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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

#181

Post by opportune »

tylerjwilk00 wrote: post #174
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…

I agree with this. Just this week I had a lengthy 2 day discussion involving 4 other employees, 8+ long emails, and hundreds of words in chat ... all to figure out that we need to add an if/else statement and two simple lines of code. The code took 2 minutes. The discovery took 2 days. The "curse of knowledge" works both ways.

I frequently implement such features.

Of course it's not the code itself that is complicated, but what do you want the overall system behavior to be (are there upstream/downstream/breaking effects?) and why. And do you understand the system well enough to know the right way to make the change - sure it only took you 2 minutes to code it but that's because you already understood the system well enough to know the right place to change the behavior.

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

#182

Post by zitterbewegung »

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…

I think a lot of these low code environments are trying to capture people when they prototype software using Microsoft Excel. The thing is if your stakeholder can also make the product it will save you a very large amount of money and then you could hire someone to port it to Python.

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

#183

Post by patrickthebold »

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…

I'm pretty skeptical of your assertions, here's why I think this will be big:

Many people aren't even going to try to do anything involving code, and it doesn't matter if they could if they tried, because they won't.

Lots gets lost in communicating with a developer.

Creating one of these honey comb things is going to force who is working on it to be precise, in a much better way than talking to a dev (or writing a story). In no small part because one can play and experiment without being intimidated by a dev. It might be buggy but the feedback loop is tight, the creator can see errors and fix them fairly immediately.

The result probably won't be beautiful, but neither is anything I end up producing.

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

#185

Post by donavanm »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #91
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…

>On the other hand, I absolutely loathe every single UI that has ever come out of AWS, and there is absolutely no chance I give the editor they've built here a shot without hearing lots of positive reactions first. I agree so much with this. I hate the AWS console UI so, so much and 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 wan…

> If the UI team that worked on this just completely took over the AWS console, I wouldn't complain.

This is the fundamental misunderstanding. There is a centralized AWS console team/organization. They are responsible for the UI libraries, guidelines, common elements, mezzanine, etc, across all of AWS.

They dont write the actual "service pane" UX that you interact with when you start an EC2 instance or upload an S3 object. That surface area is so large, varied, and changes at a frantic velocity that there's no way a single team or group could ever keep up. Even a single "service" like EC2 or Systems Manager actually has multiple front end teams responsible for different portions of the UX or functionality.

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

#186

Post by julianeon »

ihumanable wrote: post #158
txcwpalpha wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the other hand, I absolutely loathe every single UI that has ever come out of AWS, and there is absolutely no chance I give the editor they've built here a shot without hearing lots of positive reactions first. I agree so much with this. I hate the AWS console UI so, so much and 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 wan…

Can someone smarter than me explain why the AWS UI is so off-putting? I also find myself just put off by AWS UIs. I can't even figure out why I hate it so much. Looking at the screenshots though immediately filled me with the sense that this thing would just be awful to use. When I go back to the screenshots to try to find objective things I dislike about the UI, I can't really find anything. It seems to do the stuff…

I seem to be the only person who likes the AWS UI. So here's my defense of it.

AWS is like the hardware store. Who thinks Home Depot is elegant? It's not. Who think their organization scheme is a thing of beauty? It's clunky and just functional.

But the idea is, when you go to Home Depot, you're there to get work done. The interior communicates that. The real work comes after you leave - Home Depot understands it's just a facilitator.

AWS did that.

I personally give credit to AWS for looking at Google, and learning. They could've had some high-handed PM come in and roar ITS TIME TO HAVE A UNIFIED DESIGN SCHEME and then forced everyone to deal with UI updates nonstop, you know the game of 'where did it go now,' 'oh, they moved it here.'

AWS went in the opposite direction. At the risk of ugliness, they give you the most bare bones UI, basically 'nudging' you as little as possible - a clean mapping of fields, to pages, to results. We know the downside: it can be unpleasant. But the upside is, it rarely changes, its consistent, and (aesthetic concerns aside) it gets the job done.

It seems a little weird to commend AWS for their design sense, but when you phrase it as their design goals, I vastly prefer them to Google or any other 'opinionated' service.

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

#187

Post by buu700 »

dataminded wrote: post #177
andrewzah wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still can't imagine going to the trouble of actually doing all of that if I can just log into HoneyComb and make everything nice and quick and just get it done. That sounds all nice and good until one inevitably runs into limitations of the software. And then it has to be made again, this time from scratch. > bashing it together with Django and deploying it to an EC2 VM is almost definitely not your differentiate…

> But I would never rely on it for a business. You sir have options. Every place I have ever worked has at least one app that someone hacked together through some combination of PDFs, Excel and Access. This is a tremendous opportunity for those folks. The ones who will never learn to code, never learn to deploy an application and never get enough visibility to have a developer assigned to their project. For the every…

Agreed. When I was a teenager a worked at an organization whose entire business was run on internal applications built out in FileMaker Pro largely by non-programmer teenagers and young adults. It was actually pretty awesome, and I was still able to drop into a basic scripting language on the few occasions I needed to implement some non-trivial logic.

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

#188

Post by julianeon »

Are there any tools where you can design something in the UI, and then export it as actual React or JavaScript code, that you can then take and upload somewhere else?

Using low-code as a developer to iterate faster, and bang out lots of mini code apps quickly, is an interesting idea.

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

#189

Post by wwweston »

patrickthebold wrote: post #183
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…

I'm pretty skeptical of your assertions, here's why I think this will be big: Many people aren't even going to try to do anything involving code, and it doesn't matter if they could if they tried, because they won't. Lots gets lost in communicating with a developer. Creating one of these honey comb things is going to force who is working on it to be precise, in a much better way than talking to a dev (or writing a st…

You're both on to something.

Like the parent says, there are absolutely going to be people who will be defeated by Honeycode (or any other solution no matter how easy) because they simply can't or don't develop a model of the domain that an app can serve as an interaction point for.

As you say, there are absolutely going to be people who can do that, with Honeycode or something else, but are put off by the specific arcana of some language/dev environment. Just like there are people who don't think of themselves as developers but do an awful lot of spreadsheet work.

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

#190

Post by papito »

julianeon wrote: post #188

Are there any tools where you can design something in the UI, and then export it as actual React or JavaScript code, that you can then take and upload somewhere else? Using low-code as a developer to iterate faster, and bang out lots of mini code apps quickly, is an interesting idea.

The idea of code generation is not new - but it seems like the new crop of software developers are learning the same concepts and lessons all over again. Hey - state machines are so hot right now.

Back in the day there was this cool concept of creating a bunch of UML diagrams for your business logic and them BOOM - press a button and here is your C++ code. But then architecture astronomy hits the asphalt and you realize that most of the hard work is still ahead. So things like IBM Rational Rose were only sold to suckers.

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