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No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

204 points by dthread3 5y ago

animalgonzales 5y ago
wtf they want people who know coffeescript https://bubble.io/job?jid=4377554002 https://bubble.io/job?jid=4377554002
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  I'll have you know that CoffeeScript is still widely used! \s cries in legacy code
  - vosper 5y ago
    I'm right there with ya cries in not even Coffee version 2. One day maybe it'll be a lucrative niche for contractor legacy-maintenance warriors. That'll happen before I convince senior management that startups with React and Typescript can run rings around us, and that I can't find anyone fulltime who wants to work on our stack (or has even worked in not-React)... If anyone wants to chime in with their stories about using Decaffeinate, I'd be interested! https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate
    - deleted 5y ago
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    - ironmagma 5y ago
      Got any stories about Coffeescript’s scope? I always suspected the way it works would cause more than a few fires.
    - newhouseb 5y ago
      Dropbox has a fairly exhaustive post about moving away from Coffeescript that involves decaffeinate: https://dropbox.tech/frontend/the-great-coffeescript-to-typescript-migration-of-2017 https://dropbox.tech/frontend/the-great-coffeescript-to-type.... I do hope for their own sake that Bubble looks at migrating away. At scale an untyped de facto abandoned 'language' is going to catch up to them sooner or later and limit their ability to iterate safely at scale. [Disclaimer: used to work at Dropbox, but had no involvement in this project other than massive appreciation for the amount of effort involved]
      - vosper 5y ago
        > I do hope for their own sake that Bubble looks at migrating away. At scale an untyped de facto abandoned 'language' is going to catch up to them sooner or later and limit their ability to iterate safely at scale. Looks like they founded in 2012, which is right on time for Coffeescript. So, there's a good chance it's not just Coffee - could well be Backbone, jQuery, Handlebars etc all mixed in there, too. You can definitely work React into a codebase like that (we have) but that could be a ton of work to get away from. Those codebases often ended up as un-unit-tested spaghetti. Codebases from that era are a tech-debt albatross. Sure, you can make them work, but at some point something's going to come along built with modern tooling and just move so much faster.
        arthurcolle 5y ago
        Pretty ~easy~ legacy codebase migration gig if you're into that kinda work
    - dmix 5y ago
      Warriors would be a good name for anyone working on legacy code like that.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    Coffeescript already had a lot of the features we use in es6, and one can argue it’s terser. What’s the misery about? Sounds like you guys were ahead of the curve.
- bavell 5y ago
  > AWS Postgres Redis Node Coffee-Script ES6 The rest of the stack looks good but yeah wtf indeed
- winrid 5y ago
  It's actually a really nice language. But yes, it was a fad that is mostly irrelevant now...
  - heipei 5y ago
    I still use it daily since I find it so much easier to write and read than having my code littered with semicolons and braces, and it enforces correct whitespace. I do see its limitations, and I wish efforts to marry Coffeescript with Typescript would be more serious.
  - sa46 5y ago
    It's really not. Coffeescript might be nice with fresh development and a small codebase but it's really bad when you're trying to figure out someone else's code.
    - winrid 5y ago
      That can be said of any loosely typed language. I agree that, overall, I'd always prefer something like TS or Java.
- vmception 5y ago
  tell me you’re a startup from 2012 without telling me you’re a startup from 2012
- feoren 5y ago
  Ah yes, one of the many languages where designers were like "you know what sucks about writing code? All that damn punctuation you write! It takes so long to type those curly braces. We're going to make a language where all our punctuation is invisible! Our code will be so much cleaner when all these important control-flow and context-determining marks are unable to be seen anymore!" Looking at you, Python, YAML, and Coffeescript.
asadlionpk 5y ago
"No-code startup bubble..."
whall6 5y ago
If you need to go through a boot camp to be able to use it, why not just learn to code?
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  That is how I often feel about cloud providers like AWS. If you have to invest most of your time in becoming an AWS pro in order use it correctly, why not just learn how to build out a cloud using open standards.. at least that way you actually learned something useful, and not just a vendor solution that serves little purpose outside of its locked-in ecosystem.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    I think there are network effect benefits to having a few standards. Much as I detest vendor lock-in, it is helpful to have an existing pattern such that you can find and hire people who already know it. Right now there exist quite a few proprietary no-code platforms, but I suspect a possibly open standard will emerge, analogous to OpenStack versus AWS, or at least a few “winning” platforms.
  - jonas21 5y ago
    This comment is right on the line where I can't tell if it's sarcasm or not.
  - redisman 5y ago
    Can you really compare these two without completely ignoring reality? With Bubble you can do some limited MVPs. With AWS you can deploy services to billions of people.
    - dmix 5y ago
      And AWS has a ton of crossover knowledge with using any open source operating system (not even just limited to servers but using Linux desktops) and plenty of other deployment systems both hosted and self hosted. So your expertise is much more easily transferred in or out of AWS. Making the lockin argument less persuasive. Compared to learning the complex interface of one app like Bubble for building ‘no code’ apps which only has some value to some junior programmers looking for basic expression of ideas to get them motivated and/or some limited mental analogies to the real work of programming.
ipnon 5y ago
What's the next 10x technological innovation for no code? What would it take to remove programming from web development? Bubble seems excellent, but it is in a competitive field.
- nexuist 5y ago
  Declarative goal based development. You type in English what you want the application to do, and some developer tool generates thousands of variants (maybe through a genetic algorithm?) until you reach a design and functionality you're comfortable shipping. At a certain point we should be able to declaratively describe entire businesses, and have the computer work with vendors and other people online to carry out business processes while we macro-manage it from a bird's eye view. Something that could probably make lots of people very rich is a tool that allows anyone to start a SaaS within a few hours or days rather than months or years.
  - neatze 5y ago
    > You type in English what you want the application to do. In my experience this is the hardest part of coding, to a large degree.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      Because modern coding is still too low level to allow quick development of full blown applications. It would be really annoying if you had to tell a Subway employee behind the counter how to use their hands to pick up ingredients, how many ingredients to pick up, when to move the sandwich down the line, when to stop applying mayo etc. Instead we can just tell them to make a BLT sandwich and they'll do it with little to no intervention. This is the same ideal we should strive for in our compilers and interpreters. Maybe the request is too vague and the employee has to ask for clarification - and that's okay! That's still far faster than micromanaging their muscle movements. Modern coding is micromanaging muscle movements. We want to evolve to a point where we can just ask the computer to make us a cake and be able to eat it, too.
robertwt7 5y ago
The market is comparable to Wix? Divi from wordpress? Again, not sure how these companies last and compete where everyone else is learning how to code. I can't foresee a mature product that is achievable without coding, at all. I always thought companies that uses those builders will, at some point, move out from MVP and hire some coders. Well, I guess there're always market for everything.
- Tehdasi 5y ago
  Well it would be nice to have a no-code solution that elegantly can be moved into a coded solution, but I suspect that a company that makes no-code software has little incentive to help ppl stop using no-code.
- dmix 5y ago
  HyperCard circa the early 90s?
- goatlover 5y ago
  Also Dreamweaver and Flash Builder for Flex.
- rchaud 5y ago
  How do I build a calculator in Wordpress or Wix? You're conflating website builders with web app builders.
modeless 5y ago
They named their startup 'Bubble'? Bold move.
- deleted 5y ago
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- ToJans 5y ago
  Exactly my thought: couldn't find their exact turnover, but I assume it's less then 10M? How does this valuation work exactly? Could anyone elaborate?
  - paou 5y ago
    As far as I know - investment amount / % shares of company - so if your cap table has total 10% for 100k it's a 1 mil valuation - whether an investor is willing to bet that is a different matter however :)
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deeviant 5y ago
I think the biggest problem with this approach is at some point, they necessarily reach a level of complexity that it takes the same amount of time to learn how to use their "no-code" tools than it does to just learn how to code.
- ldiracdelta 5y ago
  I went down a foolish path once of trying to create a simple flow-diagram -> code generator for the business people to use in order to do some basic logic with regard to email escalations. Got it done and ..... the logic was still hard for them. Oh well. Guess that's why we're paid well.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    Yeah maybe the point is that it isn't the actual code that's hard, it's the thinking. Like, you wouldn't try to make a no-equations maths system. It's not writing down e=mc² that's hard, it's figuring out that's what you want. That said it's still way too hard to make web apps the "proper" way. I think there's space for something easier but I bet it will look more like Mathematica than LabVIEW.
- pm90 5y ago
  That’s when they hire “yes-code” people to simplify their setup. Snark aside though; do whatever floats your boat. Tools that allow non technical folks to start building useful products is still a win (even if I personally wouldn’t make that tradeoff).
- brundolf 5y ago
  I wonder if a more useful category would be "just-code". I.e., even today you have to know quite a bit of auxiliary stuff about computers, your environment, tooling, networking, to realistically contribute to a real codebase (much less start one from scratch!). I think this is the real unnecessary barrier. Logic doesn't go away, but plenty of smart people can do logic who don't want to learn esoterica about fixing their path when they try to brew install a different version of Python and the only way forward is to go learn what "chmod" is Repl.it and peers seem to be on the right track here
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xeromal 5y ago
I think Wordpress is probably the closest thing to no-code that we're gonna get for a while.
neatze 5y ago
Are they competing with excel ? ;)
- feoren 5y ago
  People writing programs in Excel while telling themselves that's not what they're doing is part of the problem. Excel is absolutely a programming environment; it is not a no-code solution! I'm not even talking about VBA: it's a 2D programming language (with a limited 3rd dimension in tabs) with great REPL support, integrated data, strong statistical and financial built-ins, and awful everything else. Programming is just the act of solving problems in a repeatable way using computers. Excel is programming. I've seen plenty of Excel formulas that would make experienced programmers shy away. This just makes the no-code movement look even stupider. The entire movement is predicated on selling to clueless vice presidents who have no idea what their expensive programmers are actually doing.
1123581321 5y ago
A friend launched his startup recently with a product development consultant who built 1.0 and a lot of 2.0 in Bubble, in just a few months. The iterative mindset is a big part of why they moved so quickly but my friend reports that the tools helped and meant he could contribute with a lot of direct text entry and view layout, if not logic building. The consultant does a lot of internal app prototyping and initial development in Bubble for Wal-Mart corporate so I imagine app builders are doing some substantial land grabbing in other large enterprises with their raised money.
capybara_2020 5y ago
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 SharePoint. They all worked great during the marketing demos. But as soon as you had to execute a slightly complex process/workflow/idea, it broke. And that happens almost on day 2 after deployment. The only success they found in automation was by getting non-devs to learn development using VBA macros for MS Office. How is the current suite of no-code apps different. How will they solve the problem with non-trivial tasks?
- holografix 5y ago
  I think what has changed is mostly people’s “literacy” towards coding, automation, APIs (integration), etc. Where before concepts like a logic branch and a loop were very foreign I think a lot more people know what they mean. Also the industry has learned that 80% of the uses cases are around CRUD and different ways to enter data and view data.
- maguay 5y ago
  Integrations, and the number of API-as-a-service tools like Twilio available today. The core idea's the same as previous shots at no-code dev, but the number of things you can do, the features you build into a product, just by integrating with another service, is staggering. The same way things like Twilio/Stripe/AWS speed up standard development also make no-code development more valuable.
- thrav 5y ago
  I’m interested in what these things do better than Salesforce, which is incredibly powerful Apps for gaps foothold, and allows both code and no code development. I suspect the answer is that they don’t require you to buy seats for all the users, but wonder if anyone is familiar with both.
  - teh_klev 5y ago
holografix 5y ago
I am an optimist about low code platforms and apps. I think sufficiently patient people with a disposition for a bit of logic can successfully achieve solid work. Recently I witnessed some friends get quite far by using a game engine called Unreal which allows people to use a “no code” alternative to C++ called Blueprints. It can get a bit unwieldy when enough logic is created but if you’re disciplined about the diagramming etc it can be mitigated.
eljimmy 5y ago
I had to use this for a client project once (per their request) a few years ago and as a developer it was an absolute nightmare. But I guess it's not meant for developers... There were so many quirks and limitations that I wouldn't ever recommend it to anyone. It's to app development what Macromedia Dreamweaver was to web development back in the day, except worse because you can't edit the code. I don't want to be overly negative so I'll say that I do see value in it for those who have no technical skills or programming knowledge to create some sort of prototype, but that's about it.
- monkpit 5y ago
  I used to get ads for Bubble on Facebook, the ad comments were always fun to read through...
- robfitz 5y ago
  You definitely can edit the code, but it's hidden within their plugin system. If you're willing to spend 4-8 hours going through tutorials to understand their metaphors & setup, then you can find plenty of interesting ways to use it that are faster than "normal" coding. But if you just jump right in on the assumption that your coding knowledge will carry you through (which is what I did the first time I looked at it and sounds like what you did as well), then you're going to have a bad time and end up without an accurate view of what it's good at, bad at, and where the trade-offs are.
  - eljimmy 5y ago
    They had only just introduced plugins when I used it so I guess they weren’t as advanced back then. I can see they’ve added in many new features since. Can’t say I’ll use it again but good on them for continuing to improve it.
darepublic 5y ago
If Bubble is not a bubble, a coder should be able to sit down and figure things out intuitively and start getting better results than they would busting out create-react-app, or their java spring framework backend. Wait, that's not that unbelievable!
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  It's all fun and games until you get a requirement that requires you to code. Now you have to code anyway, but using something that has 0.001% of the support online in terms of docos, solved problems, stackoverflow answers, and ongoing support from Oracle/MS/Facebook etc. of mainstream frameworks. Bubble is great if you can't code and you want to save $5k on a developer (if the project is >$5k then its probably already too complex for no code!)
  - drewdog75 5y ago
    There is a plugin system. You would write (reusable) code there.
wyldfire 5y ago
Is Excel 'code'? If you answered 'No' considering cell formula expressions like cell references and arithmetic, does your answer change if you use functions? Flow control? Automata are automata. But, ok, sure, I get it. That's too abstract for the intended consumer. So what we are selling as 'no-code' is something that can allow you to preserve your identity as not-a-coder. Hmm. Scratch seems to be the language that strikes me as something you could sell as 'not code'. I've thought lately that 'Everyone Should Code' concepts didn't make sense. But maybe it does make sense -- if everyone uses computers to get their work done anyways, the "Here is how you can leverage your interaction with the computer to get your work done better/faster."
- dmix 5y ago
  I’d call Excel a database with a simple interface and relatively thin layer of optional coding that can be combined into very complex combinations that mimic programs. But a lot of programming is via building your own interfaces and input methods, whereas Excel is better for the computation (found in ‘backends’) and data science-y parts. Data science type tools often only have the small group of people doing the complex computations themselves as users. The final output in graphs and reports is what is consumed by non-experts and is again where Excel crosses paths with programming again, in a much easier and plug-and-play form than making your own charts/graphs (which in my experience is quite a challenging exercise code wise but again with way more freedom). I’d imagine a spreadsheet with a form builder interface is the fundamental implementation of what Bubble is trying to do.
mimixco 5y ago
Ah, good ole CASE. It's back like mold every few years and this year it's hot and humid. There are no video demos on their site for one simple reason: when you do find one on the YouTubes you'll see that it is very much programming. If you can create correct CRUD by dragging around "dynamic expressions" (yes, they're really called that), you could write them in TS. As frosting on the cake, they offer gig workers to no-code for you! My father would make a comment here about wiping one's own ass.
jimmy2020 5y ago
I am not expecting developers to welcome the new "No-code" movement. But eventually, it will happen. An app that's capable of building itself, supposed to be the next generation of building apps. Take a look at web development. It's revolutionary and changing fast. Users have more power than anytime before. More flexibility is being added every day with the rising of third parties services that make development faster and more reliable than ever. The question should be about complexity. How to manage the "no-code" complexity. Is it better for the user or it will add a new burden of learning? Does the no-code mean a special team to learn how to build without coding. Is it cheap, or hiring a specialist is better when it comes to fixing bugs and shipping new features.
- feoren 5y ago
  The vast majority of software being written today is still CRUD applications centered on a database using a groupthink architecture where every noun gets a table and everything you ever want to know about that noun goes into that table. They're extremely brittle, completely un-reusable, and virtually un-maintainable. Meanwhile the front-end tech is iterating rapidly because we're at the very beginning of that sigmoid curve, not toward the end. Software engineering is still very much a baby discipline. We are brand, brand new, and not nearly as advanced as you seem to think. Meanwhile Bridge Engineering, a 4000-year-old discipline, is still inventing new ideas and is still done almost entirely by human engineers. They use computers to multiply their expertise, but in no way are the computers "designing the bridge" for them. Why would automation make software engineers obsolete when that hasn't happened to bridge engineers (and shows no sign of coming)? Apps have been "building themselves" for decades: it's called a compiler. How do you manage complexity? With software engineering. Writing software without writing code is like trying to design a bridge without doing math. And if it's those crappy, un-maintainable, un-reusable CRUD applications you're saying no-code will replace, then I say: good riddance! But even if no-code is more successful than its wildest dreams, it's still just automating that lowest tier of programmer. Meanwhile, better abstractions, programming languages, type systems, mathematical advances, training programs, techniques, and architectures have been raising that water level every year for a long time. Even a good no-code solution has a very limited expected life when it's competing with that.
janmo 5y ago
10 years ago I worked for a startup that wanted to exactly the same. Basically it was a toolbox where you could add things such as a map, an image gallery, texts, documents. It was back in the days where everyone wanted to have an app even if they didn't needed. For example restaurants. The project failed, it was just way too complicated, both for the end user and the development of the project itself. Also a lot of stuff was faked. When some one would order the App, it would still be "Compiled" by a developer and "compiling" meant basically coding what the customer had ordered within 2 days. Anyway, at least in their case you had access to the final source code. EDIT: I just wanted to add that you are probably far better of if you hire a random guy from India on Fiverr to the app for you.
ekianjo 5y ago
That's an appropriate startup name to describe the phenomenon.
deepstack 5y ago
Yeah there is also stuff like ionic, even Vue has something like that with GUI. With stuff like this is great to prototype create a MPV. Machine generated code is hard for humane to debug, at some point, it will hit a limit that becomes harder and harder to debug and make changes.
- imvetri 5y ago
  Checkout tool I built - https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor. It generates code, a debuggable code, a readable code.
foxbee 5y ago
Credit to Bubble for raising such a large amount after years of hard work and dedication. I admire their tenacity, community and product but I don't agree with the sentiment 'make tech cofounders obsolete'. Why do you want to make a highly skilled individual obsolete? I feel, in many ways, this sentimentalism is what negatively affects the no-code / low-code industry. We need developers and non-developers to work together, not make the other redundant.
- foxbee 5y ago
  In the act of transparency, I am the cofounder of Budibase [1], an open source low code platform, and have felt the unease and confusion this type of sentiment brings to young developers. At the same time, a tool like Bubble is incredibly empowering, and I want to to make it clear, I don't have any issues with the product, just the sentiment in the title of this article. [1] https://github.com/Budibase/budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
- knightofmars 5y ago
  Because it is exactly what their target customer base wants to hear. A non-technical person with an idea doesn't want to go into debt or give up significant ownership of their company just to see if their product idea is worth anything. I agree that when this type of sentiment crosses over into an "us vs them" (non-tech vs tech) mentality it's problematic. Having a confrontational mindset towards any integral part of a business is a recipe for disaster. However, if you look in the Bubble forums you'll see there are a number of posts reaching out for a cofounder/technical person or advising to find a technical cofounder when scaling becomes a reality (successful proof of concept). Personally, I find products like Bubble to be a great opportunity to reduce risk in the startup phase for all parties involved. New ideas can be tested in the wild for a lot less time and money. After a market has been shown to exist then a focus on scaling and technical architecture can happen. It's also easier to attract a talented CTO when you can prove that a market for the product exists. https://bubble.io/blog/about-bubble/ https://bubble.io/blog/about-bubble/
locallost 5y ago
Everything made from somebody else that you are supposed to configure in some way only works as long as you do things with it that were specifically thought of. This is true even for code, where you have a library or piece of whatever code that should do X, but you want to do X with a bit of Y, and you can't because the author didn't consider it. I don't want to be critical of Bubble specifically because I haven't tried it, but I do feel this is a very difficult task simply because it's hard to imagine all the things people might want to do. Whereas a programming language is just kind of a general purpose thing, that can do anything you want (with more work of course, and if you're able to). I see a need for this, but I'm curious how are they going to pull it off.
devops000 5y ago
I really like Webflow and I think it's amazing for build marketing pages for startup but they lack features for CMS, Multilanguage and layout reutilization. I hope Bubble will innovate on this.
- georgeashworth 5y ago
  Webflow has CMS now: https://webflow.com/cms https://webflow.com/cms
cush 5y ago
The title and first paragraph reads like an Onion article
lionkor 5y ago
I know I'm the old man screaming at the clouds here, but the biggest problem I see with this is that it leads to engineers being pushed to outcompete these systems in iteration speed, which is impossible. An engineer might get the task to make some feature, and the manager goes and uses bubble to make it and sees it only takes an hour, the engineer sits there for 5 doing it, you can imagine the rest. The engineer might take care to make the code maintainable, fast, and expandable for some other feature that is planned, but nobody up the chain of command cares about stuff like that. It's the kind of thing that makes the developer's lives harder, the apps more bloated, all to get the features out faster to the users for a few years until it all breaks down and you have to rewrite it. I'm not convinced. I read this entire thread, but I never see a real benefit for users or programmers, just managers who enjoy pumping up some metrics so they can advance their career.
- elcomet 5y ago
  I don't think that's gonna be a real problem after a short adaptation time. Managers will learn the limits of the tools. Of course, if a product made by bubble is sufficient to solve the problem, than the engineer did a bad job when making a custom solution.
  - lionkor 5y ago
    That's fair, but you might as well just outsource all development if you're not going to use any code at all. It's the same liability, same opacity, etc.
richardknop 5y ago
The name is a good representation of times we live in. I wonder if this is a sign we are nearing the top of the current bubble.
- dmix 5y ago
  I’ve read this comment/suggestion almost every year I’ve been on HN. Maybe one year it will be true.
orliesaurus 5y ago
I used to work at a company which was doing "AWS Lambda" before AWS lambda was official and Bubble had just started. Unfortunately that company I worked at didn't make it through the journey - but Bubble did...and it's awesome for them. As a developer I tried Bubble and got frustrated but I can totally see how people that don't know too much about code can simply learn the platform and build ton of useful things with it. Some can also make a living out of it. So that's good! I also wanted to add that there's other nocode tools and then the "retool" startup that was here on HN a couple of times in the past....they branded themselves as No-code for enterprise? The right tool in the right hands can be like a torch in a dark abyss. (But please don't bring a torch in a cave full of ignitable gas)
zubairlk 5y ago
It seems like all the comments here are from non bubble users. We have worked on over 20 client projects in the past 1.5 years using bubble. Specialising exclusively in bubble now. A way to describe the platform would be WordPress for Web Apps. There was a census recently. ~75% clients are startup/MVPs ~25% SME making business tooling Out client portfolio is similar. I've hired fresh graduates in Pakistan, trained them in 2 weeks. And now have them working on a customer production app. I've also taught bubble bootcamps. After 8 weeks of weekly 2 hour zoom sessions, I doubt you'll get much progress in a coded bootcamp. But these guys were building their app ideas. All sorts of backgrounds. Accountant. Art student. Podcast editor etc. I have a client who needs a quick 2 week MVP. Done. I have a client whose 40+ employees use bubble app daily across four counting. Core business tooling. The four pieces needed for a web app are Design Logic Data Hosting. Bubble combines all that and reduces the barrier to entry. No need to make comments like the famous Dropbox comment. Why not just SSH sftp xyz. NoCode is definitely rising. We have won bids against coding agencies due to cost/time. The competing coded agency suggested 3 months. I quoted 2 months. The day rate is somewhat similar. The speed is much faster. Very much needed for MVPs That being said. There are drawbacks. You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way. However, bubble/NoCode is more suited to small teams (afaict yet) Feel free to ask me anything. Bubble.io coach, bootcamp instructor, agency owner here. Bubble all day every day. Email : hn@azkytech.com
- knighthack 5y ago
  > You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way. This makes absolutely no sense at all. You obviously have not read _The Mythical Man-Month_, and judging by what you've written I completely doubt the entirety of what you've said. Speed is one thing. The long-term maintainability and usability of a system is another thing altogether. I have serious doubts about this 'no code' movement.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - mattzito 5y ago
ransom1538 5y ago
I worked at a 'no code startup' for a few years in 2014. Here is how it goes. 1) Apple will throw out your apps quickly. They say it is a templated app. Our app at them time had 100k active installs. They basically shut down a portion of the appstore. 2) The web version of 'no code' is a sick world of godaddy guis and broken html.
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rorykoehler 5y ago
I think nocode won't compete with code but more with internal workflow and non-public apps. Basically what we do in Google Sheets to track internal company stuff atm.
xyst 5y ago
I wonder how long it will take until I see “must have 10+ years of X-low-code-solution experience” in job searches and cold calls/emails from recruiters Personally, I think low code is a farce. It’s useful for prototyping but beyond that I wouldn’t use it in any production system.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Already there... "QuickBase Application Developer 11-15 years of experience. QuickBase application development and implementation, specifically in building/updating custom applications, developing custom pages, building dashboards, and translating business needs into technology specifications." https://www.indeed.com/q-Quickbase-jobs.html?vjk=5024b4c17aa823cf https://www.indeed.com/q-Quickbase-jobs.html?vjk=5024b4c17aa...
Inspiringer 5y ago
Have they ever addressed what would happened to the app you build if their company disappear one day? It doesn't seem safe to build your system on Bubble or any SaaS for that matter unless you know the company will never go away e.g. Salesforce.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Happened with DabbleDB. It was popular and gaining momentum. Twitter bought them, probably for the dev talent, and shut it down.
- redsymbol 5y ago
  This would be my concern also, same as with other tools like repl.it, etc. But it could still be useful for a prototyping phase. (Potentially. I have not used it.)
- glutamate 5y ago
  Yes, the solution is open-source no-code that can be self hosted: Budibase, Baserow, Appsmith, Saltcorn (shameless plug).
  - csmpltn 5y ago
    > "Yes, the solution is open-source no-code that can be self hosted" So those who can't code are then expected to self-host? The lock-in is clearly a part of the business model.
    - glutamate 5y ago
      At least two of those (Budibase and Saltcorn) are available as one-click apps on DigitalOcean. Saltcorn has users with no coding skills who have done this, budibase probably does as well. I have zero interest in running a hosting business
    - mcintyre1994 5y ago
      I could see that use case inside a business though, where your non-developer staff can build their own line of business apps and your normal ops people can deploy them internally. I guess the other tradeoff there is support though.
redsymbol 5y ago
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 for almost every integration I need. It has probably saved me ~100 hours of development time in the past year alone. I wonder if Bubble might have passed a similar threshold of utility, so that it is useful even to people who DO have good coding skills.
- cam-perry 5y ago
  Yep. My partner is non technical and has been using Bubble since October. I have great impressions. The responsiveness editor could be better, or maybe just better documented. As a developer, you can't come in thinking you'll just get it. Bubble has renamed things for simplicity to non-technical folks and you need to take the time to learn their system. Something I found great is Bubble's API Connector plugin and their REST Data API to. It lets you to call out to external APIs and CRUD into the bubble database. When my partner's app had a bit of "complex" backend logic that couldnt be easily done in the Bubble UI, I wrote a lambda function and they call it using the Bubble UI. Bubble has been great for them. As their product / company grow that may not always be the case. But I think it'll hold up for longer than most developers believe, well beyond the initial prototype phase.
  - redsymbol 5y ago
    Thanks, this is the exact kind of intel I was looking for. Especially that they have a API connector and REST API - I was betting they DID have that, as it's a moderately easy thing for them to ad that makes custom extensions possible. (With Zapier, I have used their so-called "Webhook" connector for that - set up an endpoint on my webapp that accepts a POST with a JSON payload, then make a zap that send data there in response to some trigger.)
- arihant 5y ago
  Yes, last moth. Bubble is such a nightmare to use and learn that it’s simply easier to learn something like Vue with Firebase. Just to get a basic value from JavaScript code to display in UI, you need to put together this weird pipeline sort of logic. The back end requests aren’t really back end, the logic is still front end regardless of where the code is executed. The result is there is no way to implement a queue. Using an API that rate limits, can’t use it in Bubble. For API calls things have to map into their weird data types and in their world, a phone number is an integer. But the biggest issue is that learning curve is even higher than tools like react. And the steps to do basic things are so tiresome it’s just easier to write code. UI prototyping is fast, sure. But not much faster than tailwind.
oytis 5y ago
I wish we had No-business solutions. Like you only have to write code and the business side of things is being solved for you by a script, just watch money flow into your account.
- koolba 5y ago
  Closest things would be developing ransomware, defi contracts, and algo trading.
  - keyme 5y ago
    Also drugs, software exploits, anything that sells itself really.
  - WJW 5y ago
    No experience with ransomware, but from reading on HN it seems they have to have substantial "customer" support teams to help victims actually buy the bitcoins and stuff.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  I know this is tongue in cheek, but it's actually an interesting frame. "No business" software startups are kind of possible. If the software/product is useful, important, unique or cheap enough the business side would be trivial. An iphone equivalent for $50 doesn't need any marketing. A script that automatically optimizes any and every AWS setup to save money. A consistently profitable algorithm trading. Sales will be trivial, fundraising, etc. In reality though, it's very hard to be that good on one axis. In a competitive game, you usually you need to perform across multiple areas. Great product and decent marketing. Great marketing & decent sales. etc. This applies to Low/No code setups too. Maybe you can build twitter, airbnb or Tinder using Bubble. But, that'll mean that your product is very unlikely to be as good as those built using a more powerful toolset. The software itself can't be your competitive edge. People have been competing with Amazon, without code, since viaweb. You're just never going to launch aws.
yourenotsmart 5y ago
We keep doing this, every time with the same outcome.
- mm983 5y ago
  also it's not just the industry that's going to fail if it hits the fan, but also all the other companies which rely on the no code platform. and if those companies are saas, they'll cause damage too somewhere else. or am i missing something? this seems like domino
- surfingdino 5y ago
  Madness, isn't it?
  - yourenotsmart 5y ago
    Those who took $100 million aren't the mad ones, though.
rubyfan 5y ago
Am I the only one that thinks it’s ironic that a company called “bubble” just raised $100M?
- Metacelsus 5y ago
  No, you're not.
- luismedel 5y ago
  I was looking for this exact comment.
deleted 5y ago
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surfingdino 5y ago
I used to work for the client who bought a no-code solution all devs advised against. It was meant to make it so simple to write business logic that even non-technical BAs could do it. Nobody understood how it worked and the devs spent six months trying to make it work before business admitted it's useless.
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  Let’s say I buy a motorcycle to deliver packages and it fails due to size constraints. That doesn’t make motorcycles useless, it means I chose the wrong tool.
- rattray 5y ago
  Which one?
- kokekolo 5y ago
  Operationalizing an application within an enterprise is its own challenge, and it's adjacent to the creation of said application. There are many custom business applications that were not operationalized even when they were written well, covered all requirements, were tested and accepted. Oftentimes the businesses and vendors have no idea how to get from "the app is ready" to "the app is in use" state. Without details it's hard to tell if the problem truly was in the app complexity, or because the "non-technical BAs" did not receive proper training, or because of something else.
dkobia 5y ago
I look at No-Code the same way I look at Canva — one can create powerful designs in Canva that were once the exclusive domain of expert photoshop/illustrator designers. It does not replace them but reduces the barriers to entry for others which is a fantastic thing! There are many ideas that can be set free and realized with No-Code platforms that otherwise wouldn’t due to the difficulty. I say this as a software engineer. No-code won’t necessarily replace us but it will elevate the game.
gilbetron 5y ago
What's the difference between no/low-code and just an application? Most of these just seem like a solidly built application that allows users to do complex things. MS Word is a no-code application to generate documents, Photoshop is a no-code application to generate images, Chrome is a no-code application to explore the web. "no-code" just seems like a marketing term.
- rattlesnakedave 5y ago
  No-code platforms allow one to create applications via a GUI or similar. Word, Photoshop, Chrome are all applications. No-code applications like bubble allow users to define workflows graphically, and then execute them later as a part of an application. Hopefully that makes sense. I think the key bits here are "it's being built through a GUI" and "you are building an application that will be executed later."
- patrickthebold 5y ago
  I think it's more or less continuous from data -> application -> no/low code -> programming languages. Where you get more flexibility at each step. E.g if I want to crop a photo I'm not going to do it in Java even though Java gives me all the power to do that and more. And of course LaTeX is Turing complete so I could mine bitcoins with a document. So in one sense it is arbitrary but in another the marketing is useful to give some idea of how much power/flexibility the application will allow. I think you can argue Excel is a low-code application.
- hnbad 5y ago
  As far as I can tell, "no code" just means you can create automation workflows with a visual editor, "low code" means you have some extension points that support scripting. The terms only make sense in the context of automation I think.
lwhi 5y ago
Conceptually, it can't work for general use cases. I hope the investors realise this.
masswerk 5y ago
I like the idea of "no-code boot camps". — Will there be no-code CS studies, as well?
- rchaud 5y ago
  Not sure if your tone is sarcastic. Does the existence of a bootcamp for Bubble negate its value? Adobe Illustrator has a learning curve too; that doesn't mean that I should go back to coding SVGs by hand.
mackrevinack 5y ago
their website is obnoxious on mobile. im trying to scroll down the page to see what they are about but it keeps focusing on the email sign up box which scrolls me back up to the top of the page and opens my keyboard. i guess ill have continue not knowing what bubble have to offer
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
It’s like a signal visible from outer space that our economy is in a Bubble.
nobody0 5y ago
I read as "No-code startup bubble...“ and it still works as a title.
- rchaud 5y ago
  There are tens of thousands of everyday businesses running on WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin. That's no-code all the way, but since WP sits outside the Silicon Valley hype machine, it doesn't get talked about.
deleted 5y ago
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orcasushi 5y ago
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 tools I often suffered from these things: - closed source. - expensive monthly fees. - Any apps build with it are not really property of the developer, but are intellectual property of the low code tool corp - either bad ux ui or not horizontally or vertically scalable - Datamodel, Algorithm or business logic can not really be extracted from the low code platform. - You now need to become a specialist in this low code platform. These low code platforms outdate faster then the typical programming language. - The best developers look down on it so you get "lesser" developers. - If a feature is not available in the low code platform then you are stuck. - If there is a real bug in the low code platform you are screwed because you now need to open a ticket, but the engineer looking at the ticket is more help-desk then engineer. The majority of tickets they solve are from dummies not understanding the platform and they assume you are one of them. Will take several months to convince them it was a bug and was never solved during the time I was on the project (2 years). - You cannot run it on premise, unless you have deep pockets - They have non or terrible git integration. Or other collaboration problems. - Due to their dynamic nature are often slow in performance. - Corps HR department runs a different low code platform then their finance department and now it becomes a political shit show. Terrible situation when you grow beyond the low-code platform and need to move away from it.
- chitowneats 5y ago
  I'm not sure I share your enthusiasm for LC/NC as being the wave of the future. That being said, I have only spent a few afternoons with any of them. I do agree 100% with your assessment that is incredibly painful to migrate your systems from one of these onto a mature, open-source web development ecosystem. I've witnessed the tail end of one of these Herculean efforts and it wasn't pretty. The existing LC/NC platforms claim that their sweet spot is prototyping or MVP-style products. Even if one shaves a few months of development time off with this (and even that is not clearly the case), the extra work of building the new system, migrating all the data, hosting, etc, doesn't pass the smell test for me. Open source web dev has gotten infinitely better for basic CRUD style apps. Hire a few devs with a couple years of experience, maybe even a few out of college, with one experienced engineering manager, and I can guarantee you will get a better proof of concept with React/Node, or any of the other widely adopted open source web dev platforms currently on offer.
a4isms 5y ago
No-code environments are “Duck Programming:” https://raganwald.com/2012/01/08/duck-programming.html https://raganwald.com/2012/01/08/duck-programming.html I’m much more interested in how they manage all the software engineering _around_ the low code than I am in the low code itself, e.g. - version control - testing - developing at scale Which is not to say that the low-code tooling for single developers or extremely small groups is not interesting and valuable in its own right. It’s just that this other stuff is even more interesting if a tool is to escape a small (but still incredibly valuable*) niche of making prototypes quickly. ——— * Way back when, some of us used Hypercard to do low-code prototypes and mockups of apps. It was absolutely a good tool for iterating quickly on working prototypes, and Bubble could be that with high-fidelity today.
pictur 5y ago
The most basic point of these tools is that they offer as basic things as possible. and in this way they can reach a real customer base. tech people's comments on this are often just "useless". yes, I don't think it will work either, but they can find customers.
drewdog75 5y ago
Bubble Chess anyone? https://forum.bubble.io/t/bubble-chess-anyone/8914 https://forum.bubble.io/t/bubble-chess-anyone/8914
Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
Do these tools provide an "integration path"? For example, is there any of these tools written having in mind the fact that they will be replaced by a full fledged software if successful, and as such provide some "injection points" for manualky written software to be executed? If yes, I can see that being reasonable as a solution to sliwly migrate from a no code software to a fully coded software. I understand and appreciate the idea of prototyping without code, however this goes end in end with the reality that if adoption is big and you suddenly have to make something performant and it's impossible on the no code tool, you might have a big problem to do (write from scratch) with a tight timeline (performance exploding), potentially losing customers.

204 points by dthread3 5y ago

animalgonzales 5y ago

wtf they want people who know coffeescript https://bubble.io/job?jid=4377554002 https://bubble.io/job?jid=4377554002

arthurcolle 5y ago
I'll have you know that CoffeeScript is still widely used! \s cries in legacy code
- vosper 5y ago
  I'm right there with ya cries in not even Coffee version 2. One day maybe it'll be a lucrative niche for contractor legacy-maintenance warriors. That'll happen before I convince senior management that startups with React and Typescript can run rings around us, and that I can't find anyone fulltime who wants to work on our stack (or has even worked in not-React)... If anyone wants to chime in with their stories about using Decaffeinate, I'd be interested! https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    Got any stories about Coffeescript’s scope? I always suspected the way it works would cause more than a few fires.
  - newhouseb 5y ago
    Dropbox has a fairly exhaustive post about moving away from Coffeescript that involves decaffeinate: https://dropbox.tech/frontend/the-great-coffeescript-to-typescript-migration-of-2017 https://dropbox.tech/frontend/the-great-coffeescript-to-type.... I do hope for their own sake that Bubble looks at migrating away. At scale an untyped de facto abandoned 'language' is going to catch up to them sooner or later and limit their ability to iterate safely at scale. [Disclaimer: used to work at Dropbox, but had no involvement in this project other than massive appreciation for the amount of effort involved]
    - vosper 5y ago
      > I do hope for their own sake that Bubble looks at migrating away. At scale an untyped de facto abandoned 'language' is going to catch up to them sooner or later and limit their ability to iterate safely at scale. Looks like they founded in 2012, which is right on time for Coffeescript. So, there's a good chance it's not just Coffee - could well be Backbone, jQuery, Handlebars etc all mixed in there, too. You can definitely work React into a codebase like that (we have) but that could be a ton of work to get away from. Those codebases often ended up as un-unit-tested spaghetti. Codebases from that era are a tech-debt albatross. Sure, you can make them work, but at some point something's going to come along built with modern tooling and just move so much faster.
      - arthurcolle 5y ago
        Pretty ~easy~ legacy codebase migration gig if you're into that kinda work
  - dmix 5y ago
    Warriors would be a good name for anyone working on legacy code like that.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  Coffeescript already had a lot of the features we use in es6, and one can argue it’s terser. What’s the misery about? Sounds like you guys were ahead of the curve.
bavell 5y ago
> AWS Postgres Redis Node Coffee-Script ES6 The rest of the stack looks good but yeah wtf indeed
winrid 5y ago
It's actually a really nice language. But yes, it was a fad that is mostly irrelevant now...
- heipei 5y ago
  I still use it daily since I find it so much easier to write and read than having my code littered with semicolons and braces, and it enforces correct whitespace. I do see its limitations, and I wish efforts to marry Coffeescript with Typescript would be more serious.
- sa46 5y ago
  It's really not. Coffeescript might be nice with fresh development and a small codebase but it's really bad when you're trying to figure out someone else's code.
  - winrid 5y ago
    That can be said of any loosely typed language. I agree that, overall, I'd always prefer something like TS or Java.
vmception 5y ago
tell me you’re a startup from 2012 without telling me you’re a startup from 2012
feoren 5y ago
Ah yes, one of the many languages where designers were like "you know what sucks about writing code? All that damn punctuation you write! It takes so long to type those curly braces. We're going to make a language where all our punctuation is invisible! Our code will be so much cleaner when all these important control-flow and context-determining marks are unable to be seen anymore!" Looking at you, Python, YAML, and Coffeescript.

asadlionpk 5y ago

"No-code startup bubble..."

whall6 5y ago

If you need to go through a boot camp to be able to use it, why not just learn to code?

encryptluks2 5y ago
That is how I often feel about cloud providers like AWS. If you have to invest most of your time in becoming an AWS pro in order use it correctly, why not just learn how to build out a cloud using open standards.. at least that way you actually learned something useful, and not just a vendor solution that serves little purpose outside of its locked-in ecosystem.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  I think there are network effect benefits to having a few standards. Much as I detest vendor lock-in, it is helpful to have an existing pattern such that you can find and hire people who already know it. Right now there exist quite a few proprietary no-code platforms, but I suspect a possibly open standard will emerge, analogous to OpenStack versus AWS, or at least a few “winning” platforms.
- jonas21 5y ago
  This comment is right on the line where I can't tell if it's sarcasm or not.
- redisman 5y ago
  Can you really compare these two without completely ignoring reality? With Bubble you can do some limited MVPs. With AWS you can deploy services to billions of people.
  - dmix 5y ago
    And AWS has a ton of crossover knowledge with using any open source operating system (not even just limited to servers but using Linux desktops) and plenty of other deployment systems both hosted and self hosted. So your expertise is much more easily transferred in or out of AWS. Making the lockin argument less persuasive. Compared to learning the complex interface of one app like Bubble for building ‘no code’ apps which only has some value to some junior programmers looking for basic expression of ideas to get them motivated and/or some limited mental analogies to the real work of programming.

ipnon 5y ago

What's the next 10x technological innovation for no code? What would it take to remove programming from web development? Bubble seems excellent, but it is in a competitive field.

nexuist 5y ago
Declarative goal based development. You type in English what you want the application to do, and some developer tool generates thousands of variants (maybe through a genetic algorithm?) until you reach a design and functionality you're comfortable shipping. At a certain point we should be able to declaratively describe entire businesses, and have the computer work with vendors and other people online to carry out business processes while we macro-manage it from a bird's eye view. Something that could probably make lots of people very rich is a tool that allows anyone to start a SaaS within a few hours or days rather than months or years.
- neatze 5y ago
  > You type in English what you want the application to do. In my experience this is the hardest part of coding, to a large degree.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    Because modern coding is still too low level to allow quick development of full blown applications. It would be really annoying if you had to tell a Subway employee behind the counter how to use their hands to pick up ingredients, how many ingredients to pick up, when to move the sandwich down the line, when to stop applying mayo etc. Instead we can just tell them to make a BLT sandwich and they'll do it with little to no intervention. This is the same ideal we should strive for in our compilers and interpreters. Maybe the request is too vague and the employee has to ask for clarification - and that's okay! That's still far faster than micromanaging their muscle movements. Modern coding is micromanaging muscle movements. We want to evolve to a point where we can just ask the computer to make us a cake and be able to eat it, too.

robertwt7 5y ago

The market is comparable to Wix? Divi from wordpress? Again, not sure how these companies last and compete where everyone else is learning how to code. I can't foresee a mature product that is achievable without coding, at all. I always thought companies that uses those builders will, at some point, move out from MVP and hire some coders. Well, I guess there're always market for everything.

Tehdasi 5y ago
Well it would be nice to have a no-code solution that elegantly can be moved into a coded solution, but I suspect that a company that makes no-code software has little incentive to help ppl stop using no-code.
dmix 5y ago
HyperCard circa the early 90s?
goatlover 5y ago
Also Dreamweaver and Flash Builder for Flex.
rchaud 5y ago
How do I build a calculator in Wordpress or Wix? You're conflating website builders with web app builders.

modeless 5y ago

They named their startup 'Bubble'? Bold move.

deleted 5y ago
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ToJans 5y ago
Exactly my thought: couldn't find their exact turnover, but I assume it's less then 10M? How does this valuation work exactly? Could anyone elaborate?
- paou 5y ago
  As far as I know - investment amount / % shares of company - so if your cap table has total 10% for 100k it's a 1 mil valuation - whether an investor is willing to bet that is a different matter however :)

deleted 5y ago

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deeviant 5y ago

I think the biggest problem with this approach is at some point, they necessarily reach a level of complexity that it takes the same amount of time to learn how to use their "no-code" tools than it does to just learn how to code.

ldiracdelta 5y ago
I went down a foolish path once of trying to create a simple flow-diagram -> code generator for the business people to use in order to do some basic logic with regard to email escalations. Got it done and ..... the logic was still hard for them. Oh well. Guess that's why we're paid well.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Yeah maybe the point is that it isn't the actual code that's hard, it's the thinking. Like, you wouldn't try to make a no-equations maths system. It's not writing down e=mc² that's hard, it's figuring out that's what you want. That said it's still way too hard to make web apps the "proper" way. I think there's space for something easier but I bet it will look more like Mathematica than LabVIEW.
pm90 5y ago
That’s when they hire “yes-code” people to simplify their setup. Snark aside though; do whatever floats your boat. Tools that allow non technical folks to start building useful products is still a win (even if I personally wouldn’t make that tradeoff).
brundolf 5y ago
I wonder if a more useful category would be "just-code". I.e., even today you have to know quite a bit of auxiliary stuff about computers, your environment, tooling, networking, to realistically contribute to a real codebase (much less start one from scratch!). I think this is the real unnecessary barrier. Logic doesn't go away, but plenty of smart people can do logic who don't want to learn esoterica about fixing their path when they try to brew install a different version of Python and the only way forward is to go learn what "chmod" is Repl.it and peers seem to be on the right track here

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xeromal 5y ago

I think Wordpress is probably the closest thing to no-code that we're gonna get for a while.

neatze 5y ago

Are they competing with excel ? ;)

feoren 5y ago
People writing programs in Excel while telling themselves that's not what they're doing is part of the problem. Excel is absolutely a programming environment; it is not a no-code solution! I'm not even talking about VBA: it's a 2D programming language (with a limited 3rd dimension in tabs) with great REPL support, integrated data, strong statistical and financial built-ins, and awful everything else. Programming is just the act of solving problems in a repeatable way using computers. Excel is programming. I've seen plenty of Excel formulas that would make experienced programmers shy away. This just makes the no-code movement look even stupider. The entire movement is predicated on selling to clueless vice presidents who have no idea what their expensive programmers are actually doing.

1123581321 5y ago

A friend launched his startup recently with a product development consultant who built 1.0 and a lot of 2.0 in Bubble, in just a few months. The iterative mindset is a big part of why they moved so quickly but my friend reports that the tools helped and meant he could contribute with a lot of direct text entry and view layout, if not logic building. The consultant does a lot of internal app prototyping and initial development in Bubble for Wal-Mart corporate so I imagine app builders are doing some substantial land grabbing in other large enterprises with their raised money.

capybara_2020 5y ago

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 SharePoint. They all worked great during the marketing demos. But as soon as you had to execute a slightly complex process/workflow/idea, it broke. And that happens almost on day 2 after deployment. The only success they found in automation was by getting non-devs to learn development using VBA macros for MS Office. How is the current suite of no-code apps different. How will they solve the problem with non-trivial tasks?

holografix 5y ago
I think what has changed is mostly people’s “literacy” towards coding, automation, APIs (integration), etc. Where before concepts like a logic branch and a loop were very foreign I think a lot more people know what they mean. Also the industry has learned that 80% of the uses cases are around CRUD and different ways to enter data and view data.
maguay 5y ago
Integrations, and the number of API-as-a-service tools like Twilio available today. The core idea's the same as previous shots at no-code dev, but the number of things you can do, the features you build into a product, just by integrating with another service, is staggering. The same way things like Twilio/Stripe/AWS speed up standard development also make no-code development more valuable.
thrav 5y ago
I’m interested in what these things do better than Salesforce, which is incredibly powerful Apps for gaps foothold, and allows both code and no code development. I suspect the answer is that they don’t require you to buy seats for all the users, but wonder if anyone is familiar with both.
- teh_klev 5y ago

holografix 5y ago

I am an optimist about low code platforms and apps. I think sufficiently patient people with a disposition for a bit of logic can successfully achieve solid work. Recently I witnessed some friends get quite far by using a game engine called Unreal which allows people to use a “no code” alternative to C++ called Blueprints. It can get a bit unwieldy when enough logic is created but if you’re disciplined about the diagramming etc it can be mitigated.

eljimmy 5y ago

I had to use this for a client project once (per their request) a few years ago and as a developer it was an absolute nightmare. But I guess it's not meant for developers... There were so many quirks and limitations that I wouldn't ever recommend it to anyone. It's to app development what Macromedia Dreamweaver was to web development back in the day, except worse because you can't edit the code. I don't want to be overly negative so I'll say that I do see value in it for those who have no technical skills or programming knowledge to create some sort of prototype, but that's about it.

monkpit 5y ago
I used to get ads for Bubble on Facebook, the ad comments were always fun to read through...
robfitz 5y ago
You definitely can edit the code, but it's hidden within their plugin system. If you're willing to spend 4-8 hours going through tutorials to understand their metaphors & setup, then you can find plenty of interesting ways to use it that are faster than "normal" coding. But if you just jump right in on the assumption that your coding knowledge will carry you through (which is what I did the first time I looked at it and sounds like what you did as well), then you're going to have a bad time and end up without an accurate view of what it's good at, bad at, and where the trade-offs are.
- eljimmy 5y ago
  They had only just introduced plugins when I used it so I guess they weren’t as advanced back then. I can see they’ve added in many new features since. Can’t say I’ll use it again but good on them for continuing to improve it.

darepublic 5y ago

If Bubble is not a bubble, a coder should be able to sit down and figure things out intuitively and start getting better results than they would busting out create-react-app, or their java spring framework backend. Wait, that's not that unbelievable!

quickthrower2 5y ago
It's all fun and games until you get a requirement that requires you to code. Now you have to code anyway, but using something that has 0.001% of the support online in terms of docos, solved problems, stackoverflow answers, and ongoing support from Oracle/MS/Facebook etc. of mainstream frameworks. Bubble is great if you can't code and you want to save $5k on a developer (if the project is >$5k then its probably already too complex for no code!)
- drewdog75 5y ago
  There is a plugin system. You would write (reusable) code there.

wyldfire 5y ago

Is Excel 'code'? If you answered 'No' considering cell formula expressions like cell references and arithmetic, does your answer change if you use functions? Flow control? Automata are automata. But, ok, sure, I get it. That's too abstract for the intended consumer. So what we are selling as 'no-code' is something that can allow you to preserve your identity as not-a-coder. Hmm. Scratch seems to be the language that strikes me as something you could sell as 'not code'. I've thought lately that 'Everyone Should Code' concepts didn't make sense. But maybe it does make sense -- if everyone uses computers to get their work done anyways, the "Here is how you can leverage your interaction with the computer to get your work done better/faster."

dmix 5y ago
I’d call Excel a database with a simple interface and relatively thin layer of optional coding that can be combined into very complex combinations that mimic programs. But a lot of programming is via building your own interfaces and input methods, whereas Excel is better for the computation (found in ‘backends’) and data science-y parts. Data science type tools often only have the small group of people doing the complex computations themselves as users. The final output in graphs and reports is what is consumed by non-experts and is again where Excel crosses paths with programming again, in a much easier and plug-and-play form than making your own charts/graphs (which in my experience is quite a challenging exercise code wise but again with way more freedom). I’d imagine a spreadsheet with a form builder interface is the fundamental implementation of what Bubble is trying to do.

mimixco 5y ago

Ah, good ole CASE. It's back like mold every few years and this year it's hot and humid. There are no video demos on their site for one simple reason: when you do find one on the YouTubes you'll see that it is very much programming. If you can create correct CRUD by dragging around "dynamic expressions" (yes, they're really called that), you could write them in TS. As frosting on the cake, they offer gig workers to no-code for you! My father would make a comment here about wiping one's own ass.

jimmy2020 5y ago

I am not expecting developers to welcome the new "No-code" movement. But eventually, it will happen. An app that's capable of building itself, supposed to be the next generation of building apps. Take a look at web development. It's revolutionary and changing fast. Users have more power than anytime before. More flexibility is being added every day with the rising of third parties services that make development faster and more reliable than ever. The question should be about complexity. How to manage the "no-code" complexity. Is it better for the user or it will add a new burden of learning? Does the no-code mean a special team to learn how to build without coding. Is it cheap, or hiring a specialist is better when it comes to fixing bugs and shipping new features.

feoren 5y ago
The vast majority of software being written today is still CRUD applications centered on a database using a groupthink architecture where every noun gets a table and everything you ever want to know about that noun goes into that table. They're extremely brittle, completely un-reusable, and virtually un-maintainable. Meanwhile the front-end tech is iterating rapidly because we're at the very beginning of that sigmoid curve, not toward the end. Software engineering is still very much a baby discipline. We are brand, brand new, and not nearly as advanced as you seem to think. Meanwhile Bridge Engineering, a 4000-year-old discipline, is still inventing new ideas and is still done almost entirely by human engineers. They use computers to multiply their expertise, but in no way are the computers "designing the bridge" for them. Why would automation make software engineers obsolete when that hasn't happened to bridge engineers (and shows no sign of coming)? Apps have been "building themselves" for decades: it's called a compiler. How do you manage complexity? With software engineering. Writing software without writing code is like trying to design a bridge without doing math. And if it's those crappy, un-maintainable, un-reusable CRUD applications you're saying no-code will replace, then I say: good riddance! But even if no-code is more successful than its wildest dreams, it's still just automating that lowest tier of programmer. Meanwhile, better abstractions, programming languages, type systems, mathematical advances, training programs, techniques, and architectures have been raising that water level every year for a long time. Even a good no-code solution has a very limited expected life when it's competing with that.

janmo 5y ago

10 years ago I worked for a startup that wanted to exactly the same. Basically it was a toolbox where you could add things such as a map, an image gallery, texts, documents. It was back in the days where everyone wanted to have an app even if they didn't needed. For example restaurants. The project failed, it was just way too complicated, both for the end user and the development of the project itself. Also a lot of stuff was faked. When some one would order the App, it would still be "Compiled" by a developer and "compiling" meant basically coding what the customer had ordered within 2 days. Anyway, at least in their case you had access to the final source code. EDIT: I just wanted to add that you are probably far better of if you hire a random guy from India on Fiverr to the app for you.

ekianjo 5y ago

That's an appropriate startup name to describe the phenomenon.

deepstack 5y ago

Yeah there is also stuff like ionic, even Vue has something like that with GUI. With stuff like this is great to prototype create a MPV. Machine generated code is hard for humane to debug, at some point, it will hit a limit that becomes harder and harder to debug and make changes.

imvetri 5y ago
Checkout tool I built - https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor. It generates code, a debuggable code, a readable code.

foxbee 5y ago

Credit to Bubble for raising such a large amount after years of hard work and dedication. I admire their tenacity, community and product but I don't agree with the sentiment 'make tech cofounders obsolete'. Why do you want to make a highly skilled individual obsolete? I feel, in many ways, this sentimentalism is what negatively affects the no-code / low-code industry. We need developers and non-developers to work together, not make the other redundant.

foxbee 5y ago
In the act of transparency, I am the cofounder of Budibase [1], an open source low code platform, and have felt the unease and confusion this type of sentiment brings to young developers. At the same time, a tool like Bubble is incredibly empowering, and I want to to make it clear, I don't have any issues with the product, just the sentiment in the title of this article. [1] https://github.com/Budibase/budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
knightofmars 5y ago
Because it is exactly what their target customer base wants to hear. A non-technical person with an idea doesn't want to go into debt or give up significant ownership of their company just to see if their product idea is worth anything. I agree that when this type of sentiment crosses over into an "us vs them" (non-tech vs tech) mentality it's problematic. Having a confrontational mindset towards any integral part of a business is a recipe for disaster. However, if you look in the Bubble forums you'll see there are a number of posts reaching out for a cofounder/technical person or advising to find a technical cofounder when scaling becomes a reality (successful proof of concept). Personally, I find products like Bubble to be a great opportunity to reduce risk in the startup phase for all parties involved. New ideas can be tested in the wild for a lot less time and money. After a market has been shown to exist then a focus on scaling and technical architecture can happen. It's also easier to attract a talented CTO when you can prove that a market for the product exists. https://bubble.io/blog/about-bubble/ https://bubble.io/blog/about-bubble/

locallost 5y ago

Everything made from somebody else that you are supposed to configure in some way only works as long as you do things with it that were specifically thought of. This is true even for code, where you have a library or piece of whatever code that should do X, but you want to do X with a bit of Y, and you can't because the author didn't consider it. I don't want to be critical of Bubble specifically because I haven't tried it, but I do feel this is a very difficult task simply because it's hard to imagine all the things people might want to do. Whereas a programming language is just kind of a general purpose thing, that can do anything you want (with more work of course, and if you're able to). I see a need for this, but I'm curious how are they going to pull it off.

devops000 5y ago

I really like Webflow and I think it's amazing for build marketing pages for startup but they lack features for CMS, Multilanguage and layout reutilization. I hope Bubble will innovate on this.

georgeashworth 5y ago
Webflow has CMS now: https://webflow.com/cms https://webflow.com/cms

cush 5y ago

The title and first paragraph reads like an Onion article

lionkor 5y ago

I know I'm the old man screaming at the clouds here, but the biggest problem I see with this is that it leads to engineers being pushed to outcompete these systems in iteration speed, which is impossible. An engineer might get the task to make some feature, and the manager goes and uses bubble to make it and sees it only takes an hour, the engineer sits there for 5 doing it, you can imagine the rest. The engineer might take care to make the code maintainable, fast, and expandable for some other feature that is planned, but nobody up the chain of command cares about stuff like that. It's the kind of thing that makes the developer's lives harder, the apps more bloated, all to get the features out faster to the users for a few years until it all breaks down and you have to rewrite it. I'm not convinced. I read this entire thread, but I never see a real benefit for users or programmers, just managers who enjoy pumping up some metrics so they can advance their career.

elcomet 5y ago
I don't think that's gonna be a real problem after a short adaptation time. Managers will learn the limits of the tools. Of course, if a product made by bubble is sufficient to solve the problem, than the engineer did a bad job when making a custom solution.
- lionkor 5y ago
  That's fair, but you might as well just outsource all development if you're not going to use any code at all. It's the same liability, same opacity, etc.

richardknop 5y ago

The name is a good representation of times we live in. I wonder if this is a sign we are nearing the top of the current bubble.

dmix 5y ago
I’ve read this comment/suggestion almost every year I’ve been on HN. Maybe one year it will be true.

orliesaurus 5y ago

I used to work at a company which was doing "AWS Lambda" before AWS lambda was official and Bubble had just started. Unfortunately that company I worked at didn't make it through the journey - but Bubble did...and it's awesome for them. As a developer I tried Bubble and got frustrated but I can totally see how people that don't know too much about code can simply learn the platform and build ton of useful things with it. Some can also make a living out of it. So that's good! I also wanted to add that there's other nocode tools and then the "retool" startup that was here on HN a couple of times in the past....they branded themselves as No-code for enterprise? The right tool in the right hands can be like a torch in a dark abyss. (But please don't bring a torch in a cave full of ignitable gas)

zubairlk 5y ago

It seems like all the comments here are from non bubble users. We have worked on over 20 client projects in the past 1.5 years using bubble. Specialising exclusively in bubble now. A way to describe the platform would be WordPress for Web Apps. There was a census recently. ~75% clients are startup/MVPs ~25% SME making business tooling Out client portfolio is similar. I've hired fresh graduates in Pakistan, trained them in 2 weeks. And now have them working on a customer production app. I've also taught bubble bootcamps. After 8 weeks of weekly 2 hour zoom sessions, I doubt you'll get much progress in a coded bootcamp. But these guys were building their app ideas. All sorts of backgrounds. Accountant. Art student. Podcast editor etc. I have a client who needs a quick 2 week MVP. Done. I have a client whose 40+ employees use bubble app daily across four counting. Core business tooling. The four pieces needed for a web app are Design Logic Data Hosting. Bubble combines all that and reduces the barrier to entry. No need to make comments like the famous Dropbox comment. Why not just SSH sftp xyz. NoCode is definitely rising. We have won bids against coding agencies due to cost/time. The competing coded agency suggested 3 months. I quoted 2 months. The day rate is somewhat similar. The speed is much faster. Very much needed for MVPs That being said. There are drawbacks. You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way. However, bubble/NoCode is more suited to small teams (afaict yet) Feel free to ask me anything. Bubble.io coach, bootcamp instructor, agency owner here. Bubble all day every day. Email : hn@azkytech.com

knighthack 5y ago
> You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way. This makes absolutely no sense at all. You obviously have not read _The Mythical Man-Month_, and judging by what you've written I completely doubt the entirety of what you've said. Speed is one thing. The long-term maintainability and usability of a system is another thing altogether. I have serious doubts about this 'no code' movement.
- deleted 5y ago
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- mattzito 5y ago

ransom1538 5y ago

I worked at a 'no code startup' for a few years in 2014. Here is how it goes. 1) Apple will throw out your apps quickly. They say it is a templated app. Our app at them time had 100k active installs. They basically shut down a portion of the appstore. 2) The web version of 'no code' is a sick world of godaddy guis and broken html.

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rorykoehler 5y ago

I think nocode won't compete with code but more with internal workflow and non-public apps. Basically what we do in Google Sheets to track internal company stuff atm.

xyst 5y ago

I wonder how long it will take until I see “must have 10+ years of X-low-code-solution experience” in job searches and cold calls/emails from recruiters Personally, I think low code is a farce. It’s useful for prototyping but beyond that I wouldn’t use it in any production system.

tyingq 5y ago
Already there... "QuickBase Application Developer 11-15 years of experience. QuickBase application development and implementation, specifically in building/updating custom applications, developing custom pages, building dashboards, and translating business needs into technology specifications." https://www.indeed.com/q-Quickbase-jobs.html?vjk=5024b4c17aa823cf https://www.indeed.com/q-Quickbase-jobs.html?vjk=5024b4c17aa...

Inspiringer 5y ago

Have they ever addressed what would happened to the app you build if their company disappear one day? It doesn't seem safe to build your system on Bubble or any SaaS for that matter unless you know the company will never go away e.g. Salesforce.

tyingq 5y ago
Happened with DabbleDB. It was popular and gaining momentum. Twitter bought them, probably for the dev talent, and shut it down.
redsymbol 5y ago
This would be my concern also, same as with other tools like repl.it, etc. But it could still be useful for a prototyping phase. (Potentially. I have not used it.)
glutamate 5y ago
Yes, the solution is open-source no-code that can be self hosted: Budibase, Baserow, Appsmith, Saltcorn (shameless plug).
- csmpltn 5y ago
  > "Yes, the solution is open-source no-code that can be self hosted" So those who can't code are then expected to self-host? The lock-in is clearly a part of the business model.
  - glutamate 5y ago
    At least two of those (Budibase and Saltcorn) are available as one-click apps on DigitalOcean. Saltcorn has users with no coding skills who have done this, budibase probably does as well. I have zero interest in running a hosting business
  - mcintyre1994 5y ago
    I could see that use case inside a business though, where your non-developer staff can build their own line of business apps and your normal ops people can deploy them internally. I guess the other tradeoff there is support though.

redsymbol 5y ago

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 for almost every integration I need. It has probably saved me ~100 hours of development time in the past year alone. I wonder if Bubble might have passed a similar threshold of utility, so that it is useful even to people who DO have good coding skills.

cam-perry 5y ago
Yep. My partner is non technical and has been using Bubble since October. I have great impressions. The responsiveness editor could be better, or maybe just better documented. As a developer, you can't come in thinking you'll just get it. Bubble has renamed things for simplicity to non-technical folks and you need to take the time to learn their system. Something I found great is Bubble's API Connector plugin and their REST Data API to. It lets you to call out to external APIs and CRUD into the bubble database. When my partner's app had a bit of "complex" backend logic that couldnt be easily done in the Bubble UI, I wrote a lambda function and they call it using the Bubble UI. Bubble has been great for them. As their product / company grow that may not always be the case. But I think it'll hold up for longer than most developers believe, well beyond the initial prototype phase.
- redsymbol 5y ago
  Thanks, this is the exact kind of intel I was looking for. Especially that they have a API connector and REST API - I was betting they DID have that, as it's a moderately easy thing for them to ad that makes custom extensions possible. (With Zapier, I have used their so-called "Webhook" connector for that - set up an endpoint on my webapp that accepts a POST with a JSON payload, then make a zap that send data there in response to some trigger.)
arihant 5y ago
Yes, last moth. Bubble is such a nightmare to use and learn that it’s simply easier to learn something like Vue with Firebase. Just to get a basic value from JavaScript code to display in UI, you need to put together this weird pipeline sort of logic. The back end requests aren’t really back end, the logic is still front end regardless of where the code is executed. The result is there is no way to implement a queue. Using an API that rate limits, can’t use it in Bubble. For API calls things have to map into their weird data types and in their world, a phone number is an integer. But the biggest issue is that learning curve is even higher than tools like react. And the steps to do basic things are so tiresome it’s just easier to write code. UI prototyping is fast, sure. But not much faster than tailwind.

oytis 5y ago

I wish we had No-business solutions. Like you only have to write code and the business side of things is being solved for you by a script, just watch money flow into your account.

koolba 5y ago
Closest things would be developing ransomware, defi contracts, and algo trading.
- keyme 5y ago
  Also drugs, software exploits, anything that sells itself really.
- WJW 5y ago
  No experience with ransomware, but from reading on HN it seems they have to have substantial "customer" support teams to help victims actually buy the bitcoins and stuff.
dalbasal 5y ago
I know this is tongue in cheek, but it's actually an interesting frame. "No business" software startups are kind of possible. If the software/product is useful, important, unique or cheap enough the business side would be trivial. An iphone equivalent for $50 doesn't need any marketing. A script that automatically optimizes any and every AWS setup to save money. A consistently profitable algorithm trading. Sales will be trivial, fundraising, etc. In reality though, it's very hard to be that good on one axis. In a competitive game, you usually you need to perform across multiple areas. Great product and decent marketing. Great marketing & decent sales. etc. This applies to Low/No code setups too. Maybe you can build twitter, airbnb or Tinder using Bubble. But, that'll mean that your product is very unlikely to be as good as those built using a more powerful toolset. The software itself can't be your competitive edge. People have been competing with Amazon, without code, since viaweb. You're just never going to launch aws.

yourenotsmart 5y ago

We keep doing this, every time with the same outcome.

mm983 5y ago
also it's not just the industry that's going to fail if it hits the fan, but also all the other companies which rely on the no code platform. and if those companies are saas, they'll cause damage too somewhere else. or am i missing something? this seems like domino
surfingdino 5y ago
Madness, isn't it?
- yourenotsmart 5y ago
  Those who took $100 million aren't the mad ones, though.

rubyfan 5y ago

Am I the only one that thinks it’s ironic that a company called “bubble” just raised $100M?

Metacelsus 5y ago
No, you're not.
luismedel 5y ago
I was looking for this exact comment.

deleted 5y ago

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surfingdino 5y ago

I used to work for the client who bought a no-code solution all devs advised against. It was meant to make it so simple to write business logic that even non-technical BAs could do it. Nobody understood how it worked and the devs spent six months trying to make it work before business admitted it's useless.

long_time_gone 5y ago
Let’s say I buy a motorcycle to deliver packages and it fails due to size constraints. That doesn’t make motorcycles useless, it means I chose the wrong tool.
rattray 5y ago
Which one?
kokekolo 5y ago
Operationalizing an application within an enterprise is its own challenge, and it's adjacent to the creation of said application. There are many custom business applications that were not operationalized even when they were written well, covered all requirements, were tested and accepted. Oftentimes the businesses and vendors have no idea how to get from "the app is ready" to "the app is in use" state. Without details it's hard to tell if the problem truly was in the app complexity, or because the "non-technical BAs" did not receive proper training, or because of something else.

dkobia 5y ago

I look at No-Code the same way I look at Canva — one can create powerful designs in Canva that were once the exclusive domain of expert photoshop/illustrator designers. It does not replace them but reduces the barriers to entry for others which is a fantastic thing! There are many ideas that can be set free and realized with No-Code platforms that otherwise wouldn’t due to the difficulty. I say this as a software engineer. No-code won’t necessarily replace us but it will elevate the game.

gilbetron 5y ago

What's the difference between no/low-code and just an application? Most of these just seem like a solidly built application that allows users to do complex things. MS Word is a no-code application to generate documents, Photoshop is a no-code application to generate images, Chrome is a no-code application to explore the web. "no-code" just seems like a marketing term.

rattlesnakedave 5y ago
No-code platforms allow one to create applications via a GUI or similar. Word, Photoshop, Chrome are all applications. No-code applications like bubble allow users to define workflows graphically, and then execute them later as a part of an application. Hopefully that makes sense. I think the key bits here are "it's being built through a GUI" and "you are building an application that will be executed later."
patrickthebold 5y ago
I think it's more or less continuous from data -> application -> no/low code -> programming languages. Where you get more flexibility at each step. E.g if I want to crop a photo I'm not going to do it in Java even though Java gives me all the power to do that and more. And of course LaTeX is Turing complete so I could mine bitcoins with a document. So in one sense it is arbitrary but in another the marketing is useful to give some idea of how much power/flexibility the application will allow. I think you can argue Excel is a low-code application.
hnbad 5y ago
As far as I can tell, "no code" just means you can create automation workflows with a visual editor, "low code" means you have some extension points that support scripting. The terms only make sense in the context of automation I think.

lwhi 5y ago

Conceptually, it can't work for general use cases. I hope the investors realise this.

masswerk 5y ago

I like the idea of "no-code boot camps". — Will there be no-code CS studies, as well?

rchaud 5y ago
Not sure if your tone is sarcastic. Does the existence of a bootcamp for Bubble negate its value? Adobe Illustrator has a learning curve too; that doesn't mean that I should go back to coding SVGs by hand.

mackrevinack 5y ago

their website is obnoxious on mobile. im trying to scroll down the page to see what they are about but it keeps focusing on the email sign up box which scrolls me back up to the top of the page and opens my keyboard. i guess ill have continue not knowing what bubble have to offer

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

It’s like a signal visible from outer space that our economy is in a Bubble.

nobody0 5y ago

I read as "No-code startup bubble...“ and it still works as a title.

rchaud 5y ago
There are tens of thousands of everyday businesses running on WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin. That's no-code all the way, but since WP sits outside the Silicon Valley hype machine, it doesn't get talked about.

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orcasushi 5y ago

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 tools I often suffered from these things: - closed source. - expensive monthly fees. - Any apps build with it are not really property of the developer, but are intellectual property of the low code tool corp - either bad ux ui or not horizontally or vertically scalable - Datamodel, Algorithm or business logic can not really be extracted from the low code platform. - You now need to become a specialist in this low code platform. These low code platforms outdate faster then the typical programming language. - The best developers look down on it so you get "lesser" developers. - If a feature is not available in the low code platform then you are stuck. - If there is a real bug in the low code platform you are screwed because you now need to open a ticket, but the engineer looking at the ticket is more help-desk then engineer. The majority of tickets they solve are from dummies not understanding the platform and they assume you are one of them. Will take several months to convince them it was a bug and was never solved during the time I was on the project (2 years). - You cannot run it on premise, unless you have deep pockets - They have non or terrible git integration. Or other collaboration problems. - Due to their dynamic nature are often slow in performance. - Corps HR department runs a different low code platform then their finance department and now it becomes a political shit show. Terrible situation when you grow beyond the low-code platform and need to move away from it.

chitowneats 5y ago
I'm not sure I share your enthusiasm for LC/NC as being the wave of the future. That being said, I have only spent a few afternoons with any of them. I do agree 100% with your assessment that is incredibly painful to migrate your systems from one of these onto a mature, open-source web development ecosystem. I've witnessed the tail end of one of these Herculean efforts and it wasn't pretty. The existing LC/NC platforms claim that their sweet spot is prototyping or MVP-style products. Even if one shaves a few months of development time off with this (and even that is not clearly the case), the extra work of building the new system, migrating all the data, hosting, etc, doesn't pass the smell test for me. Open source web dev has gotten infinitely better for basic CRUD style apps. Hire a few devs with a couple years of experience, maybe even a few out of college, with one experienced engineering manager, and I can guarantee you will get a better proof of concept with React/Node, or any of the other widely adopted open source web dev platforms currently on offer.

a4isms 5y ago

No-code environments are “Duck Programming:” https://raganwald.com/2012/01/08/duck-programming.html https://raganwald.com/2012/01/08/duck-programming.html I’m much more interested in how they manage all the software engineering _around_ the low code than I am in the low code itself, e.g. - version control - testing - developing at scale Which is not to say that the low-code tooling for single developers or extremely small groups is not interesting and valuable in its own right. It’s just that this other stuff is even more interesting if a tool is to escape a small (but still incredibly valuable*) niche of making prototypes quickly. ——— * Way back when, some of us used Hypercard to do low-code prototypes and mockups of apps. It was absolutely a good tool for iterating quickly on working prototypes, and Bubble could be that with high-fidelity today.

pictur 5y ago

The most basic point of these tools is that they offer as basic things as possible. and in this way they can reach a real customer base. tech people's comments on this are often just "useless". yes, I don't think it will work either, but they can find customers.

drewdog75 5y ago

Bubble Chess anyone? https://forum.bubble.io/t/bubble-chess-anyone/8914 https://forum.bubble.io/t/bubble-chess-anyone/8914

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago

Do these tools provide an "integration path"? For example, is there any of these tools written having in mind the fact that they will be replaced by a full fledged software if successful, and as such provide some "injection points" for manualky written software to be executed? If yes, I can see that being reasonable as a solution to sliwly migrate from a no code software to a fully coded software. I understand and appreciate the idea of prototyping without code, however this goes end in end with the reality that if adoption is big and you suddenly have to make something performant and it's impossible on the no code tool, you might have a big problem to do (write from scratch) with a tight timeline (performance exploding), potentially losing customers.