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Comment by lucasverra | Hacker News Reader

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lucasverra

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

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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.

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

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

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.

Your approach requires learning HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and Rails documentation in order to create a prototype.

You may as well be saying that getting furniture from IKEA isn't any simpler than buying lumber, saws, wax and paint from Home Depot and building your own.

I already know all those things and learned them for pleasure. Once you know it, nocode vs code is like the difference between using a GUI with a mouse or learning the keyboard shortcuts and using the command line. GUI with mouse just slows you down and is less flexible in general. Fine for lots of things but it's hardly a substitute for complex apps. Nocode apps are basically approximations.

You personally know how to use Rails and a number of other web technologies relevant to building web apps. So this product is not for you.

Much in the same way that Home Depot is not for me.

I use nocode tools all the time, just not for building products. They’re great but they are also limited. If you hit any kind of success with your prototype you have to be ready to do it for real.

I think there's a lot here that even as an experienced engineer I hate to start doing from scratch. Now combine that with time to focus on the business

* Where to deploy? * Where to store the code? * Which library to send emails with? * Which 3rd service to send emails with?

A long time ago I spent 2-3 weeks building something to do all the above. After completion, I started going to customers and realised those 2/3wks were basically wasted time because I could have just put a google form and would've done just as good a job. Except now you get something a bit better than that.

If you can solve your issues with a google form then use a google form. I would never start a simple project as an app. All my coded projects are more complex than that. Some might be able to be done with no code tools but it would definitely be a pita to execute.

In that analysis, did you spot yourself a pre-condition of knowing Rails, Ruby, HTML, CSS, and something about databases?

The advantage of no-code comes mostly for people who don’t have that same background.

Having that background is what trained me to be able to think logically like you do to build systems which is the hard part. I wasn't born knowning this stuff either. In fact I only learned it properly in my late 20's.

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