How Bubble bootstrapped a visual programming tool for non-coders to $100k/mo

And in those meetups you tend to find a lot of people looking for someone to code their ideas. These guys put a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert.

She did a year of com sci. She learned SQL at work. She can Excel with the best at her bank, with some VBA here and there. Still I had to coax her into learning Python for some bigger-than-Excel datasets. She wanted to for ages but just couldn't make the leap to "real" programming (her thinking, obviously not true).

Even when she tried we had issues installing things. She made good progress and almost got it. I sat an evening with her and we solved the issue. She had a lot of support to get over the various hurdles, support many don't have.

Obviously it's one data point but it highlights the issue. I think we've forgotten how hard it can be. Anything that helps should get a shot.

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synt...

There may be other specific problem domains where subject matter experts may be able to be productive, if given relatively basic programming tools along with specific, modular, abstractions useful to their problem domain.

I could see drone programming becoming something like this - a farmer may need to update his drone behaviour every day, but he may not be excited about learning to 'program' it.

They do some other full time job and can't invest 2000 hours per year for 5 years to become efficient at all the detailed things the programmers have to deal with.

The use case is people who can excel at Excel, but don't want to learn about dependency injection, semantic versioning, exception handling etc.

When I switched back to a shell after 20 years I realized how much a GUI hurts, how much I unlearned to work with computers. After decades of Windows and OSX, I got Arch with i3 (so no desktop environment). I am mainly using text-based software like the shell, bash, tmux and vim every single day. Then, it's a very small step to program or to get a programmer because you are already programming in little steps here and there and every day (bash scripts, vim macros, etc.) and you deal all the time with text.

Visual tools don't teach you to code, they introduce an unnecessary layer and create an even bigger insecurity when dealing with real code. Real coding with text is quite easy—and this should be the actual message. A very good example for an educative text-based coding environment which is even functional is Logo. But again, the best way to get into coding is to get an OS on your personal computer which focuses on the shell.

There were lots of people who can build small to medium complexity apps in Visual basic in those days when VB5/VB6 was active (Pre C#/.net). Even as a developer I was happy to hack in VB any day than VC++. But any developer I knew back then wouldn't touch VB, claiming multiple reasons ranging from "not powerful", "no performance", "messy" (don't know what that means) etc. It was like developers wanted to be associated with complex languages in order to have a respect among the community. True, VB performed slower than VC and even lacked few capabilities (like you can't write a device driver or difficult to write a custom COM component etc), but it was perfect for writing business applications.

Not sure what destroyed VB, but I believe it was the web that changed everything. Java and .Net though are well designed and powerful, but they bring a lot of complexity, requiring new developers to spent considerable time to gain even a basic knowledge. With the advent of SPAs things went even worser, current SPA frameworks like React and Angular are adding layers upon layers of complexity to build some basic stuff.

IMO if you can hack a UI in a prototype tool like Balsamic, then you should be able to make it a working prototype within at least 2-3x the time you took to prototype it, including binding dynamic data from a web service. If in 2017 we are still taking 3-4 months to build a basic website (dynamic) or mobile app, we have failed somewhere.

Projects like Bubble are providing stepping stones towards a possible future where we can build UIs almost as fast as we can imagine/sketch them in a prototyping tool.

Try "thinking and communicating clearly and precisely" the process of multiplying two numbers larger than one thousand, in Roman numerals.

For me, it was very difficult if I didn't cheat and implicitly convert everything in my head to normal (Hindu) numerals first.

Now, try to do the same thing with Babylonian numerals (base-60).

(I tried and gave up)

What I'm trying to illustrate is that the tool you use to express an idea, imposes a hard limit on how "clearly and precisely" you can think about that idea in the first place.

Hindu numerals are one tool (one notation) that make processes such as multiplication and division easy to express. If such tool wasn't invented, we'd be spending too much time 'thinking' and 'expressing' and 'teaching' multiplication, and be left with too little time to actually benefit from it.

I’d like to point out that 100k is not a lot in this market. Dev tools are an 11 figure market with tens of millions of programmers. I think the biggest change is the surface area has grown so much that the failed visual tools of yesteryear might have been able to carve out sustainable markets today. Bubble, Webflow, and Square Space can all be succeess stories but that doesn’t mean they’re a bellweather for all of coding. There are clearly a lot of small problems (simple web apps) business needs solved that are simple enough for these tools. I say hallelujah! Now I don’t have to update the pricing page every 3 days and can work on the real problems! The only caveat is to keep everyone in their swim lanes and don’t let the wise Bubble intern shard my database.

The biggest issue are always the skills required to bring their ideas into actual code. Most of those tools still require an extremely advanced knowledge of calculus, DSP theory and linear algebra. Imagine if a fashion designer wanted to display a set of generative images displayed in the background following the catwalk ground vibrations (this was a real request). Even if he/she could accurately describe their idea, that would be still several magnitudes outside their STEM Skills. Most of the times we end up hiring an external dev who will be forced to use such visual tools, making his job even worse.

You might be right, but they're still making over $1mm/year in revenue.

There's obviously a big demand for this so either you're wrong or people using it are actually programmers.

But while not "F U money" $100k p/m is enough to say: Well someone must be using it then.

Perhaps, in the Hooked sense, the somewhat diffcult learning curve helps to increase long term retention?

I work with non-programmers every day who know what APIs and queries are.

There are millions of people who are technical enough to manipulate Excel sheets, talk intelligently about API integrations, and tweak SQL queries but are not programmers themselves. Non-programmer does not automatically mean non-technical.

They used it just for the tabular form.

But I agree with you on everything.

The upsides are obvious – someone that's not a 'software engineer' can program things that do real work!

The downsides tho are much less obvious; more 'hidden' costs really. It's easy and quick to bang out a new feature, but also really easy to inadvertently update or rollback another unrelated set of changes. As a professional programmer, I sure don't want to give up version control, unit tests, integration tests, automated builds, and automated deployments.

Tho in fairness to RAD tools, and both the code they produce and the whole workflow involved in using them, when I started my current position the non-RAD-tool code was (much) worse, and much more difficult to refactor and cleanup, than the RAD-tool code.

> One that knows to keep things DRY and creates a function for me when it sees the same similar code written twice

This is potentially an interesting idea.

> One that knows when I wrote an inefficient bubble sort and swaps it out with a faster sorting algorithm etc.

This is also the sort of thing that optimises out your security-critical delay loop or memory wipe.

Some of the other stuff you mention is not a way long off if you use an IDE like Visual Studio, which, with or without Resharper does a lot of code analysis. You get notified if you have dead code (branches that never get ran), duplicate code (i.e., things that should be turned into a common method or class), etc.

Webstorm can do some of what you mention:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15514285

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15638652

One that knows to keep things DRY and creates a function for me when it sees the same similar code written twice.

Unfortunately this is "sufficiently smart compiler" territory. I'd love to be wrong about that though.

What you request in the last paragraph is a Junior Developer to do the grunt work of implementing a spec.

I don't know Bubble but I am skeptical about visual programming, as syntax is one of the easier parts to learn when coding, and isn't in my opinion what makes our profession difficult.

You could also likely put a layer in front of Bubble to only serve some pages with Bubble, other with your replacement.

Also from the FAQ: > The good news is that Bubble is fully extensible via Javascript plugins. The Bubble model is to write the core website functionality using our super-simple language, and plug in Javascript to handle algorithms that are hard to build in Bubble.

So you could probably add shims and move around.

I think the most interesting way of doing this would be something like embracing Bubble for a lot of work and having the "serious" code relegated to places that are easier to manage, like complex API or some custom widgets

> there have been ideas to do this for around 40 years

You should be "pessimistic" – if the implied claim is that "these types of products" will replace all of the other standard programming paraphernalia!

But, as you wrote, this stuff has been around for decades. And that's because there are lots of people that can do real work with these tools, but aren't otherwise willing to pay the (pretty) steep costs to get up to speed using the 'pro' programming tools.

In a post-Bret Victor world, we know what such an environment might look like.

Stop Drawing Dead Fish: https://vimeo.com/64895205 Drawing Dynamic Visualizations: https://vimeo.com/66085662

As a visually-minded developer constantly hunting for such tools, and even working on some myself (in a small way — nothing that anyone here will ever end up using, surely), I can assure you that there's enough smoke that eventually we'll see something like what we desire catch fire.

If I had to guess, I'd say we'll see it come out of the world of video games, not web applications. So don't fret that Bubble looks like a step in the wrong direction. They're not building tools for visual thinkers, they're building tools for MBAs.