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Treeline (YC W15) Wants to Take the Coding Out of Building a Back End

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Re: Treeline (YC W15) Wants to Take the Coding Out of Building a Back End

#21

Post by findjashua »

jmspring wrote: post #16
findjashua wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I laud the effort of making it easier to build apps, but in my experience the backend stuff is mostly building the rest api and cron jobs, which are relatively straightforward. Imho, bulk of the complexity is in user interfaces with lots of moving parts.

Reading this, I am curious about the systems you've dealt with? If you are talking the back end basically being crud apps, sure, but most services, the bulk of the work is behind the scenese (rest apiece, etc)

outside the rest api, mostly crawling 3rd party apis, basic map-reduce aggregations, data sanity checks, the occasional s3 dump. No fancy distributed systems or machine learning stuff everyone else seems to be doing. How about yourself?

Re: Treeline (YC W15) Wants to Take the Coding Out of Building a Back End

#24

Post by salimmadjd »

This looks very very cool. But, who is the target audience here?

IMHO, this doesn't have the best Product/Market fit. I'm guessing the target is a non-programmer or just front-end guy who quickly wants to put together a backend.

If that's the target, then why not provide a set of generic backend functions. For the mentioned target.

I think you can limited to a simple set like: registration, authentication, user profile, follow (friend), add content (text, image, video), like, list content, list all liked, list friends, etc.

This way you can become "Wufoo for backend".

Re: Treeline (YC W15) Wants to Take the Coding Out of Building a Back End

#25

Post by mikermcneil »

salimmadjd wrote: post #24

This looks very very cool. But, who is the target audience here? IMHO, this doesn't have the best Product/Market fit. I'm guessing the target is a non-programmer or just front-end guy who quickly wants to put together a backend. If that's the target, then why not provide a set of generic backend functions. For the mentioned target. I think you can limited to a simple set like: registration, authentication, user profi…

Great question! Open source drag and drop functionality currently exists for things like sending emails (via mailgun or mandrill) payments (via stripe) sending SMS (via Twilio) social auth (via twitter, Facebook, or github) password encryption (via bcrypt) analytics (via segment.com) and over 100 other common functions

Re: Treeline (YC W15) Wants to Take the Coding Out of Building a Back End

#26

Post by capex »

salimmadjd wrote: post #24

This looks very very cool. But, who is the target audience here? IMHO, this doesn't have the best Product/Market fit. I'm guessing the target is a non-programmer or just front-end guy who quickly wants to put together a backend. If that's the target, then why not provide a set of generic backend functions. For the mentioned target. I think you can limited to a simple set like: registration, authentication, user profi…

There's [0]hull.io, doing a lot of the things you've mentioned here.

[0] http://hull.io

Re: Treeline (YC W15) Wants to Take the Coding Out of Building a Back End

#27

Post by knappador »

How to know if you might be a customer: Did you make a mockup that needs a backend but have little backend coding experience and are sick of including a bunch of the same libraries? If yes, maybe.

In short, they're integrating some commonly used API's and backend programs (Elastic Search etc) and putting a graphical programming model on top of it.

Crappy backends are pretty easy to throw up on a VPS or Heroku these days. It's so easy that I'm likely to select an app server(s) and language based on what library (if any) is most critical to that particular request type.

At first I wasn't sure who the target customer could possibly be. Was it a PaaS service? BackendaaS? A service like this lives in a weird space. It's almost only good for early product dev and when the team's backend devs are green.

Things like having unit tests, scale, completely custom capability etc will drive everyone who makes a successful product out at the very time that they can start to afford paying a lot.

Don't burn all your money yet ;-D

Re: Treeline (YC W15) Wants to Take the Coding Out of Building a Back End

#28

Post by mikermcneil »

arihant wrote: post #15

I think this service should have one-click deploy to other Node.js platforms, at least Heroku, Beanstalk and Bluemix. I have a feeling that their concept would be most useful on ipad/mobile. But for that to be useful there needs to be very easy deployment options that work with my hosting of choice. I mean, imagine finding a bug, being able to fix it on your phone, and deploying it immediately. If it works that way,…

Deployment system relies on sails deploy- Microsoft actually just contributed an open source deploy strategy for azure and Heroku expressed interest in contributing to theirs. AWS has also been very helpful. Will keep everyone updated as things progress.

Re: Treeline (YC W15) Wants to Take the Coding Out of Building a Back End

#29

Post by practicalpants »

Yep, I have something vaguely similar to this which I've built over the years for my own projects, essentially generators for boilerplate for back end stuff, written with preferred libraries, coding styles, testing approaches, etc. From who I know, I think it's common for back end devs.

Yet I've never really built 'a simple' app... It does always requires substantial time tweaking, customizing, and building things that just can't be automatically generated. I can't imagine for anything that's not just dead simple that you could take the generators all the way.

But I see you're targeting front end folks, which makes sense. If they have simple use cases this could work nicely for them.

Re: Treeline (YC W15) Wants to Take the Coding Out of Building a Back End

#30

Post by mikermcneil »

knappador wrote: post #27

How to know if you might be a customer: Did you make a mockup that needs a backend but have little backend coding experience and are sick of including a bunch of the same libraries? If yes, maybe. In short, they're integrating some commonly used API's and backend programs (Elastic Search etc) and putting a graphical programming model on top of it. Crappy backends are pretty easy to throw up on a VPS or Heroku these d…

Definitely don't burn any money until you try the thing out :)
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