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How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

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Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

#101

Post by mcguire »

JVIDEL wrote: post #98
le-mark wrote: post #86

Wow this has been a disappointing discussion up to now, with most commenting on how much visual coding tools suck. That's not the take away here, at all. A frequently asked question is "where is Access for the Web?", closing aligned with "what happened to 4GL languages and tools" or "where are the RAD (rapid application development) app builders for the web?". This is an answer; they've hit $100k monthly. They have f…

TBH (and it is an impressive app) there isn't much competition, not much going on despite coding-as-a-job being hammered in every article even remotely related to education and not just an extra skill but a vital one. And in those meetups you tend to find a lot of people looking for someone to code their ideas. These guys put a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert.

The question then is, what happens when they drink the lemonade? Thirst quenching? Butterflies and rainbows? Diarrhea? Cirrhosis?

When you start building a normally-complicated application that isn't going to be thrown away at the end of the semester, well, then what?

Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

#102

Post by [deleted] »

JVIDEL wrote: post #100
levonterteryan wrote: post #89

Bubble platform is the most advanced no-code tool that exists so far. It allowed many entrepreneurs (including me) create apps fast and with low budget which otherwise would take many months and tens of thousands dollars to build. It's true, I'm a bit biased here, because it also became possible for me to start a no-code development business which never existed before. So we focus on building apps without code for pe…

So you guys are a service that build apps on bubble (for people that I guess can't even deal with a GUI) and also sell templates?

[deleted]

Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

#103

Post by AriaMinaei »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #84
AriaMinaei wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you can think and communicate precisely enough to describe your ideas then you can enter them into a computer fairly easily in a language like python or basic Try "thinking and communicating clearly and precisely" the process of multiplying two numbers larger than one thousand, in Roman numerals. For me, it was very difficult if I didn't cheat and implicitly convert everything in my head to normal (Hindu) numera…

The Romans themselves didn't multiply Roman numerals. They used abacuses. Roman numerals were just the initial inputs and final output of calculations.

I think that helps the point that the wrong notation (ie interface, eg Roman numerals for multiplication) can be prohibitive to making sense of and processing data.

Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

#104

Post by spiralganglion »

Postscapes wrote: post #65

I found this product awhile back and was so excited at first. I have a design background ( but can dabble in css, hack at php and python) but had trouble trying to get some APIs connected and displayed with Bubble. Please oh please, can one of you developers have Airtable and Webflow make a baby? This combo would be amazing for functional business use and data display and I would pay good money for it.

I agree — as someone with as much of a design background as a programming background, seeing something like Bubble described as "visual programming" feels a bit offensive. Yes, there's a bit of meaningful visual structure sprinkled here and there throughout their environment. But it's nothing like what one would imagine if they were left to freely ideate about some hypothetical, ideal "visual programming" environment.

In a post-Bret Victor world, we know what such an environment might look like.

Stop Drawing Dead Fish: https://vimeo.com/64895205 Drawing Dynamic Visualizations: https://vimeo.com/66085662

As a visually-minded developer constantly hunting for such tools, and even working on some myself (in a small way — nothing that anyone here will ever end up using, surely), I can assure you that there's enough smoke that eventually we'll see something like what we desire catch fire.

If I had to guess, I'd say we'll see it come out of the world of video games, not web applications. So don't fret that Bubble looks like a step in the wrong direction. They're not building tools for visual thinkers, they're building tools for MBAs.

Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

#105

Post by spiralganglion »

carlmr wrote: post #22
ivanhoe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO visual programming should really aim more to be a scaffolding tool - so instead of replacing the syntax to focus more on speeding up the structuring of the code, helping you to easier manage and understand the blocks and the flow. Ideally it can then auto-generate the most of it and leave you to fine-tune the details of logic directly in the code (where it's faster and more expressive to be able to type the code…

Also if it's not in text, you can't use all the tools effectively, like diffing, versioning, to actually create reliable tools with few bugs. I'm very skeptical of graphical programming.

Unfortunately, there's a long history of graphical programming being foisted upon text-centric domains, which is just as bad as the reverse, so you're right to be skeptical. But if you shift perspective to another domain, graphical (or otherwise non-textual) programming becomes much more appealing.

For example: Game devs build themselves sandbox environments in which they can test out their physics engine, dynamic music systems, animation playback, etc. These sandboxes are like REPLs, but for non-textual data. One can imagine how much nicer it would be if the full system's code were represented first-class inside that sandbox, so that you were introducing and manipulating system abstractions close to the truest representation of the data, rather than having to leave the sandbox to go back to your text editor to make system tweaks, far away from the data.

Still skeptical about why that might be nice? Your text editor and terminal know nothing about the full, live representation of the data, so they do nothing to help you work in that domain. The nice things you get when working with text — diffs, versioning, etc — you don't get the physics engine / music engine / animation engine equivalents unless your code is somehow present in the same space as the live data.

Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

#106

Post by flukus »

murukesh_s wrote: post #62
waytogo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This and I would go one step further: visual programming tools are like GUIs and they are the main reason that people can't code nowadays. When I switched back to a shell after 20 years I realized how much a GUI hurts, how much I unlearned to work with computers. After decades of Windows and OSX, I got Arch with i3 (so no desktop environment). I am mainly using text-based software like the shell, bash, tmux and vim e…

Coding with text is easy, but then why we there is a gap between getting a prototype/design done and the actual implementation? Text based coding is certainly more efficient in representing logic in a concise way, but the current set of frameworks and tooling on text based environments requires an exhorbitant amount of learning to produce a working application(e.g React), that's where the rapid application developmen…

> Text based coding is certainly more efficient in representing logic in a concise way, but the current set of frameworks and tooling on text based environments requires an exhorbitant amount of learning to produce a working application(e.g React)

That's a problem with this particular set of tooling then. In the past we've had drag'n'drop tools like visual basic which made rapid prototyping easy and you'd use the same tools for the final version. On the text side you've got similar tools like Qt and Gtk which allow you to slap together a prototype quickly and then use them for the final application. I always assumed react was quite similar.

Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

#107

Post by murukesh_s »

waytogo wrote: post #64
murukesh_s wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding with text is easy, but then why we there is a gap between getting a prototype/design done and the actual implementation? Text based coding is certainly more efficient in representing logic in a concise way, but the current set of frameworks and tooling on text based environments requires an exhorbitant amount of learning to produce a working application(e.g React), that's where the rapid application developmen…

> why we there is a gap between getting a prototype/design done and the actual implementation? I think this has rather psychological reasons. There is a good book from Seth Godin called 'The Dip' which deals with the problem why most are fast in prototyping but not able to transform a prototype to an actual implementation ('to stick to the end'). However, I think there is nothing wrong with a prototype to fully-imple…

That's could be because we are accustomed to coding through text. Imagine asking a designer to use code for vector editing?

Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

#108

Post by delhanty »

mcguire wrote: post #101
JVIDEL wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH (and it is an impressive app) there isn't much competition, not much going on despite coding-as-a-job being hammered in every article even remotely related to education and not just an extra skill but a vital one. And in those meetups you tend to find a lot of people looking for someone to code their ideas. These guys put a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert.

The question then is, what happens when they drink the lemonade? Thirst quenching? Butterflies and rainbows? Diarrhea? Cirrhosis? When you start building a normally-complicated application that isn't going to be thrown away at the end of the semester, well, then what?

Perhaps the point of Bubbles is product validation for a semi-technical founder without having to hire someone who can code.

Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

#109

Post by le-mark »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #36
andr3w321 wrote: post #30

What I'd really like is a smarter compiler. My normal dev process is 1. Write code 2. Run code 3. See error 4. Google error 5. Write code to fix error 6. Repeat I'd like a compiler that helps speed up steps 3-5. I know IDEs do some of this, but I'd like a compiler that automatically fixes errors instead of just telling me what went wrong. One that fixes parentheses that I left off or automatically fixes typos in vari…

You can use Javascript, the main engines will do that kind of magical "fixing" like adding missing semicolons and hoist variable definitions upwards in functions. It's even transparent. It's an hot mess. What you request in the last paragraph is a Junior Developer to do the grunt work of implementing a spec.

I'm not sure why this has been down voted, but what you are describing as "magical" were a direct consequence of the "lazy" or "lackluster" language implementation. Semicolons are optional, and variable scope is not strictly lexical. This can be seen easily by implementing a javascript subset, which is an interesting excercise. Specifically, the part where you build symbol tables and do symbol resolution. These are also some of the reasons why Javascript is derided by many.
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