No-code startup Bubble raises $100M • Hacker News Board

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#201

Post by knighthack » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

zubairlk wrote: post #198

It seems like all the comments here are from non bubble users. We have worked on over 20 client projects in the past 1.5 years using bubble. Specialising exclusively in bubble now. A way to describe the platform would be WordPress for Web Apps. There was a census recently. ~75% clients are startup/MVPs ~25% SME making business tooling Out client portfolio is similar. I've hired fresh graduates in Pakistan, trained th…

> You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way.

This makes absolutely no sense at all. You obviously have not read _The Mythical Man-Month_, and judging by what you've written I completely doubt the entirety of what you've said.

Speed is one thing. The long-term maintainability and usability of a system is another thing altogether. I have serious doubts about this 'no code' movement.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#202

Post by knighthack » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

xchaotic wrote: post #191

murukesh_s wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. I use this analogy where if photoshop did not have this low-code interface and all artists have to do was program strokes code by code, how many artists who couldn't learn or understand "coding" would be left out? IMO Bubble is only ms-paint+ (entry point lowcode) and Photoshop (or Figma) is yet to hit the market.

well, Bubble can simply add more features to become the equivalent of Photoshop for web design...

...And then we'll have Squarespace.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#203

Post by ransom1538 » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

I worked at a 'no code startup' for a few years in 2014. Here is how it goes.

1) Apple will throw out your apps quickly. They say it is a templated app. Our app at them time had 100k active installs. They basically shut down a portion of the appstore.

2) The web version of 'no code' is a sick world of godaddy guis and broken html.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#204

Post by redsymbol » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

cam-perry wrote: post #189

redsymbol wrote: post #139

Some people here are giving examples of using Bubble a few years ago, and found it too limited to be useful. Have any developers here used it recently ? When I first looked at Zapier about 2.5 years ago, as a developer I found it limiting and just not useful compared to writing custom webhooks that I sometimes glued together with cron jobs, etc. But since late last year, Zapier has matured so much I am able to use it…

Yep. My partner is non technical and has been using Bubble since October. I have great impressions. The responsiveness editor could be better, or maybe just better documented. As a developer, you can't come in thinking you'll just get it. Bubble has renamed things for simplicity to non-technical folks and you need to take the time to learn their system. Something I found great is Bubble's API Connector plugin and the…

Thanks, this is the exact kind of intel I was looking for. Especially that they have a API connector and REST API - I was betting they DID have that, as it's a moderately easy thing for them to ad that makes custom extensions possible.

(With Zapier, I have used their so-called "Webhook" connector for that - set up an endpoint on my webapp that accepts a POST with a JSON payload, then make a zap that send data there in response to some trigger.)

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#205

Post by xnx » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #105

mrspeaker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works best for prototyping and rapidly testing ideas. I joined a startup that didn't have any deep coding skills - but had a great idea and vision for a product. They had made a pretty decent prototype with Bubble and could quickly implement suggestions from the beta testers. When I joined I instantly suggested re-writing it in a "real" stack. But when I dived into it, there was a lot of built in features of Bubbl…

People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s somet…

I like to consider myself one of those people. I find the hosting/infrastructure side much more of an obstacle/hassle than the code. Getting the infrastructure out of the way and letting me write business logic and tools is what I'm most interested in.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#206

Post by mm983 » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:11 PM UTC

yourenotsmart wrote: post #147

We keep doing this, every time with the same outcome.

also it's not just the industry that's going to fail if it hits the fan, but also all the other companies which rely on the no code platform. and if those companies are saas, they'll cause damage too somewhere else. or am i missing something? this seems like domino

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#207

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

knighthack wrote: post #201

zubairlk wrote: post #198

It seems like all the comments here are from non bubble users. We have worked on over 20 client projects in the past 1.5 years using bubble. Specialising exclusively in bubble now. A way to describe the platform would be WordPress for Web Apps. There was a census recently. ~75% clients are startup/MVPs ~25% SME making business tooling Out client portfolio is similar. I've hired fresh graduates in Pakistan, trained th…

> You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way. This makes absolutely no sense at all. You obviously have not read _The Mythical Man-Month_, and judging by what you've written I completely doubt the entirety of what you've said. Speed is one thing. The long-term maintainability and usability of a system is another thing altogether. I have serious doubts about this 'no code' mov…

[deleted]

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#208

Post by correcthorse123 » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

snovv_crash wrote: post #148

flarg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In life sciences the people are smarter than any developer but software is IT-captured so all they can work with is Excel. No code is meant for these people. Software developers will never deliver what life sciences needs without no code.

I've watched life science people spend months manually clicking boxes in the tools they have, because they don't have a developer embedded in the team to write some 10-liner automation scripts. Same with stats, there are all kinds of systems like GraphPad Prism which try to bridge Excel and 'real' stats, where 30 lines of python and a CSV file would save them months. More, they weren't even aware that these things co…

Agreed to some extent. "Life science" is quite broad so there's a wide range of topics with varying degrees of complexity and difficulty. I dipped my toes in various apects of life science during a biomedical engineering major. There are specialties overlapping with most traditional fields; from specialties comprising a large part of memorization like physiology, tissue engineering, and biochemistry (medicine), to hardcore organic synthesis (organic chem.), biomechanics (mechanical eng.), systems biology (control and graph theory), biosensors (physics, chem, biochem), imaging (CS::ML & physics), protein engineering/polymer science (chem, phys), bioinformatics (CS) which got me into CS/SE and programming, and many more.

Often there are multidisciplinary research teams and depending on how little a specialization already overlaps with CS/SE-ish topics, having at least someone who realizes which mundane stuff can be automated can be invaluable.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#209

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #105

mrspeaker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works best for prototyping and rapidly testing ideas. I joined a startup that didn't have any deep coding skills - but had a great idea and vision for a product. They had made a pretty decent prototype with Bubble and could quickly implement suggestions from the beta testers. When I joined I instantly suggested re-writing it in a "real" stack. But when I dived into it, there was a lot of built in features of Bubbl…

People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s somet…

I'm happy that these no-code/less-code/visual programming tools are putting the web-apps in focus again, It's changing from 'I have an idea, I need to find an mobile app developer' to 'I have an idea, I can create a prototype on web myself'.

Personally as a coder I have workflows, tool-chains developed over several years that writing a code to create a MVP is faster than learning no-code tools, also the end product is lean and stays with me.

So I haven't used these tools but tried notion for the first time yesterday to export my kindle highlights(HN comments)[1], So I can see the value in these no-code tools in automation workflows for even coders.

[1] https://twitter.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/14199150634906050...

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#210

Post by thesz » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #105

mrspeaker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works best for prototyping and rapidly testing ideas. I joined a startup that didn't have any deep coding skills - but had a great idea and vision for a product. They had made a pretty decent prototype with Bubble and could quickly implement suggestions from the beta testers. When I joined I instantly suggested re-writing it in a "real" stack. But when I dived into it, there was a lot of built in features of Bubbl…

People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s somet…

To write code is much like to instructing a person who is doing work-to-rule. That person won't do anything outside of instructions given and will stop at the very first time it can (encounter an error).

If you can cope with instructing work-to-rule workers, you can code. No extraordinary smarts required.

As of "much smarter than above average programmer", programmers in average are at IQ 115. If we take "above average" as +15 points (IQ's standard deviation) and "much smarter" as another +30 points, we end at 160 IQ points person. Four standard deviations make that person one in roughly 16 000, or sixteen thousands. I think you should know a lot of people, much more than 150 or so of average person, to know many of them.

And to offer you my experience, my brother seems not to have any problems with coding in Python. He is well into 40-s, most of his career he was at the C*O positions and right now he decided to change venues one more time.