Looks great. Might be simplifying too much but is it basically like Retool + cron jobs? Super interesting if that's the case :)
Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
31–40 of 102 posts
Re: Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
#32Congrats! Seems like a Retool competitor but focused more on developers? I'm not sure if that's the direction I would go since developers already have pretty good tooling for their level of expertise, IMO.
Although, I could see how building an app that uses data across the various SaaS tools a company uses without requiring that data to be dumped into another database could be useful. Maybe I'm missing the point.
As an aside, I'd love to see Retool but for less technical people. Specifically, a way to make Google Sheets available for multiple people in a company to use. We have multiple quick and dirty "calculators" (think pricing for sales, comp for recruiting) that we roll out across our company. Eventually they get operationalized and converted into proper applications (or we buy a SaaS product for it) but would be nice to have an interim solution. Some requirements:
- Ability to create a very simple CRUD web UI
- Authz/n with ability for IT to integrate into their SSO.
- Google Sheets backend and integration so financial analysts can update and manage.
Re: Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
#33The code snippet in this [0] example from the index page (top) looks to have an f-string issue:
return [
{
"message": "{t.name} is due for {t.due_days} days",
"assignee": t.assignee,
}
for t in tickets
[0] https://assets-global.website-files.com/627d359d0e0aa265b781...
E: Fix formatting (TIL HN doesn't support code blocks)
Re: Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
#34Given the comments I'm used to seeing in general in HN, the over excited tone of the comments in this post makes me wonder how truthful all the praising is, or if they are related to the company in any way. Maybe HN is actually full of people who build internal tools and find this honestly awesome and a game changer.
Eh I don't see too many like that and even if some customers do show up to give meaningful testimony I think that's fine and useful. The few that are meaningless got voted down and will be dead soon.
Re: Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
#35[Disclaimer: my company is using Superblocks and have been paying for it for about a year]
Been reading the comments and I think there are a bunch of questions about why companies would use a tool like this and that integrating your product / company into it is potentially risky. Here's why we decided to use it.
First thing you should know is that before we moved to Superblocks, we were using a combination of Retool, Google Cloud Scheduler, Mode Analytics, and a few small Google App Engine apps to solve our problems.
There is a whole ecosystem of apps and mini-products our engineering team has to build which require slow-paced maintenance, but are still mission critical to our business. Analytics dashboards, Slack reporters, revenue dashboards, customer service dashboards, Discord bots, etc.
There are plenty of different tools which solve some of those problems in silo, but the main problem (and beauty) of building internal apps is that you can fully solve for your unique business problem. We're a tech-enabled advertising agency (there are a handful of companies like ours in the world) and we both have our own external product as well as a series of internal apps that power our operations.
We decided to move all our internal apps to Superblocks effectively because we could merge a few different platform layer things (Google Cloud Scheduler, App Engine, Mode, Retool) and be able to build much faster within our team. The big thing for us was that we have engineers writing in Python (more data heavy stuff), and engineers writing Javascript. Previously, we had to have them offer APIs to each other and it wasn't as agile as it is today for simple things we had to build for our business stakeholders.
I remember seeing one of our first Workflows on Superblocks when our data scientist built a BigQuery step, a Python step, and then our Javascript engineers grabbing that to do some post-processing with it to display the data and thinking "this is probably how most tiny apps will get built in the future".
I don't want to have infrastructure for every tiny solution I built for our team. I just want things to work.
Re: Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
#36Interesting. This is kind of like Camunda without the BPMN baggage and a full blown IDE that integrates all the frontend/UI aspects with the backend workflow stuff. With Camunda, you have to build your own frontend past the auto-generated task forms. It’d also be interesting to see what a rule engine would look like in Superblocks.
You say source-available, but I do wonder what happens with all your apps/workflows if Superblocks goes belly up. It doesn't seem like there’d be an easy way to migrate off it. With Camunda, their modeler and engine is open source and all the code you write is like any other code—it exists in your own git repo.
(PS: Not a Camunda shill, but have built proofs-of-concept with it in the past, and am evaluating it again.)
Re: Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
#37Given the comments I'm used to seeing in general in HN, the over excited tone of the comments in this post makes me wonder how truthful all the praising is, or if they are related to the company in any way. Maybe HN is actually full of people who build internal tools and find this honestly awesome and a game changer.
I am a coward so I didn't want to be the first one to say it, but so many of these comments are so suspicious. The really positive ones seem to have like 1-2 karma.
Re: Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
#38Super exciting. What industries or applications are you guys tackling first? Congrats!
We've seen the most pull from more operations-heavy businesses like Fintech (building KYC, AML, Fraud, Credit Card Admin tools), Insurance (claims management and support admins), E-commerce (Order Management, Supply chain). Which industry are you in?
Seems like a cottage recipe market/consultancy for small non-tech business could be a professional services like option (or for others to have a small consultancy coming into non-tech businesses and selling setting this up, templating, recipes, whatever for companies.
interesting markets in this could be tying to legal, real-estate, construction, hospitality, etc - obv a stretch goal or at least something to just consider how to accommodate.
Re: Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
#39Given the comments I'm used to seeing in general in HN, the over excited tone of the comments in this post makes me wonder how truthful all the praising is, or if they are related to the company in any way. Maybe HN is actually full of people who build internal tools and find this honestly awesome and a game changer.
Eh I don't see too many like that and even if some customers do show up to give meaningful testimony I think that's fine and useful. The few that are meaningless got voted down and will be dead soon.
To be fair, you are right, now, because when I first opened the discussion there was only 1 critic comment and the rest was overly enthusiastic praise. It really stood out from the usual tone of the discussions.
Re: Show HN: Superblocks – IDE for Internal Apps, APIs and Cron Jobs
#40I have used airplane for scheduled jobs, I like their configuration/definition file driven development flow. I am not a fan of writting code in browser.