About

How ShowReel came to life

One idea, one evening, one conversation with Claude. From "what if" to a live site before midnight.

The spark

It started with HackerTube, a weekend hack that mined 20 years of Hacker News comments for the YouTube videos people keep recommending. A brilliant way to escape the algorithm.

That raised a sharper question: what if every video was a product someone actually built? Show HN is where makers put their work in front of the toughest crowd on the internet. Thousands of those posts include a demo video. Nobody had stitched them into one place to watch.

Real products. Real demos. Upvoted by Hacker News.

How it was built

1. Pros and cons firstThe idea was pressure tested before a line of code: smaller pool than HackerTube, dead links to handle, uneven demo quality. All solvable.
2. "Build it"Two words. Claude wrote the whole app from a phone chat: data pipeline, ranking, player and design.
3. Find every demoThe site sweeps the HN Search API for Show HN posts linking to YouTube, Loom or Vimeo, in the URL or in the post text, splitting date ranges automatically when results get large.
4. Clean the reelVideo IDs are extracted and deduplicated. Deleted videos are detected from their thumbnails and quietly dropped.
5. Make it watchableThumbnails use a frame from the middle of each video instead of the polished cover. Tabs for Top, Newest, Hidden gems, Shuffle and a For you feed that learns from what you watch.
6. Ship itDeployed on Netlify as a static site. No servers, no database, no build step.

The stack

The maker