Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming • Hacker News Board

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

#1

Post by alexyaseen » Thu, May 24, 2018, 7:13 PM UTC

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. The amount of time wasted on menial tasks was astounding. Things like cleaning data, generating custom reports, creating human workflows to solve shortcomings in third party tools, etc.

Non-technical people have to rely on doing things manually or using fragile spreadsheets that solve only part of their use cases. We don't think everyone should have to learn to code in order to work productively (https://medium.com/parabola-labs/not-everyone-needs-to-learn...). That’s why we’re building the tools to help people stop wasting so much time on manual processes, and instead focus on their actual core competencies.

We’ve made some interesting decisions in the design of Parabola’s visual programming “language”. We’d love to hear what you think and are happy to discuss our thought process in the comments.

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

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

#2

Post by sharemywin » Thu, May 24, 2018, 8:17 PM UTC

Nothing for windows? MS Office?

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

#3

Post by alexyaseen » Thu, May 24, 2018, 8:23 PM UTC

sharemywin wrote: post #2

Nothing for windows? MS Office?

Parabola is browser-based so should work great on windows! And we support importing .csv and .xls files.

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

#4

Post by adamfeldman » Thu, May 24, 2018, 8:36 PM UTC

This feels like https://ballerina.io/ but for non-programmers, and with SaaS integrations built-in. I've spent so much time moving CSV between systems at an ecommerce company.

Congrats on the launch, this looks awesome! Would love to learn more about how it was built.

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

#5

Post by alexyaseen » Thu, May 24, 2018, 8:43 PM UTC

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. The amount of time wasted on menial tasks was astounding. Things like cleaning data, generating custom reports, creating human workflows to solve shortcomings in third party tools, etc.

Non-technical people have to rely on doing things manually or using fragile spreadsheets that solve only part of their use cases. We don't think everyone should have to learn to code in order to work productively (https://medium.com/parabola-labs/not-everyone-needs-to-learn...). That’s why we’re building the tools to help people stop wasting so much time on manual processes, and instead focus on their actual core competencies.

We’ve made some interesting decisions in the design of Parabola’s visual programming “language”. We’d love to hear what you think and are happy to discuss our thought process in the comments.

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

#6

Post by markatkinson » Thu, May 24, 2018, 8:47 PM UTC

This is awesome. I am currently working with a team to develop a workflow tool with an eventual designer. This is very inspiring.

Take a look at Microsoft's logic apps, it is slightly more generalist, and not so focused on data processing but not nearly as polished as Parabola.

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

#7

Post by skanga » Thu, May 24, 2018, 8:51 PM UTC

Great idea - especially for non-programmers.

The question I have is - can it outperform the command line? (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17135841 for more)

I almost always use awk/mawk for such things.

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

#8

Post by cbkirk » Thu, May 24, 2018, 8:53 PM UTC

adamfeldman wrote: post #4

This feels like https://ballerina.io/ but for non-programmers, and with SaaS integrations built-in. I've spent so much time moving CSV between systems at an ecommerce company. Congrats on the launch, this looks awesome! Would love to learn more about how it was built.

Thanks @adamfeldman. Parabola originally was pure JS: running the majority of each step function of the language in the user’s browser, making use of some python API endpoints and React and Immutable.js for some performance enhancements to know when steps needed to be calculated and rendered.

Given there are definite limitations with browser based JS and user’s systems, we’re now a fully cloud based compute environment. As users make changes in our React UI, we send the work to a queue and then distribute it by parsing the flow tree across various node worker servers so steps can run in parallel (if your flow is built that way). Each step is self contained and we then use sockets (powered by PubNub) to notify the UI of changes.

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

#9

Post by markatkinson » Thu, May 24, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

cbkirk wrote: post #8

adamfeldman wrote: post #4

This feels like https://ballerina.io/ but for non-programmers, and with SaaS integrations built-in. I've spent so much time moving CSV between systems at an ecommerce company. Congrats on the launch, this looks awesome! Would love to learn more about how it was built.

Thanks @adamfeldman. Parabola originally was pure JS: running the majority of each step function of the language in the user’s browser, making use of some python API endpoints and React and Immutable.js for some performance enhancements to know when steps needed to be calculated and rendered. Given there are definite limitations with browser based JS and user’s systems, we’re now a fully cloud based compute environme…

Can I ask what cloud products you use and the provider? Azure, AWS GC?

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

#10

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, May 24, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

cbkirk wrote: post #8

adamfeldman wrote: post #4

This feels like https://ballerina.io/ but for non-programmers, and with SaaS integrations built-in. I've spent so much time moving CSV between systems at an ecommerce company. Congrats on the launch, this looks awesome! Would love to learn more about how it was built.

Thanks @adamfeldman. Parabola originally was pure JS: running the majority of each step function of the language in the user’s browser, making use of some python API endpoints and React and Immutable.js for some performance enhancements to know when steps needed to be calculated and rendered. Given there are definite limitations with browser based JS and user’s systems, we’re now a fully cloud based compute environme…

This is a great way to scale your system. Well done.

AWS Lambda is fairly reliable for running untrusted functions (as well as trusted functions with carefully managed inputs) at scale for customers, but any function provider should work well for this purpose (as long as their container lifecycle meets your needs).