chat quite quickly (in a matter of few
hours).

Happy to answer if you have more specific questions.

[1] [https://www.daily.co/blog/building-a-custom-video-chat-
app-w...](https://www.daily.co/blog/building-a-custom-video-chat-app-with-
react)

~~~
susa59001
Thanks a lot! I'll reach out to for further clarification if any.

------
tommyderami
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
> 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.

~~~
onetom
We were trying to do Clojure pair programming in IntelliJ+Cursive and vim-iced
over Tuple.app/Screen.so/Zoom/macOS-VNC-over-ZeroTier during the past few
weeks.

Here are a few conclusions:

Having multiple, _independent_ mouse cursors in one screen is and extremely
useful feature.

Consistent low-latency is much more important than temporary low-quality
video.

To conserve bandwidth, we hardly ever use the video-call capabilities; low-
latency, crisp and wide-frequency-band audio is more than enough.

The screen sharing codec should be optimized for text, with sharp edges. I
don't want to see glow or other jpeg artifacts around my letters...

Any of the mentioned programs can provide audio and video call capabilities;
that's not a differentiating factor. I wouldn't mind using a separate program
for just that, since it's a negligible initial inconvenience, when we are
having pairing sessions for hours on end.

Instead of wasting your money on re-implementing such features in your own
software, just blog about what existing solution would recommend for
audio/video/chat. It's MUCH CHEAPER, than giving in to the NIH syndrome...

I would rather like to see you focus on more important aspects of developer
collaboration, for example terminal and "network" sharing. After all we are
writing that code not so we can talk about it, but to run it! For example,
since we are programming in Clojure, we must see the same REPL window(s) too,
not just the source code. We are constantly running the code we just wrote
(and its tests) in those REPLs. Currently, the least painful way to do this is
sharing the whole screen :(

I haven't given up on other solutions, like Emacs in tmux or in a headless
xvnc server with small resolution, 8bit colors only and tiny fonts. Viewers
would just magnify it to full-screen. Characters would look pixelated, but
still sharp, if the magnification factor is integer. It's a pity that open-
source vnc solutions are a lot slower and macOS' built-in one and they don't
support server-side resizing to the viewer's window size and things like
that...

------
beckingz
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
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
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.

------
athorax
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
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.

------
abhijitnathwani
This looks really coool! however, the pricing is little too high?

~~~
borisandcrispin
You can use it for free! The premium features are there if you are part of a
big team or need more advanced things.

------
joaocosta
Amazing work! Congrats guys!!!

------
willhang
wow this experience is actually amazing!!!!! buttery smooth!

------
random_dork1
Cool stuff! Will try it.

------
rrusev
This is GREAT !!!

------
cirdes
Congrats!

------
franciscomello
Amazing!!!

------
koolba
This name violates the git trademark policy: [https://public-
inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...](https://public-
inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw@sigill.intra.peff.net/)

I do like the “duck” part of it though!

~~~
1f60c
Do GitHub, GitLab, Gitea and other "gits" have an agreement with "the" Git?

~~~
athorax
It explains that in the link they posted...

So GitHub is essentially outside the scope of the trademark policy, due to the
history. We also decided to explicitly grandfather some major projects that
were using similar portmanteaus, but which had generally been good citizens of
the Git ecosystem (building on Git in a useful way, not breaking
compatibility). Those include GitLab, JGit, libgit2, and some others. The
reasoning was generally that it would be a big pain for those projects, which
have established their own brands, to have to switch names. It's hard to hold
them responsible for picking a name that violated a policy that didn't yet
exist.

------
peff
Sounds neat, but I think your name runs afoul of Git's trademark; see
[https://git-scm.com/trademark](https://git-scm.com/trademark)

~~~
swyx
how? i just read through. nobody would "assume a greater degree of association
between you and the Git Project than actually exists."

~~~
gruez
Why not? If you made a backup product called "Windows Backup" (or more
relevant to this example, a collaboration product for Microsoft Office called
"Office Duck"), Microsoft will definitely go after you for trademark
infringement. Why should it be any different for an open source project with a
registered trademark?

~~~
TechBro8615
What about GitHub and GitLab?

~~~
gruez
AFAIK they started using those names before the git trademark was registered

------
spartas
If this project takes off, I see a lot of people mis-typing gitdick instead.
Probably should either look at changing the name or at least also registering
gitdick.com pre-emptively

~~~
1f60c
It’s already taken. _shrug_ It points to someone’s GitLab instance.

As a word of warning, the home page does feature a vector image of something
that looks quite phallic.

------
dvduval
It "is zoom" or it "isn't zoom"? This was confusing to me. Perhaps you are
directly integrating with zoom so actually it is zoom. Or else you have some
sort of clone.

~~~
borisandcrispin
It's a video chat tool with direct integrations to the IDE and other dev
tools.

Zoom is just a reference like Google Meet, but they have a longer name.

------
phist_mcgee
Can I ask, why did you launch this product without all the major IDEs being
supported? I use webstorm, but the thought that it won't be supported for a
few days means I may just forget about the product unless I am reminded
again..

~~~
onion2k
_why did you launch this product without all the major IDEs being supported_

(I'm not associated with GitDuck.)

Launching and getting feedback from people outside of your immediate network
as soon as possible is _really_ useful. Not launching until your app is
'perfect' and 'feature complete' means you'll burn all your runway before
getting a single customer and fail. I know that one from experience. It's far
better to launch something that's useful to 20% of your market and then
iterate to capture the other 80% than the other way round.

~~~
Vinnl
Usually I'd agree, but in the original post they stated the others would be
launched in a few days...

