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As someone on the product side I am getting more bullish each day on low-code tooling as it gets increasingly hard to source and retain engineering talent. Whi

As someone on the product side I am getting more bullish each day on low-code tooling as it gets increasingly hard to source and retain engineering talent. Whist it might comes with downsides and limitations I think the positives in terms of time-to-market and cost outweigh these on balance for many types of needs (not all for sure). Congrats.

intelVISA 4y ago
From the other side I can't imagine using no-code and inhering that tech debt when the equivalent software can be written by 1 skilled SWE in a day(ish), is it really cheaper than about 10 quality manhours (~$5k)?
- phphphphp 4y ago
  If you’ve ever worked in the real world, you’d know that the technical debt produced by developers who think they can build no-code alternatives in 10 hours is far worse than any technical debt these tools could produce. 10% of the code we write produces 90% of the value: retool etc. allow us to spend much less time on the 90% of code that isn’t valuable to the businesses we work for.
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    I disagree. I've been cranking out CRUD APIs with libraries in very little time. If something gets too complex you toss it away and maybe keep just the data model What retool offers is a nice UI on top of CRUD apps Cool, but I lived without it for my entire career (and I thought of building something like retool for about as long)
- bottled_poe 4y ago
  Are we living on the same planet? "a day"? "$500/hour"?
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    Was a little tongue in cheek, but we're talking CRUD not complex systems; modern tooling has dramatically expedited the speed at which we can churn out such things, I see no reason to drag it out unnecessarily. Not bashing retool ofc, I think it's a great product for tech sectors that don't have access to top SWEs.
phphphphp 4y ago
As a pragmatic software engineer: same. The code by default era can’t end soon enough, we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist. A decade from now we will look back on the amount of code written now as a puzzling artifact of the past. Code when a ceiling has been reached with existing tools is the future — a ceiling which is getting higher and higher, thanks to Retool etc.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Indeed. I'd rather put my energy into solving unique business problems, rather than wiring up another standard table, form, or chart.
  - LionTamer 4y ago
    Why are the only options residing yourself to vendor lock-in or developing everything from scratch? There are plenty of open source tools, components, libraries, etc that can be used to speed up the pace of development without having a situation where you’re at the whim of your vendor because you’re unable to export your work into another form. I love the idea of creating tools that allow less technical people to build software or technical people to build software faster - but why can’t those tools be ones that allow you to export the final product into a universal format?
    - bdcravens 4y ago
      As someone who has built software since 1999 across a variety of platforms, open and closed source, the amount of boilerplate you have to write to create the most common objects is still astounding, no matter how many open source libraries I pull in. (often the more you use, the worst it gets) Also "vendor lock-in" occurs in open source. Most code that gets written day-to-day is written by developers who are not qualified to work on the underlying libraries they depend on. We are locked into our server frameworks, our database engines, our front-end frameworks, our authentication library, etc.
      - 4y ago
dopeboy 4y ago
Bingo. The surface level value prop of these tools are: enable your ops staff to create/manage biz processes. The underlying value prop is: don't spend expensive dev time creating internal tools.
MangoCoffee 4y ago
>bullish each day on low-code tooling we use Microsoft PowerApps. i see it differently. if you build too much internal software/tools on PowerApps. your company is tied to Microsoft for a long term since there is no easy way to jump from PowerApps to another low code platform without redo.
- w-j-w 4y ago
  So? Vendor lock-in is just the price of using a vendor, and one which is often overwhelmingly worth paying. What you are saying is true, but it's not really enough of a detraction to justify building everything in-house.
csomar 4y ago
It's the equivalent of Microsoft Access but on the cloud. Each has its pros and cons. (vendor lock-in, cloud integrations, code customization, etc..) I don't think there is any novelty here except for it being on the cloud. I also don't think this a no-code platform.

intelVISA 4y ago

From the other side I can't imagine using no-code and inhering that tech debt when the equivalent software can be written by 1 skilled SWE in a day(ish), is it really cheaper than about 10 quality manhours (~$5k)?

phphphphp 4y ago
If you’ve ever worked in the real world, you’d know that the technical debt produced by developers who think they can build no-code alternatives in 10 hours is far worse than any technical debt these tools could produce. 10% of the code we write produces 90% of the value: retool etc. allow us to spend much less time on the 90% of code that isn’t valuable to the businesses we work for.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  I disagree. I've been cranking out CRUD APIs with libraries in very little time. If something gets too complex you toss it away and maybe keep just the data model What retool offers is a nice UI on top of CRUD apps Cool, but I lived without it for my entire career (and I thought of building something like retool for about as long)
bottled_poe 4y ago
Are we living on the same planet? "a day"? "$500/hour"?
- intelVISA 4y ago
  Was a little tongue in cheek, but we're talking CRUD not complex systems; modern tooling has dramatically expedited the speed at which we can churn out such things, I see no reason to drag it out unnecessarily. Not bashing retool ofc, I think it's a great product for tech sectors that don't have access to top SWEs.

phphphphp 4y ago

As a pragmatic software engineer: same. The code by default era can’t end soon enough, we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist. A decade from now we will look back on the amount of code written now as a puzzling artifact of the past. Code when a ceiling has been reached with existing tools is the future — a ceiling which is getting higher and higher, thanks to Retool etc.

bdcravens 4y ago
Indeed. I'd rather put my energy into solving unique business problems, rather than wiring up another standard table, form, or chart.
- LionTamer 4y ago
  Why are the only options residing yourself to vendor lock-in or developing everything from scratch? There are plenty of open source tools, components, libraries, etc that can be used to speed up the pace of development without having a situation where you’re at the whim of your vendor because you’re unable to export your work into another form. I love the idea of creating tools that allow less technical people to build software or technical people to build software faster - but why can’t those tools be ones that allow you to export the final product into a universal format?
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    As someone who has built software since 1999 across a variety of platforms, open and closed source, the amount of boilerplate you have to write to create the most common objects is still astounding, no matter how many open source libraries I pull in. (often the more you use, the worst it gets) Also "vendor lock-in" occurs in open source. Most code that gets written day-to-day is written by developers who are not qualified to work on the underlying libraries they depend on. We are locked into our server frameworks, our database engines, our front-end frameworks, our authentication library, etc.
    - 4y ago

dopeboy 4y ago

Bingo. The surface level value prop of these tools are: enable your ops staff to create/manage biz processes. The underlying value prop is: don't spend expensive dev time creating internal tools.

MangoCoffee 4y ago

>bullish each day on low-code tooling we use Microsoft PowerApps. i see it differently. if you build too much internal software/tools on PowerApps. your company is tied to Microsoft for a long term since there is no easy way to jump from PowerApps to another low code platform without redo.

w-j-w 4y ago
So? Vendor lock-in is just the price of using a vendor, and one which is often overwhelmingly worth paying. What you are saying is true, but it's not really enough of a detraction to justify building everything in-house.

csomar 4y ago

It's the equivalent of Microsoft Access but on the cloud. Each has its pros and cons. (vendor lock-in, cloud integrations, code customization, etc..) I don't think there is any novelty here except for it being on the cloud. I also don't think this a no-code platform.