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No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

reuters.com

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Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#271

Post by rorykoehler »

rchaud wrote: post #241
rorykoehler wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked through there website and I fail to see how it would be quicker or better than spinning up a quick rails app with a bootstrap template. Most of my time developing is thinking about the domain model and workflows. Once I've decided on that it takes a matter of minutes to code features and then you are not restricted in your ability to adjust and enhance after the fact.

Your approach requires learning HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and Rails documentation in order to create a prototype. You may as well be saying that getting furniture from IKEA isn't any simpler than buying lumber, saws, wax and paint from Home Depot and building your own.

I already know all those things and learned them for pleasure. Once you know it, nocode vs code is like the difference between using a GUI with a mouse or learning the keyboard shortcuts and using the command line. GUI with mouse just slows you down and is less flexible in general. Fine for lots of things but it's hardly a substitute for complex apps. Nocode apps are basically approximations.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#272

Post by chaorace »

orcasushi wrote: post #254

Having myself used some no/low-code tools (service-now, mendix, outsystems), I do think they are the future, but... I think they suffer from their business model, which often aims complete vendor lock in to milk their customers as long as possible. This is currently their only way to earn back the hard invested money of developing such a tool. We need a, open source, community driven, no-code tool. Using existing too…

Another ServiceNow developer here -- I feel that no-code tools are great for internal tooling, but that they fall quite short when it comes to crafting a proper user experience. To put it another way: there will always be a crossover point where the platform goes from helping you to hurting you. You'll usually have to rely on forcing your users into training as a crutch, unless you're willing to invest considerable time in hacking around limitations and maintaining those hacks. This works just fine if you have a captive audience (internal employees, customers with contractual lock-in), but is basically unacceptable when it comes to the cutthroat world of commercial app development.

I think this tradeoff is pretty well reflected in how ServiceNow's workspaces feature failed when it first launched in 2018 -- and why it has since been overhauled. Sure, they kept the original plug-and-play no-code UI, but they retooled it to work on top of a full-code framework that fully interoperates with the no-code UI. It's the best of both worlds: you can rapidly slap together a UI, then replace individual components of the UI with your own code as you go.

Most no/low-code tools also really suck at version control, in my experience. That's enough to make me loathe working with them, even when they do save me time :/

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#273

Post by foxbee »

the_arun wrote: post #269
foxbee wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shameless, shameless, shameless, plug here. But have you tried tools like: Budibase (cofounder) - https://github.com/Budibase/budibase Saltcorn

Is this tool similar to Hugo?

No. It's an open source low code platform for building internal tools / business apps.

Hugo is static site generator for building websites.

We use Hugo for the Budibase website.

We use Budibase for a multitude of use cases, include: Applicant tracking Api documenting CRM OKRs Growth management Onboarding and about 100 other use cases (dashboards, admin panels, data collection, client portals, and more)

Amazon, NHS, Deloitte, F1, Audi, and others have used it. We had 50,000 downloads last month.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#274

Post by marcosdumay »

adwn wrote: post #149
brundolf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm talking about is a solution for people who don't even want to know what a "script" or a "VM" is. Allowing them to learn and write only what they would actually need to care about: code.

"What I'm talking about is a solution for people who don't even want to know what a "foundation" or "mortar" is. Allowing them to learn and build only what they would actually need to care about: a house." Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn't it? Why is it that people think that all this computery stuff like syntax and semantics, compilers, and operating systems is superfluous fluff invented by programmers to gatekeep t…

Well, there is a lot of complexity on them that comes on them that could theoretically be removed, at a pretty reasonable cost.

This is the original idea behind IDEs, in that they would come with everything set-up, and you could just jump into the code. But we lost this, maybe because of the web, or the great IDE extinction of the 00's, or the proliferation of non-integrated OSS, or some other thing that happened at the time, and now IDEs are about as hard to configure as a normal build environment.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#275

Post by adwn »

whoopdedo wrote: post #256
adwn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1 through 3 (I rarely encounter 6 and never 9) are baked into most OS installers and can be done once then saved as a VM or Docker image to be cloned. That level of pedantry is akin to saying "To compile the project applepie.io from scratch you must first create the universe."

Paraphrased:

    _carbyau_: Simple command to configure your complete dev environment in respect to this project" ?

    layoutIfNeeded: configure

    adwn: No, because ...
I don't see any pedantry on my part. Also, this:

> [...] and can be done once then saved as a VM or Docker image to be cloned

is like that infamous HN comment proclaiming that nobody needs Dropbox, because you can simply "get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem". The original question asked about a simple command to configure a complete environment.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#276

Post by winrid »

sa46 wrote: post #88
winrid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a really nice language. But yes, it was a fad that is mostly irrelevant now...

It's really not. Coffeescript might be nice with fresh development and a small codebase but it's really bad when you're trying to figure out someone else's code.

That can be said of any loosely typed language. I agree that, overall, I'd always prefer something like TS or Java.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#277

Post by asoneth »

lionkor wrote: post #94
redisman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's frustrating. Especially now that I'm nearing 15 years as a professional coder, I already spend less and less time typing and more thinking and working on different views on the problem. Typing or reading text is not difficult!

This touches on the real issue here -- the assumption that, somehow, the logic gets easier to understand if it's in diagrams instead of text. Text is the arguably the best way to reason about logic, since there are millions of people wo do nothing else but read text-code all day, me included. All you do with no-code programming is outsourcing writing the actual code to some other company, who already did all the work…

> the assumption that, somehow, the logic gets easier to understand if it's in diagrams instead of text

One advantage of diagrammatic/block/flow-based programming is that it lets the programmer avoid fiddly syntax. Many experienced programmers have internalized this to the point that it barely registers as a concern except when learning a new language, but for novices doing things like correctly using tags/brackets/semicolons often lead to more failure and frustration than correctly implementing "hard" concepts like recursion.

For examples, check out the Alice project's papers from Dann, Cooper, Pausch, et al.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#278

Post by kokekolo »

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.

Operationalizing an application within an enterprise is its own challenge, and it's adjacent to the creation of said application. There are many custom business applications that were not operationalized even when they were written well, covered all requirements, were tested and accepted. Oftentimes the businesses and vendors have no idea how to get from "the app is ready" to "the app is in use" state.

Without details it's hard to tell if the problem truly was in the app complexity, or because the "non-technical BAs" did not receive proper training, or because of something else.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#279

Post by rchaud »

rorykoehler wrote: post #271
rchaud wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your approach requires learning HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and Rails documentation in order to create a prototype. You may as well be saying that getting furniture from IKEA isn't any simpler than buying lumber, saws, wax and paint from Home Depot and building your own.

I already know all those things and learned them for pleasure. Once you know it, nocode vs code is like the difference between using a GUI with a mouse or learning the keyboard shortcuts and using the command line. GUI with mouse just slows you down and is less flexible in general. Fine for lots of things but it's hardly a substitute for complex apps. Nocode apps are basically approximations.

You personally know how to use Rails and a number of other web technologies relevant to building web apps. So this product is not for you.

Much in the same way that Home Depot is not for me.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#280

Post by zubairlk »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #247
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…

I think two things are simultaneously true about no-code apps: 1) They really are a fast way to get an MVP that can be shown to investors and customers and even process customer transactions for simple businesses. Many simple businesses don't fit into pre-packaged SaaS platforms like Shopify, but don't really need a fully custom solution built from the ground up. No-code is good for these. 2) No-code quickly hits a w…

The wall is definitely there. And the wall keeps moving further and further away.

Totally right about the right tool for the job. And yes NoCode is the right tool for many simple crud apps.

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