It's cloud-native Visual Basic.
Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
131–140 of 331 posts
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#132Not surprising to see Amazon get in the game with a #nocode tool. I will be interested to compare this with Webase [1] where we've focused first on custom views and the data model but have yet to support custom notifications (coming soon though!).
Although the world still needs lots of developers I do believe there is a BIG opportunity in the #nocode space.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#133I 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…
Great insight. Since the process of creating software must be pedantic, then it seems we must push towards ways of sharing the burden with as many people as possible, and not just ones that can understand the "computer way". And I agree with you that a new-shiny-tool is not pushing towards this direction.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's called Power Apps https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/
The "Power Family" or Power Platform (PowerApps, PowerAutomate, PowerBI, Power Virtual Agents) are inarguable the most mature bundle of WYSIWYG, visual data flows, and data graphing on the market. It's not just about the app building itself, but all the ways to get data in and out of it, and what else you can do with the data once youve gathered it. Salesforce is probably the other company in the same league. Microso…
> another thread where people said Office on the web has caught up to gdocs, whereas id say theyve been ahead of it for at least 4 years.
This issue is that gdocs and co are free while even for just web word you need a subscription. so the only ppl who use it are ppl willing to pay, the freeloaders only see it when their company decides to switch back to MS apps after being in googleville for a few years.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#135I 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…
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 think you're right about perceived barriers to entry, and I certainly didn't say (nor did I mean to imply) that anyone should "just" learn to code. But I think the promise of "apps without code" is a siren song, always ending in frustration.
I'd never tell anyone that learning to code is easy (only that most people can do it with some hard work), but I would also never tell anyone that tools like this will make it easier because I do not believe that to be true.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#136I 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…
I can't agree enough with what you wrote, but I can add some colour.
'It is impossible to automate this club with 100 membership options and 300 members, it is just too complicated'. I think there is some complex psychology behind statements like this. There are elements of not knowing what is possible, elements of not knowing how to break down a problem, but also an element of not wanting someone from IT to come along and show you that the job you care about and you have to work hard at can be automated away. I tend to approach these things by building rough prototypes of the simplest case, and using that to find the edge cases. All the while using lines like, 'this will allow you to concentrate on the sales part of your job, rather than admin'. But here is the truth, most people want stability in their work life, and are terrified of what systems people might change.
In another sales-order flow project I worked on I was suspicious of the time taken to manually intervene with orders (I was worried it was stopping us from scaling), so I started asking questions like, 'what takes you a long time?', 'what could be improved?'. Apparently nothing, it was all fine. We started to map the process out and began the tedious work of finding out how the manual process works....one day the person was frustrated with one element of their job and let slip about a process that took hours that had apparently slipped their mind previously. This was manna from heaven. I attached two senior developers to the team and they fixed that problem in half a days coding, but it couldn't go live because x needed doing first. I let them do x, and they found y..so it took around three months more to fix this simple flow, I would say there are in the order of 1000 loc generated in total. I agree, it is the human part of these kind of systems that is hard, not the coding.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#137A lot of these things can be done with SharePoint. Same thing, no code.
> SharePoint Sharepoint in real life seems to be a very complex product with few people actually knowing it. Out of a company of 10,000 people we probably have 5 guys actually knows anything about sharepoint, Why is it so obscure?
Because its so hard to use that nobody can really explain it. Is it a share drive in the cloud? Not really, but it can kind of do that. Is it an application platform like Salesforce? Kind of. Is it a project management system? It sure can be.
On top of the confusion, often times the only time a end user sees the word "SharePoint" is when their Office document got lost because OneDrive pooped out and it's SharePoint underneath, so then it starts whining. The only time I've seen SharePoint work well at all is at a company that kept teams of SharePoint developers on staff, and even then we still begged for a share drive somewhere (have you ever tried to store keepass vaults in SharePoint? it's a magical experience).
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#138Has anyone ever built a decent app with a tool like this?
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#139Earlier 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.
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.
That is the problem though. I tend to do that in spreadsheets, then move to code. I don't see where this spreadsheet++ helps?
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#140I 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…
This perfectly articulates my experience. If everything was as simple as the resulting python code they'd never need me.