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No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

reuters.com

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Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#301

Post by ramraj07 »

chrisweekly wrote: post #163
flarg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In life sciences the people are smarter than any developer but software is IT-captured so all they can work with is Excel. No code is meant for these people. Software developers will never deliver what life sciences needs without no code.

IME the stronger labs have accepted the fact that software skills are key to their work, and embraced python, jupyter etc.

You should see the code they (we) write. Atrocious, archaic, sphagetti, words fail me.

Our microscope acquisition code is a single 25k LOC C file.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#302

Post by ramraj07 »

wittycardio wrote: post #182
flarg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In life sciences the people are smarter than any developer but software is IT-captured so all they can work with is Excel. No code is meant for these people. Software developers will never deliver what life sciences needs without no code.

Life sciences people are generally far less intelligent than the average developer lol

I was a LS PhD, now I’m a developer. I can assure you that the average developer is far inferior to most PhD or post docs in any reputable university. Doesn’t mean they are absolutely smart though, I’d argue the biggest issue in research today is that there are a lot of not-that-smart-hustlers in it compared to what researhers used to be 60-100 years back.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#303

Post by sokoloff »

rorykoehler wrote: post #131
lucasverra wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply not true. I’ve been programming with bubble from “technical aware founder PM/founder” and bubble is liberating. In the past i’ve built a webapp that : - Renders desktop - Renders mobile - store in database - after a conditional form - create a complex journey of to do list with defaults based on answers of previous cond. form - connects to an external system with cron daily - sends email daily from backend - u…

I just looked through there website and I fail to see how it would be quicker or better than spinning up a quick rails app with a bootstrap template. Most of my time developing is thinking about the domain model and workflows. Once I've decided on that it takes a matter of minutes to code features and then you are not restricted in your ability to adjust and enhance after the fact.

In that analysis, did you spot yourself a pre-condition of knowing Rails, Ruby, HTML, CSS, and something about databases?

The advantage of no-code comes mostly for people who don’t have that same background.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#304

Post by randompwd »

orcasushi wrote: post #254

Having myself used some no/low-code tools (service-now, mendix, outsystems), I do think they are the future, but... I think they suffer from their business model, which often aims complete vendor lock in to milk their customers as long as possible. This is currently their only way to earn back the hard invested money of developing such a tool. We need a, open source, community driven, no-code tool. Using existing too…

> We need a, open source, community driven, no-code tool.

What is with the obsession of devaluing technical skills so that non-technical business users can increase their profit?

Charge for your cost saving/tech-enabling tools.

Stop devaluing tech.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#305

Post by randompwd »

solution-finder wrote: post #112
capybara_2020 wrote: post #35

Can someone help me understand the no-code movement and what supposedly has changed in the last few years? I know Microsoft tried to allow non-developers to create apps without developers, and they have been trying for decades. But failed! They built an app that allowed you to drag and drop blocks, and they tried a visual query builder(not sure what the exact name was) for SQL. They added a workflow builder to ShareP…

I can talk about one of the low code/no code product: Power Platform. It is a Microsoft’s low-code/no-code platform that let users create apps, develop workflows, develop chat and desktop bots and also use commoditized AI models. The platform is now in business since 4+ years and I know many Fortune 100 companies who have got 5000+ apps - both for internal org and for business with external partners, subcontractors e…

Let me know when you can do proper software engineering, with unit/integration tests and deterministic performance testing/scaling on them.

A previous company forced devs to switch/add a no/low-code tool. We were given 3 to evaluate: dell boomi/mulesoft/some other crap.

Most devs were gone within 6 months of that mandate coming in to effect.

Horrible, immature, limiting tools.

Do you think the A team devs are building these no-code tools after their initial prototype? No, they're being farmed out to design and development by middling product managers and devs - which never ends well.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#306

Post by redsymbol »

jollybean wrote: post #229
redsymbol wrote: post #139

Some people here are giving examples of using Bubble a few years ago, and found it too limited to be useful. Have any developers here used it recently ? When I first looked at Zapier about 2.5 years ago, as a developer I found it limiting and just not useful compared to writing custom webhooks that I sometimes glued together with cron jobs, etc. But since late last year, Zapier has matured so much I am able to use it…

Zapier is mostly targetted at non marketing people and I wouldn't even think to write my own hooks otherwise. You want something pushed into a spreadsheet when you receive an email? That's Zapier.

Would not characterize it this way. I mainly use Zapier for marketing automation tasks, as do quite a few other people - regardless of whether that is what it is "aimed" at, marketing is a major use case for zapier in practice.

Pushing something into a spreadsheet is certainly a widely used zapier idiom. In 2021, it is capable of far more complex tasks, though.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#307

Post by [deleted] »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #197
ramraj07 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s somet…

Absolutely. It can't be said enough how much of a bubble there is here. Smart entrepreneurs who know how to get shit done don't want to waste their time learning a bunch of rote arcane commands to reify their vision. That said, these kinds of no-code panics happen twice a year around here, and looking back long enough, they're never more than a niche product. We'll see about this one.

[deleted]

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#308

Post by chitowneats »

randompwd wrote: post #304
orcasushi wrote: post #254

Having myself used some no/low-code tools (service-now, mendix, outsystems), I do think they are the future, but... I think they suffer from their business model, which often aims complete vendor lock in to milk their customers as long as possible. This is currently their only way to earn back the hard invested money of developing such a tool. We need a, open source, community driven, no-code tool. Using existing too…

> We need a, open source, community driven, no-code tool. What is with the obsession of devaluing technical skills so that non-technical business users can increase their profit? Charge for your cost saving/tech-enabling tools. Stop devaluing tech.

Rational non-technical business users are exactly the reason we need open source tooling.

What rational person would build the foundation of their business on a closed source, proprietary web development framework? Only the less experienced or less than rational would choose this setup. We have decades of evidence that companies that develop these will inevitably:

1. Not support the use cases your business needs as you grow, despite your pleas.

2. End support for a necessary feature that you need. If you're lucky, you can continue to operate on an older version or a fork. But then you don't get any new functionality going forward.

3. Simply charge you more.

4. Go out of business.

There is a niche in exploiting the naivete of such business owners. That doesn't seem to be the goal of Budibase given that you can always pick up where they leave off in any of the above scenarios.

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#309

Post by _carbyau_ »

breck wrote: post #57
_carbyau_ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen simple things in Open Source Programs that I know I could track down and fix. Off by one errors, modulus stuff and such. Do open source projects have an obvious "run this script to configure your complete dev environment in respect to this project" ? I would be happy to spin up a new VM for every project on that basis.

GitPod.io I was waiting for something like this for years, it’s great.

Damn. Minimal figuring out and 50hrs/month for free.

As a fulltime working parent, 50 hours a month is more time than I am likely to spend anyway.

Awesome. Thank you!

Re: No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

#310

Post by mrspeaker »

rattray wrote: post #232
mrspeaker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works best for prototyping and rapidly testing ideas. I joined a startup that didn't have any deep coding skills - but had a great idea and vision for a product. They had made a pretty decent prototype with Bubble and could quickly implement suggestions from the beta testers. When I joined I instantly suggested re-writing it in a "real" stack. But when I dived into it, there was a lot of built in features of Bubbl…

How long did the rewrite take? Was there anything that was worse about the coded version?

About 6 months to switch - probably twice as long as it should have, because it was happening in parallel with maintaining and improving the no-code version, and the product requirements were evolving.

Switching off the no-code version was a happy day. We'd pushed it further than it was designed to go. The initial advantages of quick prototyping slowed down, and it was getting harder (very hard) to add new features without breaking old ones. Customizing the design (to our designer's high standards!) was... tough.

The coded version was better in every way - but part of that was because we learned a lot from the prototype. I personally probably wouldn't start a fresh project with it - but I would recommended it to (technical) non-programmers who want to get an idea out of their head to see if it's any good.

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