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Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

bethanvincent.com

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Re: Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

#41

Post by 1_over_n »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #35
1_over_n wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly feel like these comments are quite elitist. I can programme if i need to but will often use convenience tools to quickly test ideas. Thats kind of the spirit of (many not all) startups right now. Isn't the magic in figuring out what people are willing to pay for? That's definitely PGs message, along with speak to customers and do things that don't scale. And now someones getting flamed for attempting to do…

> I can programme if i need to but will often use convenience tools to quickly test ideas. I don't think people are making fun of the "low-code" aspect as much as the "I literally built a business in an afternoon" part. It's a job board, implemented 2 months ago, that has a handful of postings. How is that a business?

Well to be fair the title is "How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours" not "how i built my business in 4 hours". The claim is an MVP. I've seen people raise money with less than this so at least something was built. I've also seen people raise money to hire people to build an MVP which ended up being something built using "low programming tools". At least the poster is making an effort to take some action. I cant speak for how they will iterate etc but many people with an idea never actually even get started.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the world needs another jobs board but at one point airbnb sold cereal boxes so who am i to judge on what a persons ambitions will look like in 12 months time if they continue to learn and get some feedback. I mean, if they are reading the thread there is a bunch of feedback here they can assess.

Everyone here who is commenting on scaleable systems had to start somewhere, i would bet for many that start was not with something that was at least halfway functional and could accomodate users.

Re: Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

#43

Post by lubujackson »

meredydd wrote: post #25

So, this is where the founder of a "low-code" startup pops up to confirm it: "Low code" is mostly a false promise. We have been programming computers for most of a century: 71 years this year. And in all that time, nobody has come up with a better way of telling a computer what to do than writing text in a programming language. People keep trying, of course, with endless permutations of flow-charts and rules. But soo…

"No code" is always only "less code": look at the complexity of Excel spreadsheets by non-coders. But it is a "singularity event of sensible defaults" that allows useful things to be built before the first whiff of code.

What is exciting is that simple web/apps are getting to that same place that spreadsheets were at and where blogging was at.

People already have a clear idea of what they need most of the time: "fill out this form, send it in a email, put in a spreadsheet, load it on this page with an image", etc. Provide sensible defaults and let the CRUD apps flow.

Re: Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

#44

Post by meredydd »

lubujackson wrote: post #43
meredydd wrote: post #25

So, this is where the founder of a "low-code" startup pops up to confirm it: "Low code" is mostly a false promise. We have been programming computers for most of a century: 71 years this year. And in all that time, nobody has come up with a better way of telling a computer what to do than writing text in a programming language. People keep trying, of course, with endless permutations of flow-charts and rules. But soo…

"No code" is always only "less code": look at the complexity of Excel spreadsheets by non-coders. But it is a "singularity event of sensible defaults" that allows useful things to be built before the first whiff of code. What is exciting is that simple web/apps are getting to that same place that spreadsheets were at and where blogging was at. People already have a clear idea of what they need most of the time: "fill…

Excel is sui generis - it is the end-user-programming platform that lived. But even Excel formulas are a textual programming language, and the really hairy Excel spreadsheets spill over into VBA (a "real language" for these purposes, and one whose ergonomics still blow the web out of the water).

It is tempting (albeit a bit snobbish) to think that "CRUD apps", as a category, have so little logic that you can describe a useful working version without code. I just don't think it's true - they are always shot through with squirrelly business logic.

You can carve off products like form builders (eg Google forms/Airtable/etc), but anything you'd describe as a "CRUD app" contains an amount of logic that's just painful to describe without code. (And the form builders know it, which is why they don't support those use cases!)

Re: Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

#45

Post by imtringued »

codegeek wrote: post #20

Being the critical HN person, I would say that "revenue ready" is a fancy term for "I built this website/app and now need to get clients". So revenue ready = just a website/app.

That's an amazingly low bar. Preorders and crowd funding exist. You don't need a product to ask for money.

Re: Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

#46

Post by bdv500 »

1_over_n wrote: post #41
aguyfromnb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can programme if i need to but will often use convenience tools to quickly test ideas. I don't think people are making fun of the "low-code" aspect as much as the "I literally built a business in an afternoon" part. It's a job board, implemented 2 months ago, that has a handful of postings. How is that a business?

Well to be fair the title is "How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours" not "how i built my business in 4 hours". The claim is an MVP. I've seen people raise money with less than this so at least something was built. I've also seen people raise money to hire people to build an MVP which ended up being something built using "low programming tools". At least the poster is making an effort to take some ac…

I can confirm that I am reading all the feedback with avid interest.

There are lots of fair and constructive comments here which I'm going to be taking on-board both for York Tech Jobs and for future projects.

As many people have pointed out, the claim of being a business may be a bit farfetched at this stage. The spirit of the article was to show that building and validating a basic MVP is possible in a few hours, I added the last sentence about it being a business as a bit of a perhaps misplaced barb at people who are all talk, no action.

Thanks to everyone for their comments. It's really appreciated.

Re: Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

#47

Post by aguyfromnb »

1_over_n wrote: post #41
aguyfromnb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can programme if i need to but will often use convenience tools to quickly test ideas. I don't think people are making fun of the "low-code" aspect as much as the "I literally built a business in an afternoon" part. It's a job board, implemented 2 months ago, that has a handful of postings. How is that a business?

Well to be fair the title is "How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours" not "how i built my business in 4 hours". The claim is an MVP. I've seen people raise money with less than this so at least something was built. I've also seen people raise money to hire people to build an MVP which ended up being something built using "low programming tools". At least the poster is making an effort to take some ac…

>"not "how i built my business in 4 hours"

She says at the bottom of the article:

I literally built a business in an afternoon and so can you.

I also appreciate the effort to put something like this together, especially for a person without minimal coding ability. That part is great.

Calling it a "business" is everything that's wrong with the Silicon Valley mentality. It isn't something you do in an afternoon. It could be a business one day, heck, it should be! But emphasizing the technical component over actually doing business is how many so-called companies get into trouble.

Re: Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

#48

Post by aries1980 »

I'm always curious what's the point of such articles? It is as useless as a programming language benchmark on "Hello, World!" and "Number of empty HTTP request/sec".

I am able to install a vanilla Drupal-based forum with all these integrations in the fraction of that 4 hours (working with Drupal for 15 years certainly an edge here), which I think can scale much better for less than your solution up to a certain point, but certainly fits to a York-scale. But would this prove it is a great business? Not really. Would this change if it was NodeBB, Wordpress or any other technology? Not at all. Would I hate working on something that is super boring to me just to earn money? Absolutely.

Re: Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

#49

Post by aries1980 »

lalos wrote: post #11

Low code is definitely the future. Look at all the things you can do by calling the right APIs and/or all the scaffolding available. The clear trend changed after RoR and managed cloud services like Heroku popped up. Now the big players offer cloud services that would take months to code but if you pay up you have access (everything as a service). The lesson for developers is work on tools consumed by other developer…

Low code means low expectations. Coding is not the hard part, but to satisfy the end-user or regulatory needs with the positive (or at least minimal negative) impact on the user experience. Complications arise when you think on "what can go wrong" (e.g. you lost a webhook going to your CRM and you want to understand why it happened, how it impacted the user, how can you recover automatically) and start mitigating them.

Re: Is Low Code The Future? How I built and shipped my revenue-ready MVP in 4 hours

#50

Post by dragonwriter »

tguedes wrote: post #32
lalos wrote: post #11

Low code is definitely the future. Look at all the things you can do by calling the right APIs and/or all the scaffolding available. The clear trend changed after RoR and managed cloud services like Heroku popped up. Now the big players offer cloud services that would take months to code but if you pay up you have access (everything as a service). The lesson for developers is work on tools consumed by other developer…

This has literally always been the case for the history of software. Unless you're willing to tell me an operating system is a low-code solution, building software has always been about obfuscating the frustrating parts to focus on the stuff that actually matters. Infrastructure as a service is just the current iteration.

> This has literally always been the case for the history of software.

And the code complexity doesn't actually go down; as it takes less code to meet a given set of expectations, expectations expand.

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