Hi there! I mean to be constructive with my post and not harsh, so please take it as intended :) TLDR; show and tell is key. You can't just tell me about your project, you have to show me to make it real in my head.
I invested about 40 minutes into the video in TFA and another 10 minutes in the "nutshell" video you linked. I haven't heard of Polylith before today. I really enjoyed your presentation and I thought it was of a very high quality as far as the amount of practice you put in and the visuals you created to accompany your words.
However, I have to be honest and say that the quality of the presentation is really the only thing that kept me watching. I figured if you spent so much time on the presentation there must be something here worth hearing. although I did want to abandon the effort and move on at several points because I just had no idea what you were trying to convey.
Or let me put it this way: I did know what you were talking about, but I continually felt like I was missing something because what you were telling me was obvious to me.
In the 40 minute video some notes I had in my head were that:
- First of all, you need to cut out the guy who immediately says he forgets your name. That's not a good way to start off the video.
- But more importantly, you only start talking about Polylith at minute 8 of the talk. Really, I had to double check at a couple points to make sure I was watching the right video because you spent most of the first part of the presentation talking about a different project called Code city, and I started to think this was a presentation on that. What you do at minute 8 you should have done immediately.
- When you do finally introduce Polylith, you don't tell me anything specific or interesting. The words you use are quite generic, and would be used by almost any project to describe itself. All projects want to be simple, flexible, and productive.
- At 12 minutes in things started to click for me when you actually started getting more specific. I don't know what your YouTube statistics look like but I'm willing to bet by this point you've lost almost all of your viewers.
- At 27 minutes in I got really excited because the MC came back to say that we were going to move past concepts and theory and get a demo of the actual product. But what follows is not a demo at all, but further descriptions of a system.
- Finally I'm struck that you introduce your project Scrintel, which is described as a video transcription service, but I'm not actually using Scrintel as I watch your video. Instead I'm using YouTube. This is the perfect opportunity for you to demo your actual software. I literally had to look at the video captions to understand what the MC was saying, and the captions I believe are wrong. Why aren't you using your transcription software to transcribe your video that is selling me on your transcription software?
Moving on to your 10 minute nutshell video, it's more of the same. After spending almost an hour exploring the content you've posted about your product, you've actually never demonstrated your product to me once!
One thing about the nutshell video, and your videos in general, is that I think you should abandon the Lego metaphor. First, it doesn't have the intended effect when you display the toothpick Whitehouse and the Lego Whitehouse. When I see these two, you want me to think about how difficult the toothpick version is to make, and how we shouldn't construct things that way in software, but all I can think about is how detailed it is compared to the Lego model. The toothpick model isn't a mess, it's a masterpiece. I admire the person who made it, but you're telling me that I shouldn't want to build software with that model.
Secondly, the Lego analogy is overdone. As I said in another post, every architecture has made this claim, even if they are actually toothpicks. So when you make it, it's going to be met with skepticism, and since you don't actually demo any of your software in these videos when you make the claim, you're going to be dismissed. Especially when your videos rest so heavily on the metaphor. My opinion is, if you take every instance of describing Polylith as Lego, and you replace it with a demo of your project showing how it's better in concrete terms on a real-world example (not your startup), you will be 1000% in a better place.
Thank you for your comprehensive and detailed feedback!
I'll leave Joakim to respond to your comments about his presentation, and I'll respond directly to your comments about the nutshell video.
> you've actually never demonstrated your product to me once
That's partially true, although I'd argue that by showing the components and bases from an example system, we are showing "the product". Perhaps you're thinking about showing code or filesystem structure from a complete production Polylith workspace? We do that in other videos, but didn't think it would be a good fit in the 10-minute "why?" introduction.
> The toothpick model isn't a mess, it's a masterpiece. I admire the person who made it, but you're telling me that I shouldn't want to build software with that model.
I agree that the toothpick model is a masterpiece! However, the reason we shouldn't want to build software in the same way comes down to one word: change. The real Whitehouse doesn't change shape very often, but all the software I've ever been involved in building does. That's why building software with LEGO pieces is so much better than building it with toothpicks and glue. Which is exactly why it's a such strong metaphor.
> Secondly, the Lego analogy is overdone. As I said in another post, every architecture has made this claim, even if they are actually toothpicks.
You might be right about this, but most of the other recent architectures we'd come across seemed to steer away from talking about LEGO (onion, hexagon, DDD, microservices, etc.), so we were hoping it wasn't overused.
- The Code City project is a cool way of visualising code and the idea was to show how we normally organise code today, and what problems it creates (development experience + sharing). I agree I could have been more clear about that.
- This is the longer video where I (and Furkan) try to explain what Polylith is, what problems it solves, how it works, and why you should use it. The sad fact is that it's super hard to explain Polylith (we have given about 15 different presentations) and I think you need to try it out yourself to get an idea how it is to work with and which problems it solves.
I will leave to Furkan to answer your questions about Scrintal.
I invested about 40 minutes into the video in TFA and another 10 minutes in the "nutshell" video you linked. I haven't heard of Polylith before today. I really enjoyed your presentation and I thought it was of a very high quality as far as the amount of practice you put in and the visuals you created to accompany your words.
However, I have to be honest and say that the quality of the presentation is really the only thing that kept me watching. I figured if you spent so much time on the presentation there must be something here worth hearing. although I did want to abandon the effort and move on at several points because I just had no idea what you were trying to convey.
Or let me put it this way: I did know what you were talking about, but I continually felt like I was missing something because what you were telling me was obvious to me.
In the 40 minute video some notes I had in my head were that:
- First of all, you need to cut out the guy who immediately says he forgets your name. That's not a good way to start off the video.
- But more importantly, you only start talking about Polylith at minute 8 of the talk. Really, I had to double check at a couple points to make sure I was watching the right video because you spent most of the first part of the presentation talking about a different project called Code city, and I started to think this was a presentation on that. What you do at minute 8 you should have done immediately.
- When you do finally introduce Polylith, you don't tell me anything specific or interesting. The words you use are quite generic, and would be used by almost any project to describe itself. All projects want to be simple, flexible, and productive.
- At 12 minutes in things started to click for me when you actually started getting more specific. I don't know what your YouTube statistics look like but I'm willing to bet by this point you've lost almost all of your viewers.
- At 27 minutes in I got really excited because the MC came back to say that we were going to move past concepts and theory and get a demo of the actual product. But what follows is not a demo at all, but further descriptions of a system.
- Finally I'm struck that you introduce your project Scrintel, which is described as a video transcription service, but I'm not actually using Scrintel as I watch your video. Instead I'm using YouTube. This is the perfect opportunity for you to demo your actual software. I literally had to look at the video captions to understand what the MC was saying, and the captions I believe are wrong. Why aren't you using your transcription software to transcribe your video that is selling me on your transcription software?
Moving on to your 10 minute nutshell video, it's more of the same. After spending almost an hour exploring the content you've posted about your product, you've actually never demonstrated your product to me once!
One thing about the nutshell video, and your videos in general, is that I think you should abandon the Lego metaphor. First, it doesn't have the intended effect when you display the toothpick Whitehouse and the Lego Whitehouse. When I see these two, you want me to think about how difficult the toothpick version is to make, and how we shouldn't construct things that way in software, but all I can think about is how detailed it is compared to the Lego model. The toothpick model isn't a mess, it's a masterpiece. I admire the person who made it, but you're telling me that I shouldn't want to build software with that model.
Secondly, the Lego analogy is overdone. As I said in another post, every architecture has made this claim, even if they are actually toothpicks. So when you make it, it's going to be met with skepticism, and since you don't actually demo any of your software in these videos when you make the claim, you're going to be dismissed. Especially when your videos rest so heavily on the metaphor. My opinion is, if you take every instance of describing Polylith as Lego, and you replace it with a demo of your project showing how it's better in concrete terms on a real-world example (not your startup), you will be 1000% in a better place.