Ask HN: Does back-end devs/data scientists need an easier way create web UIs?
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Also, considering advice from [2]: - Build tools for a specific set of developers who don’t have the skills to build the tools they need.
This, and feedback from a few initial users have us asking ourselves if our target audience for Lowdefy is correct. With internal tools, we are directly targeting. mid-sized and larger companies, and currently our product is not yet packaged to serve their minimum requirements out of the box.
When we introduced Lowdefy to data analysts, backend devs, etc. they immediately responded very positively with a sense of empowerment - now they can get stuff on the web without learning html, css, js, etc. The complexity to do basic stuff on the web has not changed much since 2015 [3]
If we framed Lowdefy towards backend-devs / data scientists / analysts, would this be a better audience which resonates more with our value offering? - Lowdefy makes building web UIs as simple as writing a query.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26443406
[2] - https://medium.com/@gerstenzang/developer-tools-why-it-s-har...
[3] - https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2...
I am intrigued and will check it out. We have some data we'd like to display to internal users but don't need any fancy system just want to unlock it quickly and easily on the web without tying up our frontend devs right now. Not sure if that is what you are shooting for but kinda sounds like it.
IMO there are likely a lot of companies and tech teams that would use a tool that could do that in a secure and simple way. But it would have to be targeted at the IT/database/backend crowd as that is who generally controls access to the data.
We are thinking exactly what you are describing. Just quick effortless quick wins to access backend services, like triggering an API.
We are thinking that the same benefit that infrastructure-as-code gave to backend-dev, we can give backend-dev UIs-as-code (not that it isn't already, haha) to help backend put an easy UI in front of their services.
A wswig for internal UI/dashboards has a lot of value for companies that don't have a dedicated internal tools team.
My company had an internal tools teams at one point but it got killed because of other business priorities.
We use https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin, that still requires development time and frontend knowledge, but the framework is terrible.
https://marmelab.com/react-admin/ is much better but also required development time and frontend knowledge.