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Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming

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Re: Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming

#51

Post by chatmasta »

I’ve seen a lot of attempts at this product, and none have really caught my eye. Looks like you really nailed it. Btw, great marketing website. The use cases section is critical and it’s amazing how many sites miss that.

As others have alluded to, the challenge will be when users need to do something non-standard with the data. From your comments, it sounds like everything is built in JS. Is your multitenancy isolated enough that you would be able to build a JS scripting engine? That is, to enable power users to drop in some custom logic when they need to, by writing JS against a simple API.

How long ago did you launch? How did you find your first customers, and are they happy with the product?

Also would be keen to hear the story of your journey to product/market fit. Did the product always look like this? Did you talk to users as you built it? It’s such an ambitious project, I’d be scared I was building the wrong thing for months while getting to launch. But it seems like you’ve already hit product/market fit, so kudos for that.

Re: Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming

#52

Post by derrikcurran »

hacker_9 wrote: post #47
murukesh_s wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you use a coding widget(not sure if this tool supports it) in those special cases? In that way common things are super easy and you can also tackle those corner cases as well.

But who is writing the widget? If it's a programmer, then why is he using this tool when most of this stuff is one liners in code anyway? And if it's a non-programmer, he now can't do something that he may have still been able to do in excel.

A non-developer who has access to developers. A developer can be paid to write the widget, which would likely be cheaper, easier, and faster than paying a developer for every minor change. It really depends on context. In a larger organization, for example, the user might have access to plenty of developers but need to open a ticket and wait forever every time they need something.

Re: Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming

#53

Post by mwexler »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #28
alexyaseen wrote: post #5

Hi HN! I’m Alex from Parabola ( https://parabola.io ). Parabola is a visual programming tool for creating functional data flows that everyone can use. It’s entirely drag-and-drop, handles data sizes much larger than a traditional spreadsheet, calculates everything live, and can run your flows on a schedule of your choosing. I used to work in strategy consulting, doing data analytics for SMBs and Fortune 500 companies…

Greetings! I'll get straight to the point. I've used Node-Red ( https://nodered.org ) in building my own IoT network along with automating quite a lot of things. I run my own Node-Red instance locally as well as online. Node-red has 1500 different functionality plugins, including things like "push flow to another node-red installation". Node-red also uses javascript as its frontend and backend. I can share whole code…

Thanks to the pointer for Node Red; I saw it on my Pi and forgot about it. It's pretty impressive (esp since it's got IBM all over it).

Re: Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming

#55

Post by BerislavLopac »

alexyaseen wrote: post #5

Hi HN! I’m Alex from Parabola ( https://parabola.io ). Parabola is a visual programming tool for creating functional data flows that everyone can use. It’s entirely drag-and-drop, handles data sizes much larger than a traditional spreadsheet, calculates everything live, and can run your flows on a schedule of your choosing. I used to work in strategy consulting, doing data analytics for SMBs and Fortune 500 companies…

Hi, I'm curious -- what are the underlying technologies?

Re: Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming

#56

Post by crankylinuxuser »

statictype wrote: post #33
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greetings! I'll get straight to the point. I've used Node-Red ( https://nodered.org ) in building my own IoT network along with automating quite a lot of things. I run my own Node-Red instance locally as well as online. Node-red has 1500 different functionality plugins, including things like "push flow to another node-red installation". Node-red also uses javascript as its frontend and backend. I can share whole code…

I suppose with that logic you don’t even need node red. You could just put your requirements into a .js file. What’s your buy-in? What are you doing with node red that can’t be done with a text editor and npm?

That's certainly reducto-ad-absurdum if iv'e ever seen one.

They're both in the realm of "graphical programming language in the browser". One is a pay-per-$something, and the other is libre/gratis.

And sure, you could use backend js to write scripts to do $thing, but requires a lot of setup to work with different APIs. So absolutely no, js+text editor is nowhere near the same.

Re: Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming

#57

Post by sireat »

Looks great, reminds of Labview a bit. :)

Target market is something that UIPath currently addresses is it not?

How does Parabola handle authorization issues? Is it mostly through the right API?

I am teaching Python to office personnel who balked at the high price of UIPath but might find Parabola pricing easier to accept.

Re: Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming

#58

Post by sbr464 »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #55
alexyaseen wrote: post #5

Hi HN! I’m Alex from Parabola ( https://parabola.io ). Parabola is a visual programming tool for creating functional data flows that everyone can use. It’s entirely drag-and-drop, handles data sizes much larger than a traditional spreadsheet, calculates everything live, and can run your flows on a schedule of your choosing. I used to work in strategy consulting, doing data analytics for SMBs and Fortune 500 companies…

Hi, I'm curious -- what are the underlying technologies?

I noticed they were using jsPlumb https://jsplumbtoolkit.com/ for the UI builder

Re: Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming

#60

Post by dcre »

some_account wrote: post #41
alexyaseen wrote: post #5

Hi HN! I’m Alex from Parabola ( https://parabola.io ). Parabola is a visual programming tool for creating functional data flows that everyone can use. It’s entirely drag-and-drop, handles data sizes much larger than a traditional spreadsheet, calculates everything live, and can run your flows on a schedule of your choosing. I used to work in strategy consulting, doing data analytics for SMBs and Fortune 500 companies…

It's a very nice idea but these tools always have limitations that become super annoying after a while. Programming is total freedom to do what you want and these tools try to make it look like you cab drag and drop data flows together and it will just work in a optimal way. And it will at first, until your first special or odd requirement needs to somehow be implemented in that tool.

"total freedom" — never heard of it
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