Comment by gervwyk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gervwyk | Hacker News Reader

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We are! We started Lowdefy [0], co-founder here shameless plug, by building apps for customers. Our model is to build their back-office apps for them with no up-font dev charge, we just agree on a monthly fee. This monthly fee includes any changes and reporting in the future at no additional charge, as long as the scope remains the same. And they own the data in their database of choice.

The model is not perfect and does not work well for every type of process, but we have a few very satisfied customers. Just enough success to slowly grow our business and buy us enough free time to build and improve Lowdefy.

Currently it's working really well, like one gear turns the next. The apps we sell help us test and improve our low-code platform. The more apps we sell the more we invest in our platform and as a result all our apps get better, more feature rich and easier to maintain. Hopefully next, by building an open-source community around Lowdefy we can accelerate this cycle.

[0] - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

I tried out Lowdefy recently and it was too much yaml so in the end I just wrote my app with Vue and Buetfy. If you had a visual editor that was good I would have used and paid for that.

This is interesting feedback. Thank you! I would love to ask you a few questions about this, if you do not mind, please reach out gvw[at]lowdefy.com

A visual editor is definitely on our roadmap. Our strategy is to make the schema easy to read, write and understand. We want to ensure the dev experience of working with the Lowdefy schema is first class so that change review and version control can be as productive as possible.

Adding a visual dev interface is resource intensive can easily distort the schema quality. We figured by first maturing the schema and making sure it works well with dev tooling, we can add a visual dev interface on top as Lowdefy becomes more popular.

I made a dev tool into a small business. Came hear to rant: invest in ui upfront. At the end, customers visit your site and you have very little time to make them go wow. Your spending a lot of attention capital when you don’t have much

Thanks for the advice. You make a very valid point. The first version of Lowdefy had a UI, then every time we wanted to make a schema improvement we also had the tech debt of adapting the UI. As a result the schema became secondary and more and more become unreadable.

So then we really asked how lean can we make this platform to keep it agile while experimenting with the mechanics of the schema. After more than a year of that the experimentation paid off and we now have a very flexible, yet understandable schema for building apps.

But yes. Adding a visual editor on top is one of our goals - and we are getting closer and closer to making it happen.

Can you elaborate on what type of devtool you built?

I'm founder of a startup that develops DevOps tooling and we're debating how early to build out the ui. (We have the basics down with Vue like I mentioned.)

I can't speak for the GP, but I personally find editing code in my IDE to be a smoother and more productive process than editing any type of serialization or markup format like YAML (or JSON, or RON, or EDN to a bit lesser extent). This is most likely due to me being so used to being on the other side of those formats, or generating them with code in the first place, and not necessarily because one is "better." My IDE setups will reflect that preference, which in turn makes it stronger.

Sure, emailed

Too much yaml is interesting: it hides a lot (a lot) of plumbing: what did you find easier with Vue besides 'control'?

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