No-code startup Bubble raises $100M

No-code startup Bubble raises $100M(reuters.com)

204 points by dthread3 4 years ago | 308 comments

deeviant 4 years 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.

mrspeaker 4 years ago | |

It works best for prototyping and rapidly testing ideas.

I joined a startup that didn't have any deep coding skills - but had a great idea and vision for a product. They had made a pretty decent prototype with Bubble and could quickly implement suggestions from the beta testers.

When I joined I instantly suggested re-writing it in a "real" stack. But when I dived into it, there was a lot of built in features of Bubble they were using that would be a pain to write or integrate. The rewrite would take some time.

Instead we launched with the Bubble app as it was. It targeted a niche market, and that market came flooding in - it really proved there was demand for the product and the feedback helped shape the end result - months ahead of where would have been if I re-wrote it.

But as the app grew we ended up with "spaghetti no-code", slow loading times, crazy hacks, giant bundles (that we had no control over)... but again, it was good enough to launch with and validate the company, and it was fast to try out ideas.

We eventually did a full rewrite once we were happy with the overall structure of the app, but the process changed my perspective on the value of no-code tools in the right hands.

ramraj07 4 years ago | | |

People (especially the kind that hangs out in HN) dont seem to understand that there’s a vast ocean of fairly smart people, much smarter than the average (or even above average) programmer, who are unable to build what they can imagine because of the coding bottleneck. I know many, and it’s not for a lack of significant effort that they are not able to learn to code in a way that’s meaningful. I suppose there’s something in your brain that needs to click to write code? Anyways I’d much rather trust a product created by a team described in this comment than one written by a pure group of engineers.

Toine 4 years ago | | |

Wow that felt great to read, thanks for sharing.

I believe no-code is incredibly underrated by many early stage startups. Rewrite only once you found your PMF and there's a real performance issue (or other technical reason), just you like you did.

One of the best thing about no-code is that you avoid painful, timewasting continuous refactoring while trying to iterate on your products the first months. It's much easier to design & structure the code to be as close as possible to the business (DDD-style) when you write it from scratch after reaching PMF.

Being able to iterate fast early on is such an important part of startups. I think code is not great at this.

anm89 4 years ago | | |

This feels like the one valid case to me. Non technical founder prototypes with no code until they can validate their idea and raise and then completely re writes.

I'm guessing many people would get this right up until the last step and see how much juice they could squeeze out of the prototype which I would imagine could be fatal in many cases.

I still wouldn't suggest this route for anyone.

jcheng 4 years ago | | |

Thank you for a strikingly helpful testimonial. I’m skeptical of no- and low-code but based on your account, I’m now intrigued enough to give bubble a look.

rattray 4 years ago | | |

> "spaghetti no-code", slow loading times, crazy hacks, giant bundles

Can you say more about these problems? I'm curious what they're like in practice, if/how companies using Bubble can work around them, and whether Bubble might be able to fix these kinds of issues in the future.

rattray 4 years ago | | |

How long did the rewrite take? Was there anything that was worse about the coded version?

narrator 4 years ago | | |

The area where most no code solutions tend to break is performance. There's some sort of black box that has o(n^2) time and nobody can fix it.

ak39 4 years ago | | |

Thank you for sharing this experience.

mdoms 4 years ago | | |

Thanks for your comment which definitely isn't sponsored or paid for.

brundolf 4 years 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

_carbyau_ 4 years ago | | |

I have seen simple things in Open Source Programs that I know I could track down and fix. Off by one errors, modulus stuff and such.

Do open source projects have an obvious "run this script to configure your complete dev environment in respect to this project" ?

I would be happy to spin up a new VM for every project on that basis.

ldiracdelta 4 years 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 4 years 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.

lucasverra 4 years ago | |

Simply not true.

I’ve been programming with bubble from “technical aware founder PM/founder” and bubble is liberating.

In the past i’ve built a webapp that :

- Renders desktop

- Renders mobile

- store in database

- after a conditional form

- create a complex journey of to do list with defaults based on answers of previous cond. form

- connects to an external system with cron daily

- sends email daily from backend

- uses plugins from community

- much more

The deal with bubble is : - resources cutting 10X - if you manage to understand the adequate scope (serving up to multiple thousands) with no such fancy ui, with not blazing extreme loading perf (since no focus on static)

Bubble is : - Build 10x faster a custom ish layout with custom logic to get your first 10k users. (NPM available if you code)

Does it scale to infinity? No

Will you need code after that. Most probably. But you got there with 10x less ressources

kfk 4 years ago | | |

Most of the time I spend with devs is figuring out objects and their respective data models. Low code is great but it sure doesn’t save 10x on resources, not for me at least.

ZephyrBlu 4 years ago | | |

What you described is a relatively simple web app. For a more complicated app, Bubble would likely be more complicated than coding it up.

Terretta 4 years ago | | |

For perspective: this same bullet list was in Vemeer’s FrontPage (bought by Microsoft).

rorykoehler 4 years ago | | |

I just looked through there website and I fail to see how it would be quicker or better than spinning up a quick rails app with a bootstrap template. Most of my time developing is thinking about the domain model and workflows. Once I've decided on that it takes a matter of minutes to code features and then you are not restricted in your ability to adjust and enhance after the fact.

quickthrower2 4 years ago | |

I hope with $100m they can solve this. I think the only way to solve this is to hard-code so many different use cases into the gallery of controls, workflows and repeaters etc. that anything you dream of is easy to build.

They also need to invest heavily into UX and the ease of figuring out how to do something. I've used Bubble and similar tools, and they share something in common with coding - you need to watch/read a bunch of tutorials to figure out how to do what you need.

What they save is an initial headache of devops / authentication / wrangling which is bad enough as a programmer but extra hard for a non programmer to contend with.

Here is another idea for someone - a yes-code tool that lets you write everything in code, but handles devops/authentication and some common stuff for you. Basically Heroku + some NodeJS starter kit that is meticulously kept up to date.

zingar 4 years ago | | |

Suspenders is what you describe for Rails. It bakes in lots of opinions, obviously, but the idea is that you can go to production with this code by pushing it to your heroku repo.

fakedang 4 years ago | | |

Exactly. I had my tries with a few code builders, and soon enough I realized that it's often better (and sometimes faster) to simply learn how to code.

Most code builders don't even give the devops/authentication bits.

random_kris 4 years ago | | |

To me java spring boot is a yes code platoform.

There is library basically for anything you can think of. Out of the box you get all the batteries you need

tluyben2 4 years ago | |

Well, learning how to code is not the only issue. Tooling installation, deployment etc is, at least for me, even after having written code for almost 40 years, a huge annoyance. I want to think about problems and logic; I couldn't care less about what editor I use or any of that and I care even less how it's deployed. As long as it's up and fast, I don't care. And this is still not that simple still, after all these cloud advancements to do except for the most trivial cases (static-ish websites).

bob1029 4 years ago | | |

This is why we vertically integrated most of our tool chain. Deploying our software involves emailing a customer a link to a zip file or importing a json configuration file for them in a web portal.

A vast majority of our day is spent focusing on the business end.

motoxpro 4 years ago | |

I think the problem is that you don't need a "mature" product to make millions of dollars.

It's similar to Shopify, I can put up a store in ~20 mins and start selling immediately. I would be extremely misguided to try to "build an platform" when that problem has already been solved.

Same with no-code. Why code it from scratch when it's been solved already? If you want to go super deep, sure. Seems like the hate comes from a cross of not-invented-here syndrome crossed with only 10 billion dollar companies in 2 years are cool.

Here's an example of a Bubble biz. https://goodgigs.app/

andrewingram 4 years ago | | |

The problem here is that if Bubble gets _huge_ before solving the very obvious performance problems, the web is going to be in an even worse place than it is today. That Goodgigs site has a first load weight of over 5mb, when it could really be done in much less.

I truly appreciate the problem these platforms are trying to solve, but they're just not there yet. I wouldn't say it's easy to build a no-code platform, but it's much easier without the constraint of needing the output to have good performance - that's the hard part.

layoutIfNeeded 4 years ago | | |

Lol, works as expected:

“Your browser was unable to load some necessary resources, contact your IT network administrator and ask them to allow access to

     dhtiece9044ep.cloudfront.net 
     dd7tel2830j4w.cloudfront.net/ 
     d1muf25xaso8hp.cloudfront.net”

redisman 4 years ago | |

It's frustrating. Especially now that I'm nearing 15 years as a professional coder, I already spend less and less time typing and more thinking and working on different views on the problem. Typing or reading text is not difficult!

lionkor 4 years ago | | |

This touches on the real issue here -- the assumption that, somehow, the logic gets easier to understand if it's in diagrams instead of text. Text is the arguably the best way to reason about logic, since there are millions of people wo do nothing else but read text-code all day, me included.

All you do with no-code programming is outsourcing writing the actual code to some other company, who already did all the work for you, and you just plug it together. To me, that doesn't reduce complexity, or mental load, it just offloads it to someone else. There's no "no-code" here, they just let you use the code they engineered.

goto11 4 years ago | |

Yes but most problems are simple. It also happen that Excel-sheets become too complex for their own good, but most excel sheets are pretty simple and never grow to that level of complexity.

So if you don't know if a particular task will grow to that level of complexity, it is probably better use of resources to use a nocode/lowcode solution until it is clearly insufficient, and then take the pain of migrating to code.

jacquesm 4 years ago | |

Clearly you haven't actually used any of these tools or you likely would not have written it.

I've worked with '4G' since Mimer, Mapper and all kinds of other contenders and until a few years ago (roughly until 'Mendix') low code / no code was a limiting environment.

But Mendix got it right and there are plenty of valid domains of application for the current crop. Plenty of success stories of companies that used it as RAD and validation tool. Once the money rolls in you can always do a rewrite, it is much easier to do that when you are successful then to try to find success on a platform that is slower to develop for. Like every other tool: use where appropriate, there are plenty of domains where this approach would not work.

zamalek 4 years ago | |

My issue with no-code/low-code is that it puts the cart before the horse, or rather, the developer before the user. When you look at the amount of time spent staring at a screen, your users spend way more time (person-hours) looking at your app than you do coding it. Why all this focus on what is arguably the least important actor in the system?

minitoar 4 years ago | | |

Perhaps this is obvious but the answer is: cost. Developers are expensive. Delivering a viable poc cheaper, sooner, even if you end up having to redo it all anyway, can be an excellent trade off.

onion2k 4 years ago | |

You can rephrase what you said as "This approach is better for low complexity apps", and in my experience, that's probably 80% of what businesses need.

rattray 4 years ago | |

I'd be curious to hear from someone who's built a truly complicated app with bubble (equivalent of >50k loc not just crud).

I can't think of a reason it'd be impossible to build a no-code app that scales as well as code, and I don't have evidence that Bubble has failed.

mrspeaker 4 years ago | | |

I worked on a Bubble app that definitely hit the limits of how big apps should be. The work flow box things still give me nightmares. It's very hard to figure out the order things were executing, and we had to resort to A LOT of JavaScript blocks to break out of the normal workflow to get features working that weren't achievable with the built-in tools.

If felt like there was a missing level of abstraction - everything was too intertwined. Making changes to anything becomes harrowing once the app becomes large - it was slow, and you don't know which UI elements are being accessed by any blocks - so it's really easy to break things without realizing. And the undo system gives you no visual clue as to what is being undo-d if it was in a different view. It was the most fragile system I've worked on.

However, many of those issues could be fixed, improved, or redesigned. If you were doing "regular" use-case stuff it was... fun! Our designer could get in and implement/test things really easily.

My gut feeling is that there could be system that scales well - but the escape hatches need to be reliable when you hit the edges.

foxpurple 4 years ago | | |

What if you are just building a generic CRUD app?

eastendguy 4 years ago | |

"Low code" tools like Sikuli, Selenium IDE, UIPath or UI Vision are often used for test and process automation. They work well and have their place.

Could you do everything with pure Python or C++? Sure, but it would be much slower. Low code is useful if your need is not covered by an available application, and on the other hand you lack the resources and/or time to develop an app from scratch.

But I fully agree that "No-code" is a marketing term only. Even the easiest "No-code" app requires a good understanding of concepts like "if/then". The term "Low-code" is more honest.

tootie 4 years ago | |

My read is that there is a big unmet need is small line of business apps. Things that are currently managed with awkward email/spreadsheet workflows that aren't worth an investment in custom development. No-code apps can automate these with much less cost and time. This will overlap a bit with what's currently being done by teams of specialists but it will mostly be a new market niche. That may change in a few years though.

yuvalhazaz 4 years ago | |

We try to solve precisely that with Amplication, where we combine low-code with custom code. We generate a node.js and react application based on low-code configuration and push the code to your GitHub repo

https://github.com/amplication/amplication

strogonoff 4 years ago | |

I (possibly wrongly) apply the reverse of the “$100 note on the ground” parable to no-code tools.

If a toolchain that allows to deliver fully functional software of appropriate complexity without writing code was even remotely feasible, Apple/Microsoft/Google would have already been pushing hard each for their own take on it.

Considering the immense upside for whomever of the big tech that manages to do it first, and that they can throw much more resources at it than the best-valued SV unicorn, presumably they’ve tried (probably more times than we know); and presumably what they’ve found is that at a level of no-code tool sophistication where it’s good enough it becomes indistinguishable from programming—so they’re trying to attract more people into software engineering instead.

pm90 4 years 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).

drewdog75 4 years ago | |

I find the data modeling portion of Bubble to be very intuitive. Some of the UI configuration is also intuitive. The responsiveness of the solutions built W Bubble is lacking.

treespace88 4 years ago | |

I need to checkout some of these low / no code tools to see if anything is new since I last checked.

In the past I have found that as soon as a server push action is required things break down pretty fast.

IE display alert at a certain time but not if the user has focus in a text field. Show an message indicator instead.

jimmy2020 4 years ago | |

reading your comment and thinking of Wix

GoblinSlayer 4 years ago | |

How does it work for Excel?

dmix 4 years ago | | |

Probably Google Sheets since it’s web based with API oriented integrations.

zubairlk 4 years 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

eljimmy 4 years 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.

robfitz 4 years 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 4 years 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.

monkpit 4 years ago | |

I used to get ads for Bubble on Facebook, the ad comments were always fun to read through...

capybara_2020 4 years 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?

redsymbol 4 years 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.

orcasushi 4 years 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.

surfingdino 4 years 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.

kokekolo 4 years 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.

rattray 4 years ago | |

Which one?

wyldfire 4 years 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 4 years 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.

1123581321 4 years 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.

whall6 4 years ago |

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

ekianjo 4 years ago | |

Because it's proprietary and it's hip right now? I agree with the comment, sounds like a pure waste of time.

encryptluks2 4 years 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.

jonas21 4 years ago | | |

This comment is right on the line where I can't tell if it's sarcasm or not.

redisman 4 years 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.

ironmagma 4 years 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.

rubyfan 4 years ago |

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

luismedel 4 years ago | |

I was looking for this exact comment.

Metacelsus 4 years ago | |

No, you're not.

animalgonzales 4 years ago |

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

feoren 4 years 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.

arthurcolle 4 years ago | |

I'll have you know that CoffeeScript is still widely used! \s

cries in legacy code

vosper 4 years 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

runawaybottle 4 years 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.

vmception 4 years ago | |

tell me you’re a startup from 2012 without telling me you’re a startup from 2012

winrid 4 years ago | |

It's actually a really nice language. But yes, it was a fad that is mostly irrelevant now...

heipei 4 years 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 4 years 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.

mimixco 4 years 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.

dkobia 4 years 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.

robertwt7 4 years 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 4 years 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.

rchaud 4 years ago | |

How do I build a calculator in Wordpress or Wix?

You're conflating website builders with web app builders.

dmix 4 years ago | |

HyperCard circa the early 90s?

goatlover 4 years ago | |

Also Dreamweaver and Flash Builder for Flex.

a4isms 4 years ago |

No-code environments are “Duck Programming:”

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.

gilbetron 4 years 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.

patrickthebold 4 years 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.

rattlesnakedave 4 years 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."

hnbad 4 years 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.

xyst 4 years 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 4 years 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=5024b4c17aa...

Inspiringer 4 years 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.

glutamate 4 years ago | |

Yes, the solution is open-source no-code that can be self hosted:

Budibase, Baserow, Appsmith, Saltcorn (shameless plug).

csmpltn 4 years 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.

redsymbol 4 years 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.)

tyingq 4 years ago | |

Happened with DabbleDB. It was popular and gaining momentum. Twitter bought them, probably for the dev talent, and shut it down.

xeromal 4 years ago |

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

ipnon 4 years 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 4 years 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 4 years 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.

zkldi 4 years ago | | |

> Declarative goal based development. You type in English what you want the application to do,

Isn't that just code?

I'm convinced that for sufficiently complex "no-code" solutions, you just end up with a poor mans programming language.

solresol 4 years ago | |

Taking the history of a spreadsheet file, seeing what has been added to it over time, and where, and automatically generating a web application from that.

Often some spreadsheet has grown organically to solve some problem, with or without code.

antupis 4 years ago | |

I would say using nlp to create model where you can query erp, crm and other big business stuff without sql.

janmo 4 years 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.

cush 4 years ago |

The title and first paragraph reads like an Onion article

holografix 4 years 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.

nobody0 4 years ago |

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

rchaud 4 years 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.

asadlionpk 4 years ago |

"No-code startup bubble..."

orliesaurus 4 years 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)

jimmy2020 4 years 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 4 years 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.

jimmy2020 4 years ago | | |

> Apps have been "building themselves" for decades: it's called a compiler.

To your point, can I call the cement mixer a self-made building material that resulted in an accumulation of 4000-year-old of knowledge?

Every known industry has different levels of production to reach the final product. Which may be a tool builder to automate the industry. Exactly the same way the building evolves to the prefabricated. The limitations are with the raw material which is clearly to the advantage of the software industry.

> 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

I totally agree with all of the above. But that can be done along with investing more in the essential no-code tools. And if some has decided to go further good luck.

The argument about we need to do more so please let's stop the entire direction of automating because somewhere they still using CRUD, old-fashioned and unmaintainable code is similar to let's stop space discovery because we still have problems on the planet earth. We can do both.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4 years 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.

foxbee 4 years 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.

knightofmars 4 years 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/

foxbee 4 years 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

yourenotsmart 4 years ago |

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

mm983 4 years 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 4 years ago | |

Madness, isn't it?

yourenotsmart 4 years ago | | |

Those who took $100 million aren't the mad ones, though.

ransom1538 4 years 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.

pictur 4 years 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.

deepstack 4 years 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.

mackrevinack 4 years 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

darepublic 4 years 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 4 years 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 4 years ago | | |

There is a plugin system. You would write (reusable) code there.

lionkor 4 years 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 4 years 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 4 years 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.

locallost 4 years 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.

drewdog75 4 years ago |

Bubble Chess anyone?

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

ekianjo 4 years ago |

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

devops000 4 years 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 4 years ago | |

Webflow has CMS now: https://webflow.com/cms

masswerk 4 years ago |

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

rchaud 4 years 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.

modeless 4 years ago |

They named their startup 'Bubble'? Bold move.

ToJans 4 years 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?

JohnJamesRambo 4 years ago |

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

lwhi 4 years ago |

Conceptually, it can't work for general use cases.

I hope the investors realise this.

neatze 4 years ago |

Are they competing with excel ? ;)

feoren 4 years 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.

richardknop 4 years 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 4 years ago | |

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

oytis 4 years 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 4 years ago | |

Closest things would be developing ransomware, defi contracts, and algo trading.

WJW 4 years 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.

keyme 4 years ago | | |

Also drugs, software exploits, anything that sells itself really.

dalbasal 4 years 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.

rorykoehler 4 years 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.