Ship a real-time app in 3 minutes
One YAML file. Four engines. Every tutorial on this portal is runnable exactly as written — copy, paste, and watch events flow.
⚡ The 3-minute quickstart
From an empty folder to a deployed app with live events — timed.
guided🧭 Learning paths
Six ordered routes: First App → Streaming → AI → Multi-Agent → Production → Scale.
catalog📚 All tutorials
Searchable, filterable, honest about time and prerequisites.
Why developers stay
- 3 minutes to first success. The quickstart ends with your event visible in
pulse events tail— not with a diagram. - Everything is copy-paste-able. Each step shows the command and the expected result. No pseudo-code, no "adapt this to your setup" mid-tutorial.
- Two doors in. Every tutorial runs in the hosted playground (zero install) or locally (
pulse server start --dev) — same commands either way. - Honest by policy. Prerequisites are explicit (an
llmstage needs a provider; anmcpstage showsblockeduntil its plugin is installed). A tutorial that says 10 minutes takes 10 minutes.
The mental model in one line
A Pulse app is a pipeline that lives on a stream: a source observes, a chain of stages decides (four engines: streaming · rule-based · llm · mcp), a sink acts — and every hop between them is a durable, tailable topic.
source → stage 1 → stage 2 → … → sink
(in) (.out) (.out) (act)
every arrow is a topic you can tail
Popular tutorials
| Tutorial | Level | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Your first pipeline in 3 minutes | Beginner | 3 min |
| Windows & aggregations | Intermediate | 15 min |
| Your first LLM stage | Intermediate | 12 min |
| Call your app from anywhere | Intermediate | 12 min |
| Secrets done right | Beginner | 8 min |
| Start from a template | Beginner | 5 min |
When one machine stops being enough
Everything you learn here runs free, self-hosted, forever. The day you need multiple nodes — HA, the distributed mesh, multi-region — the same app scales without a rewrite: that's StreamFlow Enterprise. The To Scale path explains the transition honestly.