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I found myself nodding vigorously to Ms. Atkinson's (fictional) responses. > You fixate on some technical solution and then completely forget what is the conte

I found myself nodding vigorously to Ms. Atkinson's (fictional) responses. > You fixate on some technical solution and then completely forget what is the context in which you're building it. Good software designers basically treat all problems they face as ill-defined, even if they are fairly specific. Oh my god, I nearly fell out of my chair. YES. What we need are tools for software development that are highly flexible, easy to use, and safe. We need to put those tools in the hands of someone like a software designer from this blog post: A domain expert (and/or intuitive listener) who deeply understands the business, understands their customers' needs, and can hook up whatever logic is required themselves. (And uhh, shameless plug, I'm actually working on a product right now that attempts to realize this dream. We're hiring platform engineers. See my profile for contact info/links.)

fooblitzky 5y ago
Can you please explain what differentiates your product from previous attempts to realize the dream? E.g. 4GL, Visual Programming Languages, business rules engines, Access, SharePoint, low-code or no-code platforms, etc.
- adameasterling 5y ago
  So, in some ways, it is not that different. It uses ideas that have been around for years: The core of the product is a visual programming language, plus a database, plus a low-code Python editor. All of which have, obviously, been done before. But the problem is, no one has put them all together in quite the right way to satisfy our needs. - We needed a platform that would let our non-programmer staff create complex integration-related features for customers. We needed an accessible VPL that was easy to get started in, but powerful if power was needed. - We needed a lot of integrations to not-particularly-popular business software (which means, we needed the ability to write and/or extend them ourselves); we needed the integration editor to be accessible and easy to use by junior programmers. - We needed data pulled from integrations to be stored and kept around for a while; we need to look up individuals, see their history and a history of triggered VPL logic; we needed to be able to update and bulk-execute VPL scripts against the data store; we needed full text search capability as well. - We needed workflows/data organized into tenants with a user auth scheme that would let us invite business customers to see just their data and no-one else's, with view-only permission as well. - We needed something that could scale up to handle a lot of work, and still be at a competitive price. There isn't a platform that has all of these things. One or two, sure. But not all of them. My hope is that in 5 years b2b saas companies won't have to build much integration software themselves; there will be us, or someone like us, that'll handle it for them, and they can focus on whatever it is they actually made the company to do.

fooblitzky 5y ago

Can you please explain what differentiates your product from previous attempts to realize the dream? E.g. 4GL, Visual Programming Languages, business rules engines, Access, SharePoint, low-code or no-code platforms, etc.

adameasterling 5y ago
So, in some ways, it is not that different. It uses ideas that have been around for years: The core of the product is a visual programming language, plus a database, plus a low-code Python editor. All of which have, obviously, been done before. But the problem is, no one has put them all together in quite the right way to satisfy our needs. - We needed a platform that would let our non-programmer staff create complex integration-related features for customers. We needed an accessible VPL that was easy to get started in, but powerful if power was needed. - We needed a lot of integrations to not-particularly-popular business software (which means, we needed the ability to write and/or extend them ourselves); we needed the integration editor to be accessible and easy to use by junior programmers. - We needed data pulled from integrations to be stored and kept around for a while; we need to look up individuals, see their history and a history of triggered VPL logic; we needed to be able to update and bulk-execute VPL scripts against the data store; we needed full text search capability as well. - We needed workflows/data organized into tenants with a user auth scheme that would let us invite business customers to see just their data and no-one else's, with view-only permission as well. - We needed something that could scale up to handle a lot of work, and still be at a competitive price. There isn't a platform that has all of these things. One or two, sure. But not all of them. My hope is that in 5 years b2b saas companies won't have to build much integration software themselves; there will be us, or someone like us, that'll handle it for them, and they can focus on whatever it is they actually made the company to do.