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…
Thanks for your comment which definitely isn't sponsored or paid for.
No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
311–320 of 327 posts
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#312Earlier 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…
> "spaghetti no-code", slow loading times, crazy hacks, giant bundles Can you say more about these problems? I'm curious what they're like in practice, if/how companies using Bubble can work around them, and whether Bubble might be able to fix these kinds of issues in the future.
The hard bit I think is the "spaghetti no-code" problem that I've seen in nearly all visual-type programing environments. Just because it's no code, all of the logic still needs to exist somewhere. When we code we can break it apart in many ways, and how you break things apart and abstract things depends on the system.
But no-code tools are fixed, and you only have one way to divide up the logic. In Bubble's case, it means there's a "design" section with UI and data-binding, and a "workflow" section with all of the actions that happen: UI interactions and business logic are smooshed in together. You end up with thousands of boxes indicating actions, in a giant list. You can kind of group them, and you can colourize them - but everything is held together by convention. A single logical flow can require many UI elements, and tracking that logical flow through the various unrelated boxes is... spaghetti!
In Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs it says "Every powerful language has three mechanisms for [combining simple ideas to form more complex ideas]: * primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with, * means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and * means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units."
Most of the no-code tools seem to miss (or have a too simple version of) the final mechanism: "means of abstraction". So the entire system is built of combinations, that are poorly tied together.
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
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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
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apps have been "building themselves" for decades: it's called a compiler. To your point, can I call the cement mixer a self-made building material that resulted in an accumulation of 4000-year-old of knowledge? Every known industry has different levels of production to reach the final product. Which may be a tool builder to automate the industry. Exactly the same way the building evolves to the prefabricated. The l…
I feel less like I'm asking to stop space discovery until we fix Earth, and more like I'm cautioning against the claims of crystal healing and homeopathy. I would have no issue with a well-conducted, good-faith research study into crystal healing -- after all, simply coating a surface in silver dramatically increases its anti-bacterial properties, so clearly some "dark-ages alchemy" level claims are actually true. Bu…
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
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How long did the rewrite take? Was there anything that was worse about the coded version?
About 6 months to switch - probably twice as long as it should have, because it was happening in parallel with maintaining and improving the no-code version, and the product requirements were evolving. Switching off the no-code version was a happy day. We'd pushed it further than it was designed to go. The initial advantages of quick prototyping slowed down, and it was getting harder (very hard) to add new features w…
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "spaghetti no-code", slow loading times, crazy hacks, giant bundles Can you say more about these problems? I'm curious what they're like in practice, if/how companies using Bubble can work around them, and whether Bubble might be able to fix these kinds of issues in the future.
The "slow editor/loading times" and "giant bundles" is just technical, so should be "easy" to fix! The hard bit I think is the "spaghetti no-code" problem that I've seen in nearly all visual-type programing environments. Just because it's no code, all of the logic still needs to exist somewhere. When we code we can break it apart in many ways, and how you break things apart and abstract things depends on the system.…
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#317Earlier 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.
In that analysis, did you spot yourself a pre-condition of knowing Rails, Ruby, HTML, CSS, and something about databases? The advantage of no-code comes mostly for people who don’t have that same background.
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
I'd argue, no.
Bubble will not provide good handmade applications in the vast majority of cases.
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incidentally the only Bubble app I've seen online was mentioned in the Bubble FB ad: Revetize. It actually made me do some research when I saw the ad last week as it seemed so absurd. https://nocodefounders.com/interview/revetize-interview 0 results on the Apple app store, but there is an app on the Play store called Revetize with "10+ downloads". Perhaps that's it?
Bubble has a showcase section on their site: https://bubble.io/showcase
Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because programming wraps around the instruction-based model that processors use to execute programs. When you elevator pitch a product, you don't give them a list of instructions the product carries out, you tell them what the product does in broad terms. The theoretical next level of programming is being able to pitch your software to the computer, having it build it in real time, and playing around and tweakin…
This is a longer term goal that we're interested in at Story.ai ( https://www.story.ai ). We think that the future is presenting the computer with a problem (in the same way you might present to a consultant) and through a process of disambiguation with your domain expertise, come to a solution.