Not sure if this counts but https://www.home-assistant.io/ for stitching together all my home technology and create automations. Have to get comfortable with yaml but their support forum is pretty good. End result is I get an LG TV, Dyson Fan, Hive Heating, Google Home, Sonos and Ring Camera all talking to each other if I want.
Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
31–40 of 290 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#32I use Node-Red for all of my home automations. And Tasker for phone automation. I would consider both to fall in the low code genre but still allow a dev to do really cool things (both allow for you to write whatever you want in JS).
Seconded as well with Nodered.
It is low code AND capable of full serverside JS for handling interesting cases. And it has hundreds of plugins for handling APIs of all sorts.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#33Google Sheets can be surprisingly handy as a UI for editing data. For example, I have a job on AWS that scrapes a handful of URLs and snapshots them. Instead of creating a database and hosting it somewhere, or hard-coding them, I put them in a spreadsheet that the AWS job reads at the beginning of every run.
I continually find myself amazed with what people can do with Excel.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#34airtable + zapier replaced like 70% of internal apps.
Can you expand on how is Zapier helping? I am using Airtable + Python because I felt too constrained by Zapier.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#35Hasura by far, lets you point-and-click build your database and table relationships with a web dashboard and autogenerates a full GraphQL CRUD API with permissions you can configure and JWT/webhook auth baked-in. https://hasura.io/ I've been able to build in a weekend no-code what would've taken my team weeks or months to build by hand, even with something as productive as Rails. It automates the boring stuff and you…
I can't agree more about Hasura, I made the jump to GraphQL for my current application and it's been a dream. Their documentation is excellent, helping me get setup with auth0 jwt auth and apollo client despite being new to both.
Metabase was a game changer in my last company, it was so nice to just be able to drop a 50+ line custom SQL query in there with parameters and let users pull what they want. We'd also setup queries to be loaded via Google Sheets cron jobs. That enabled live dashboards most any spreadsheet user could create (pivot, lookups, transforms, etc.).
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#36AutoIT...
I do not like to use it this way at all but you can manage many things using the AU3 macro system. Can be useful for beginners...
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#37I've been working on something that might be interesting to you [1]. It gives you the full flexibility of a programming language while removing all the boilerplate surrounding your business logic through static analysis.
Have a look at the Encore Playground [2] to see a real-world example.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#38I'm biased [1], but MintData (https://mintdata.com) is my personal favorite.
It doesn't use Google Sheets, and instead has its own spreadsheet + Sketch-like surface, giving you tight control over design and behavior that I haven't seen in other tools.
It would honestly warm my heart to see something that has more power & simplicity in the same tool, because I've been a die-hard fan of app-dev tooling for the past 19 years.
Would be curious to get people's thoughts here on MintData -- do you guys agree with my assessment above?
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[1] Founder here. We built MintData into the tool I've always wanted and thought was missing. Our inspiration was Visual Basic 6, PowerBuilder, and all the RAD (rapid app-dev) tooling from the 1990s.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#39Retool (https://retool.com) might be what you're looking for on the front-end. It's built for engineers, so it abstracts away a lot of the boiler-plate stuff (e.g. fetching data from an API, showing errors if it fails, showing a loading indicator on the button when the REST API is in progress, etc.). But you still write code for the custom bits (e.g. if you want to hide a component for certain users).
Here's a 3 minute demo video: https://cdn.tryretool.com/videos/4_minute_demo_4827ae.mp4
It's something we started working on a few years ago before low-code was a thing, haha. It's funny to see what you work on become a buzzword, haha. If any of you have any thoughts / feedback, please let me know! (HN, honestly, has been the main source of feedback for us as we've been working on it.)
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
#40I'm gonna say Godot engine. Yeah, I'm seriously, the "game" engine. https://godotengine.org/
I was playing with it last month and whipped up a simple "toy" (calling it a "game" is too much) that lets me fly a little space ship around a little asteroid field. It took about a day to get it working enough to be fun. (I polished it up a little after that, and maybe one day I'll add some actual game play, mine an asteroid, whatever.)
https://git.sr.ht/~sforman/SpaceGame
While I used GDScript there's a node & pipe dataflow visual UI that non-programmers can use to construct "code", so I think it counts as low-code. You can modify your objects to "export" member vars to the UI so you can tweak them with widgets.
If I had to e.g. design and deploy a 3D world for VR users I would seriously consider Godot as a front-end IDE.
(BTW, I also made a fun knock-down-the-tower toy I call Yengapult: https://git.sr.ht/~sforman/Yengapult )