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No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

reuters.com

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Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#231

Post by Terretta »

lucasverra wrote: post #69
deeviant wrote: post #10

I think the biggest problem with this approach is at some point, they necessarily reach a level of complexity that it takes the same amount of time to learn how to use their "no-code" tools than it does to just learn how to code.

Simply not true. I’ve been programming with bubble from “technical aware founder PM/founder” and bubble is liberating. In the past i’ve built a webapp that : - Renders desktop - Renders mobile - store in database - after a conditional form - create a complex journey of to do list with defaults based on answers of previous cond. form - connects to an external system with cron daily - sends email daily from backend - u…

For perspective: this same bullet list was in Vemeer’s FrontPage (bought by Microsoft).

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#232

Post by rattray »

mrspeaker wrote: post #48
deeviant wrote: post #10

I think the biggest problem with this approach is at some point, they necessarily reach a level of complexity that it takes the same amount of time to learn how to use their "no-code" tools than it does to just learn how to code.

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…

How long did the rewrite take? Was there anything that was worse about the coded version?

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#233

Post by [deleted] »

rattray wrote: post #226
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…

What tools did your agency use before Bubble?

[deleted]

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#234

Post by rattray »

surfingdino wrote: post #168

I used to work for the client who bought a no-code solution all devs advised against. It was meant to make it so simple to write business logic that even non-technical BAs could do it. Nobody understood how it worked and the devs spent six months trying to make it work before business admitted it's useless.

Which one?

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#236

Post by macando »

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…

"We have worked on 30+ projects in bubble.io."

"I'm afraid many are only showable on a Zoom call. Please book a consultation call and I'll share a project that aligns closest with what your project."

30 projects

0 images

0 gifs

0 videos

0 company names

0 case studies

Hmmmmm.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#237

Post by adwn »

adwn wrote: post #157
layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do open source projects have an obvious "run this script to configure your complete dev environment in respect to this project" ? ./configure

That's not even close to being accurate. The real workflow looks more like this: 1) Install an appropriate compiler toolchain. 2) Install whatever other tools are needed (like pkgconfig). 3) Install the necessary *-dev packages for the library dependencies. 4) Figure out which options to pass to configure to include the features you want and exclude the features you don't want. 5) ./configure 6) Go back to step 3 bec…

Sorry, I just realized that the above workflow is wrong: Since you want to fix a bug, you'll probably clone the development branch of the repo, which doesn't even have a configure script – only source releases have that. So prepend these steps:

0.1) Install the autotools.

0.2) Run autoconf, no wait, automake, no wait, autoreconf, no wait, autoreconf --install.

0.3) Delete all files in the directory and checkout a fresh copy.

0.4) autoreconf --install

1) ...

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#238

Post by Terretta »

dbt00 wrote: post #77
capybara_2020 wrote: post #35

Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years? I know Microsoft tried to allow non-developers to create apps without developers, and they have been trying for decades. But failed! They built an app that allowed you to drag and drop blocks, and they tried a visual query builder(not sure what the exact name was) for SQL. They added a workflow builder to ShareP…

Visual Basic was incredibly successful. From VB3 adding database support until VB6-ish started integrating with .NET, 10s of millions of developers built applications that you've just never heard of. What killed RAD tools was the web, not them being a failure.

Would the low code equivalent from the era be MS Access? And the webification of that being MS FrontPage for UI w/ MS Access .mdb behind? You also had ColdFusion wizards, Dreamweaver app helpers, etc.

Maybe what killed that push was proliferation of cheap journeymen: everyone’s niece wanted to be a web dev, everyone’s nephew a web designer, so it was easier to have your nephew or niece build your site than research which low code boxed software of the age would let you do it yourself.

The niece went down the path of PHP, Rails, and node.js+Angular/React, the nephew down the path of Dreamweaver, Creative Suite, Sketch, Figma. Plentiful cheap hands you can pick up the phone and boss around, nobody needs low code.

Now the tide has shifted. Nieces, nephews, cousins, anyone with a knack are all doing it, but the demand outstrips this supply.

So the demand needs more workers or more automation. Code camps aren’t keeping up, but boxed software is now web delivery. Advertising puts it under general public noses.

Anyone can find a way to build a thing (there are a thousand drag and drop app/site builders now), and the average small biz owner reading the marketing then dragging and dropping doesn’t have a clue whether that’s limiting or good idea.

So yeah what killed RAD tools was the web, but also kids. Now the kids on the web are building the next gen of RAD. And the circle of life continues. :-)

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#239

Post by Uehreka »

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…

Given the kind of cocky tone elsewhere in that comment, I read it as “the biggest problem with Bubble is that if you’re an engineering manager who likes maintaining a fiefdom of 30 engineers, you won’t get to do that anymore”. No-code folks often try and make it seem like their biggest antagonists are corrupt middle managers, because they make for better rhetorical punching bags than individual contributor developers.

You’re right about the mythical man month, but I have a feeling this person is trying to grind an axe more than make a coherent point.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#240

Post by cloverich »

gilbetron wrote: post #174
yourenotsmart wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years? It's a basic error of attribution. We need complex systems, and we build them typically by text source, which is the most efficient way of coding a system (as we've found over the decades). Because the source looks arcane to an untrained eye, people attribute the complexity to the form of the code: text source…

This is an excellent comment, I love how you phrase it. I've had people (even on HN) get angry at me when I suggest that we do have a wonderful visual/graphical was to write software: text. Text is a graphical representation of ideas. One that, as you point out, has been honed over hundreds of years for expressing ideas, and decades for expressing code. Text is so amazingly intuitive that don't even think of it as gr…

Text also has the best tooling around change management. Every developer I interview these days knows how to use source control, do diffs and code review, use local / staging / production environments and do rollbacks and hotfixes (etc etc). Sometimes the allure of these no code platforms in solving some important problems overlooks that even if they can do that well, they _also_ need to be just as good as change management, and likely the person building said app needs to understand all these concepts well.
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