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0 pointsoutlore2y ago0 comments

Having received many t shirts from companies and conferences, I mostly don't wear them if the branding is really over the top. As described, a Kagi shirt would be something I'd actually wear

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SOLAR_FIELDS2y ago

There was a hilarious blog post on here a few months ago from some guy who collects database company T shirts. A lot of them are quite bad but a few are really good. IIRC his favorite was from Snowflake.

Edit: apparently his favorite was from mongo: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2016/07/my-favorite-datab... which I have to agree with, that is a good shirt.

I think I might still like the Snowflake one (3) the best though. Although rereading the article he says there is writing on the back of the Snowflake one which makes me not like it as much. There are very few stylish shirts I enjoy that have writing on the back of them.

3PS2y ago

For reference, that "some guy" is Andy Pavlo, a professor of databases at Carnegie Mellon. He has a lot of neat writeups online, like this annual review of new database systems [0]. He puts up lectures on the internet for free too.

Having been to Dr. Pavlo's office - or at least, one of them - I can attest to there being multiple cardboard boxes filled with gifted shirts from different companies. One of my favorite designs was actually from CMU's DB group itself - it has a little "this database kills fascists" tag on it, with a skull motif :D

[0]: https://ottertune.com/blog/2022-databases-retrospective

thfuran2y ago

But would that make it effective advertising?

diggan2y ago

But isn't the goal of the t-shirt a gift for the first 20k paying users? The goal for them doesn't seem to be about what they get back from giving away the t-shirt.

justinclift2y ago

That sounds pretty silly.

Shouldn't gifts and similar things come after the business is properly sustainable?

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outloreOP2y ago

I suppose it wouldn't! Perhaps it might develop brand awareness. (I am thinking about Nike's swoosh or Vercel's triangle)

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