HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Ruby on Rails demo Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Ruby on Rails demo

tenthconcept
Demos
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this demo2 months2013–2025 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN treats it as the model for a compelling developer demo and a benchmark for how simple web development once felt.

David Heinemeier Hansson builds a blog engine with Ruby on Rails in 15 minutes, the demo that launched Rails' momentum.

“I think a good example to follow for your project is the original Rails announcement video by DHH” (HN, 2018)

2 recommendations · 11 citations · 1 jokes · Demos · intro · partly dated

14 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@girishso Oct 2023 Recommends
on HN thread
Ruby on Rails demo by DHH back in 2005/6. I was blown away that he created a blog application with comments in 15 minutes, I was working on Asp.NET back then and it would have taken me about a week to do that. [this video]
Blog with comments built in 15 minutes

Citations, criticism and jokes

@jules Feb 2013 Cites it
on HN thread Rails Has Turned into Java
Read more
Rails is now like Java EE because it is no longer better than the competition. It's not that Rails got worse. Perhaps in simplicity it did get worse a bit, but overall Rails now is much better than Rails then. The thing is that the competition got a lot better too. The baseline changed. I don't think the thing that will be to Rails as Rails was to Java EE exists yet though. The competition has merely caught up, perhaps a little ahead on some fronts and a little behind on others. But there is nothing that is clearly much much better. Things like Meteor and Opa are a step in the right direction, but they don't go far enough (yet). Does anybody remember this video: [this video] This is not the original Rails video, it's the second one I think, but they're fairly similar (couldn't find the original). Back then when I saw the first Rails video I remember finding it amazing. Now it's just boring.
Original Rails demo once amazing, now seems boring as competition caught up
@chadkruse Mar 2015 Cites it
on HN thread Meteor 1.1 Released – Now Supporting Microsoft Windows and MongoDB 3.0
Here's a reasonably recent list of production Meteor apps: [link] IMHO, one of the often overlooked use cases for Meteor is rapid-prototyping. If anyone remembers DHH's video 10 years ago demonstrating Rails' scaffolding [0], Meteor is the 2015 version. [0] [this video]
Rails scaffolding demo as precedent for rapid prototyping
@mavelikara Jan 2017 Cites it
on HN thread DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?
> There are a lot of vocal people who make it seem like you should be doing everything in Go or Angular or what have you It might be hard to believe now, but Rails also went through this stage of vocal supporters advocating for it over alternatives. If you go back and watch the introduction video [1], you have DHH creating a blog in 15 minutes using RoR. I remember being impressed by it and vocally pushing for it where I worked then. :) [1]: [this video]
DHH building a blog in 15 minutes with Rails
@grappler Feb 2020 Cites it
on HN thread Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US
Read more
I know you're at least half joking, but for me it actually is the year of linux on the desktop. As a developer who does server-side stuff, a mac was an obvious easy choice for a long time -- a tradition that has been widespread going at least as far back as dhh's intro to rails development using textmate [1]. What does that open source crowd want now? They want to build OCI/docker containers and deploy them to kubernetes clusters. You can do that on mac, but these containers need to run on a linux kernel, so the setup winds up as containers on a VM on the host OS. If your dev machine is linux, you can remove the VM layer in between and the setup is simpler and more efficient. I think that might push a lot of developers from mac to linux. I just got a new dev machine recently and it's a linux laptop. [1] [this video]
DHH's Rails intro on TextMate as origin of the Mac developer tradition
@BoumTAC Sep 2021 Cites it
on HN thread I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
Read more
When I started learning to code few years ago, tutorials were always, "how to create a blog ?" because it shows everything (authentication, crud, nested view, rights). Then javascript framework came out. It was so hard that they move to just a todolist tutorial because even the creator didn't know how to create a blog with their new cool tech. Some blogger were still able to understand how to use it and release todolist tutorial with authentication to demonstrate authentication, session management and rights. Then new cool javascript framework came out and now it was even harder to code, creators weren't able to develop a todolist because it was too hard so their tutorial was just a basic counter application. Now with nextjs we are even a step further. The developers don't know how to use it (is it even possible ?) so the tutorials show just how to "start" an application, load css and how to create a route. In just a few years we came from create a full application to not even know how to do a todolist. (Imagine form validation, it must be so hard !!!). Everybody seems happy and very productive. It must be myself. In 15 years we came from 15 minutes to create a blog with this old tech to a few days of work. That's a lot of progress we don't have to reload the page ! [this video]
Blog in 15 minutes contrasted with modern frontend complexity
@dmitriid Dec 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Remix: On Rails
The original "How to build a blog in 15 minutes with Rails" from 2005: [this video] I've yet to see a single video like that from any of the new remixes/redwoods/nexts/nuxts/<god there are so many of them> And one that doesn't require 270 KB of Javascript to display a static page like Remix's landing page.
Original Rails blog-in-15-minutes video from 2005
@sergiomattei Jan 2022 Cites it
on HN thread DOS on Dope (2010)
Love the little details: the text in the forms is exactly what DHH used in 2005 when famously introducing Rails at a conference. [this video]
Form text matches DHH's 2005 Rails introduction
@avg_dev May 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Rails Cheat Sheet
i find this critique interesting, because i believe the initial momentum behind rails was sparked by a video about how to create a blog using rails without any setup in just a few minutes. [this video]
Rails momentum started from a quick blog-building video
@dmix May 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Smol Developer
code2prompt.py has some interesting implications for "forking" github projects into the base of your own side project. Once this stuff matures it will be fascinating to see how the 2030 version of 2010 Rails scaffolding looks. What will the DHH "make a blog in 15min" video look like? (Edit: which apparently is 17yrs old now, aka 2006) [this video]
DHH's blog-in-15-minutes video as model for AI scaffolding
@sph May 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Dynamic Forms with LiveView Streams
The Live View demo or the Rails one? :-) Rails, it was this one 17 years ago: [this video] Live View, I'm not sure which is the first demo. There's "Build a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5" ( [link] )
The original Rails demo from 17 years ago

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close