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Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

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Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#111

Post by jrockway »

cosmotic wrote: post #56

Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? 27th times the charm?

It gets you pretty far. When I worked at a bank, most of the pricing was done in Excel. What they had was infrastructure on top of Excel, like standard calculations and network connectivity, to support this. (I ended up writing a monitoring system for this, which proved very interesting. Months were spent going back and forth with the networking vendor about how slow their thing was, but I added some simple time in -> time out monitoring and we found that the cause was actually the spreadsheet. That was a politically unpopular finding, but data is data.)

Anyway, this is still "programming", of course. You have inputs, you transform them, and you get outputs. What Excel gives is the ability to see all the intermediate calculations update as you stitch things together, which is very different from the software engineer approach (where we think of all the inputs, and write tests to make sure a particular sub-module works, and then treat that as working forever). The software engineering approach lets us build very large systems reliably, but the spreadsheet approach lets you build simple things very quickly.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#112

Post by mNovak »

avolcano wrote: post #3

Looks like a competitor to Retool, interesting. The focus on data permissions, mobile support, and push notifications is really interesting because none of those features are ones that Retool focuses on, I believe - those features being front and center makes me think Amazon has looked at the competition and wants to focus on what they offer that others don't, rather than just trying to be yet-another-tool in the spa…

As far as I can tell, this is being pitched to teams, not really general purpose applications (as I imagine a highly scalable DB being used for). The pricing is quite high on a per user basis and the 'tables' max out at 100k rows, so not useful for any larger scale data aggregation.

Agreed, a seemingly missing feature is how can lambdas or other AWS ecosystem components interact with this data? I could imagine systems where it's nice for "no-code" and "code" to interact cleanly.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#113

Post by nickff »

robbyking wrote: post #102
nickff wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are radically underestimating the perceived barriers to entry with programming. You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. This type of insider view is often referred to as 'the curse of knowledge'.

I don't think they were saying learning to code is easy, per se, just that it's not the only barrier to launching a successful product.

Grandparent said "that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context". I think that my response was reasonable, and directly addressed one of their most important points.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#114

Post by tsp »

grumple wrote: post #89
nickff wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are radically underestimating the perceived barriers to entry with programming. You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. This type of insider view is often referred to as 'the curse of knowledge'.

Perceived barriers are just that though. This doesn’t remove them - someone still has to learn this system, and you’ve got to pay them to work on it. With a system like this, you’ll quickly come to the cases that business people love to create anyway: you can’t do X with Honeycode but you need to make it happen anyway. And then you’ll wish you’d just done the whole thing in Python.

Writing a first iteration fast with no code is a smart move. You can later on create a second iteration with more traditional languages and tooling like Python.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#115

Post by dahfizz »

unicornfinder wrote: post #79
cbdumas wrote: post #73

I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal…

Indeed. The hardest part of my job isn't writing code. It's in understanding the problems and working out how to solve them.

That's because you already know how to code. For someone with no programming experience, the programming would be the hard part.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#116

Post by basch »

llimos wrote: post #47
kords wrote: post #37

A lot of these things can be done with SharePoint. Same thing, no code.

Correct, especially when you add Power Automate and Power Apps - MS have been quietly pulling ahead in this space. They also have one huge advantage that no-one else besides maybe Google have - integration with Office 365: your corporate directory, email, filestore... Which means they don't even need to be the best at this kind of product. Good enough, plus the integration, is a game changer.

Office 365 AND Dynamics (CRM, Finance, ERP etc.)

The one thing Microsoft really needs still is in house, industry specific layers to drop on top of dynamics, such as https://www.mtwocloud.com/ instead of depending on these third parties. Microsofts own sales teams don't know these products exist, and they have poor visibility. Enough companies won't even touch Dynamics, preferring something more industry specific.

Look at all the other things they cover in the SalesForce, Adobe, Oracle realm that automatically integrate right into the Power Platform. https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#117

Post by IggleSniggle »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #55
VRay wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, man, this looks like a beefed-up version of Excel macros Anyone who can write working spreadsheet macros could probably just learn to actually program. Maybe they aren't going to be making the next RTX Voice or proving P=NP, but I'll bet they could crank out some CRUD

I did a lot of customer interviews. And I mean a lot. People that are good at using Excel (as in, not just create a table with data, but know how to use it, do macros, pivots, etc), if the need arrives they just move up the chain to Access/Filemaker. I would say Excel is their gateway drug to coding. Maybe now they will move to Honeycode perhaps (if the UI is ok) The ones that can't use Excel past putting =A1+A2*0.2…

Call me crazy, but with all the high-level language features in most of the commonly used languages of today, combined with the depth of rich IDE tooling for those languages, we already exist in a no-code world.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#120

Post by LoSboccacc »

majormajor wrote: post #97
grumple wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perceived barriers are just that though. This doesn’t remove them - someone still has to learn this system, and you’ve got to pay them to work on it. With a system like this, you’ll quickly come to the cases that business people love to create anyway: you can’t do X with Honeycode but you need to make it happen anyway. And then you’ll wish you’d just done the whole thing in Python.

> you’ll quickly come to the cases that business people love to create anyway: you can’t do X with Honeycode but you need to make it happen anyway. And then you’ll wish you’d just done the whole thing in Python. If doing the first versions in this thing meant you got to that position 6 months earlier than you would've otherwise, you shouldn't wish you'd just done it in Python from the start - your business would be m…

it's very hard for a business process to do with "good enough" code. in many situation either the output is complete and correct or it's of marginal utility.

it is also geared heavily toward internal software, so it has a very narrow scope, it's not really for startup, it's not really for large enterprise with their it deps, it's not really for jim in accounting with his excel honed trough year of hard work...

it will find a niche for sure, but the harder part of the use case it covers is modeling workflow interdependencies and that complexity doesn't lie in the software

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