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Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
141–150 of 331 posts
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It blows my mind that such a large company can't seem to even get on the same page about what color scheme or menu bar position they want to use. Isn't it the other way around? Being a large company makes coordinating on an uniform look and feel much harder, not easier.
You're right, and I did think of that after I clicked "reply". What I meant was that a company with so much resources doesn't seem to have that capability. Even with such a large size, I would imagine Amazon of all companies would have the resources to say "this is the design, now get on board" and make it happen. This goes for other aspects of AWS as well, such as consistency in the way services report to CloudTrail…
Teams at AWS are almost like individual companies of 5 - 15 people. When integrating with each other they do it in almost the same way external apps would. The frontend of each app is decided by each team using a shared library for UI styling and some guidelines.
This helps with iteration speed and not getting bogged down in middle management approval hell, but it does lead to inconsistency problems.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#143and we're back to MS Access ! about time, really
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It blows my mind that such a large company can't seem to even get on the same page about what color scheme or menu bar position they want to use. Isn't it the other way around? Being a large company makes coordinating on an uniform look and feel much harder, not easier.
You're right, and I did think of that after I clicked "reply". What I meant was that a company with so much resources doesn't seem to have that capability. Even with such a large size, I would imagine Amazon of all companies would have the resources to say "this is the design, now get on board" and make it happen. This goes for other aspects of AWS as well, such as consistency in the way services report to CloudTrail…
Because any attempt to do that gets quickly flooded by responses about how it's just totally impractical.
Apple can do it because all of their legacy architecture and organisational structure was put in place before the internet
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#145I 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…
~20 years ago, I spent a year or so mostly creating and updating Lotus Notes 'apps' for internal use at my employer. Most of these were CRUD apps to support existing business processes.
The v1 of each one, which was immediately useful and used, usually took me 4 to 8 hours to create. That includes the time talking to the main user to understand what they needed.
I can't achieve the same speed with Django or Flask. Maybe others who are more experienced developers can?
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#146Earlier 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 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…
Two things to add:
1) Agreed. Writing the code is the easy part. Determining and defining what to build? That's the magic.
2) In the wrong hands, making things too easy can be detrimental. First, there's add too much, simply because you can. For instance, WordPress n00bs are notorious for adding too many plugins. Why? Because they can.
The second reason is, changing too soon without enough data, without enough user input. Yes, iteration is helpdul. But if it's borderline pivoting then that's likely to end badly. Again, in the wrong hands.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#147I feel like many of these no-code tools are taking an all or nothing approach that will ultimately ossify into a very specific form.
However, if something like Honeycode also had a robust programming/design API, you allow for tons of flexibility.
We could build a lot of it without code, and we could build a lot of it with code, and even better, we could code more things that can be built without code on an app by app basis.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#148Earlier 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'.
> You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. But they should. People aren't stupid, shells aren't horrifically complicated if you try a bit and once you climb that hurdle you're suddenly a "tech genius".
People tend to have better things to do, already, in their own domain.
Also doing something you don't like rarely yields impressive results, no matter the endeavor.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#149Earlier 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.
I tend to disagree here. The thing that makes writing business software take a long time (using code, to be pedantic), isn't the fact that it's in code -- it's the fact that the requirements are often so fast and complex that there's no way to capture them in the application without taking a good chunk of time. If you want an application that doesn't actually meet your requirements, but at the very least, exists, get a group of competent-enough engineers together and they'll be able to whip you something up pretty quickly, I reckon. About as quickly as non-techincal people would be able to make something of equal usefulness in a non-code tool.
If you have access to only engineers, why would they learn this new non-code tool? If you want an application that meets a very sparse, loose set of requirements, just get them to create it using their normal tools -- it won't take relatively long.
If you have access to both engineers and business folk, there's no reason to have the businesspeople write such a requirement-lax application using a non-code tool, since if all you really want is an MVP that doesn't really meet your requirements, get the engineers to do it -- I'm sure they'd be happy with the freedom to throw requirements out the window. And then when you want to expand on it and flesh out those requirements, the engineers don't have to port the whole thing over from whatever proprietary non-code tool the businesspeople could have used.
If you only have access to nontechnical people, you're kind of screwed. Sure, you can have business-savvy folks whip up an MVP using one of these tools, but then when you want to expand on it, what do you do? You need technical people somewhere in the pipeline to make this work. If you didn't have access to engineers in the first place, this is the juncture at which you could hire some to port the application, but is the technical debt you've introduced worth it?
I don't know -- tools like these seem to target aspirational nontechnical people who don't have the foresight to think two steps ahead.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#150Really wish Amazon would stop trying to eat all software startups.