"Josh and I both had enough savings from previous jobs to be able to live in NYC for more than two years (with a simple lifestyle…), and we didn't start paying ourselves a salary until 2.5 years in."
Critical factor here.
How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo
91–100 of 117 posts
Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo
#92Has anyone had experience transitioning a Bubble app into an actual coded app/DB outside of Bubble? I could see it as an interesting solution for rapid prototyping of ideas, but I'd be concerned about lock-in and extra expense later when migrating to something more robust.
Based off the demos, it seems like you can integrate HTML directly, so it might be possible to move from Bubble to "external API + Bubble frontend" in a straightforward fashion. You could also likely put a layer in front of Bubble to only serve some pages with Bubble, other with your replacement. Also from the FAQ: > The good news is that Bubble is fully extensible via Javascript plugins. The Bubble model is to write…
>> The Bubble model is to write the core website functionality using our super-simple language, and plug in Javascript to handle algorithms that are hard to build in Bubble
Programming without code...until you need to actually do something
Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo
#93I've seen plenty of visual programming tools and lots of other things to help "non programmers." I've even helped build one. The fact is that if you can think and communicate precisely enough to describe your ideas then you can enter them into a computer fairly easily in a language like python or basic. If you can't then no matter how fancy your tools are you still need something intelligent (currently a human progra…
This and I would go one step further: visual programming tools are like GUIs and they are the main reason that people can't code nowadays. When I switched back to a shell after 20 years I realized how much a GUI hurts, how much I unlearned to work with computers. After decades of Windows and OSX, I got Arch with i3 (so no desktop environment). I am mainly using text-based software like the shell, bash, tmux and vim e…
> visual programming tools are like GUIs and they are the main reason that people can't code nowadays.
Lots of people can't code, and most programmers can't code well, yet very few people have been exposed to visual programming tools.
I'd look elsewhere for explanations:
(1) If those with more aptitude for programming are more likely to become programmers, and the demand for programmers increases, programmers with less aptitude have to be hired. (And the problem is made worse by excluding experienced older people when hiring.)
(2) Whatever the reason, very few women become programmers now compared to the past, so almost half the population is being excluded.
(3) There's less diversity in software now. There's only two operating systems (with the same user interface), and only imperative languages augmented with object orientation, mostly with C syntax, so programmers only learn to think in one way.
(4) Personal computers nowadays are basically appliances which you can just use without programming, and that's what most people do. When they first became available, there was very little software on them and a far greater incentive to learn to program so that you could make them usable. For many people back then, programming became an end in itself.
> Visual tools don't teach you to code, they introduce an unnecessary layer and create an even bigger insecurity when dealing with real code.
There are different kinds of visual tools. Some visual tools (like, if I'm not mistaken, Bubble) are code generators so aren't designed to teach you how to code. Others are programming languages in their own right with no textual substrate, so there's no extra layer.
It isn't as if you need visual tools to introduce unnecessary layers anyway. There are now frameworks and other unnecessary layers, which of course mean you need more programmers to handle the additional complexity, and then you have problem (1). If the software industry designed aircraft or bicycles, you'd never be able to rotate your plane or ride your bike uphill.
> Real coding with text is quite easy
No it is not. Programming is hard however it's done, even visually. Concurrent, type-safe programming is even harder, and it's here that visual dataflow programming would help. MIMD programming is problematic in textual languages because there's an explicit ordering of operations, and there are synchronization issues which have to be addressed. Switching to the dataflow paradigm avoids this, but dataflow is difficult to express in text. Also, textual languages make type inference and code optimization harder.
> A very good example for an educative text-based coding environment which is even functional is Logo. But again, the best way to get into coding is to get an OS on your personal computer which focuses on the shell.
I agree with you about Logo. But Logo originated and was closely associated with the Lisp community centred around MIT, which had a very different way of doing things from Unix approach you seem to favour: a listener instead of a shell, multiple windows, and a programming language very closely integrated with the operating system.
Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
This and I would go one step further: visual programming tools are like GUIs and they are the main reason that people can't code nowadays. When I switched back to a shell after 20 years I realized how much a GUI hurts, how much I unlearned to work with computers. After decades of Windows and OSX, I got Arch with i3 (so no desktop environment). I am mainly using text-based software like the shell, bash, tmux and vim e…
I'd go a step further again and say that GUI's are why people have no idea how to use computers anymore. A file is a concept the average user is becoming less familiar with, directories of files have almost disappeared entirely for them. The idea that you could manipulate an image in a paint program and have it updated in your word document is black magic, so tools like word and excel have to do everything they need.…
People know how to use computers just fine. Very few people need to know how the programs they use are implemented, or even the data structures they use. For most people nowadays, computers are for playing games, sending and receiving mail, watching videos, reading the news, shopping, and organizing your photograph collection. You don't need to know how to program to use a modern computer.
Also, whether photographs or anything else use files stored in hierarchical directories is a historical accident. There are alternatives to file systems. For example, Squeak doesn't have files, hierarchically organized or otherwise, just persistent objects. EROS also took that approach.
Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo
#95I had to learn and use Bubble to build an application (no choice, per client's request) and as a programmer I found it to be a nightmare. I can definitely see it as a great and useful tool for non-programmers, but having to go throw your entire skill-set and decades of knowledge out the window to use a tool like this was just a horrible experience. Again, I don't mean to disparage it, as I can see the benefits, but f…
There's something like an 'uncanny valley' between RAD tools and a more 'best practices' setup/workflow.
The upsides are obvious – someone that's not a 'software engineer' can program things that do real work!
The downsides tho are much less obvious; more 'hidden' costs really. It's easy and quick to bang out a new feature, but also really easy to inadvertently update or rollback another unrelated set of changes. As a professional programmer, I sure don't want to give up version control, unit tests, integration tests, automated builds, and automated deployments.
Tho in fairness to RAD tools, and both the code they produce and the whole workflow involved in using them, when I started my current position the non-RAD-tool code was (much) worse, and much more difficult to refactor and cleanup, than the RAD-tool code.
Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo
#96Has anyone had experience transitioning a Bubble app into an actual coded app/DB outside of Bubble? I could see it as an interesting solution for rapid prototyping of ideas, but I'd be concerned about lock-in and extra expense later when migrating to something more robust.
Based off the demos, it seems like you can integrate HTML directly, so it might be possible to move from Bubble to "external API + Bubble frontend" in a straightforward fashion. You could also likely put a layer in front of Bubble to only serve some pages with Bubble, other with your replacement. Also from the FAQ: > The good news is that Bubble is fully extensible via Javascript plugins. The Bubble model is to write…
> I think the most interesting way of doing this would be something like embracing Bubble for a lot of work and having the "serious" code relegated to places that are easier to manage, like complex API or some custom widgets
This is basically what I do now at work. I was hired to, in part, work with several RAD-tool projects. I pretty quickly ended-up tho working on mostly backend code that the RAD tool projects interact with via, e.g. web requests. That's been a pretty good division of labor given that most of the RAD tool project's features are fairly simply in terms of UX. They're definitely not good enough to be widely used by lots of users tho, e.g. there's no real error handling.
Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo
#97I'm very pessimistic of these types of products. Mostly because there have been ideas to do this for around 40 years. In the end any non-trivial business logic is too cumbersome to make in a GUI and is build much faster in text form ( programming language) or just can't be made with your platform. At that point it requires specialization and your need for a programmer is born.
> I'm very pessimistic of these types of products.
> there have been ideas to do this for around 40 years
You should be "pessimistic" – if the implied claim is that "these types of products" will replace all of the other standard programming paraphernalia!
But, as you wrote, this stuff has been around for decades. And that's because there are lots of people that can do real work with these tools, but aren't otherwise willing to pay the (pretty) steep costs to get up to speed using the 'pro' programming tools.
Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo
#98Wow this has been a disappointing discussion up to now, with most commenting on how much visual coding tools suck. That's not the take away here, at all. A frequently asked question is "where is Access for the Web?", closing aligned with "what happened to 4GL languages and tools" or "where are the RAD (rapid application development) app builders for the web?". This is an answer; they've hit $100k monthly. They have f…
TBH (and it is an impressive app) there isn't much competition, not much going on despite coding-as-a-job being hammered in every article even remotely related to education and not just an extra skill but a vital one.
And in those meetups you tend to find a lot of people looking for someone to code their ideas. These guys put a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert.
Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
People may be capable of programming, but are not programmers. They do some other full time job and can't invest 2000 hours per year for 5 years to become efficient at all the detailed things the programmers have to deal with. The use case is people who can excel at Excel, but don't want to learn about dependency injection, semantic versioning, exception handling etc.
If you can excel in Excel, you certainly can do similar jobs with Python. You don't need dependency injection, semantic versioning (any version control at all!) or exception handling to write a script that turns your data from format A to format B and generates a summary. Most people can probably learn enough Python to do that in two or three weeks. There is a large gap between what professional programmers are expec…
Python is great, but if your goal is to build a simple web app, there's no simple, pythonic way to do that. Maybe anvil.works will be that one, but currently, there's a hole in the market, and bubble fits this hole very well.
Re: How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo
#100Bubble platform is the most advanced no-code tool that exists so far. It allowed many entrepreneurs (including me) create apps fast and with low budget which otherwise would take many months and tens of thousands dollars to build. It's true, I'm a bit biased here, because it also became possible for me to start a no-code development business which never existed before. So we focus on building apps without code for pe…
So you guys are a service that build apps on bubble (for people that I guess can't even deal with a GUI) and also sell templates?