I didn't know about salt! The internet is full of lovely tools! Although it does look generate really dated looking pictures but definitely interested in looking at its parser etc.
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.
I think two things are simultaneously true about no-code apps:
1) They really are a fast way to get an MVP that can be shown to investors and customers and even process customer transactions for simple businesses. Many simple businesses don't fit into pre-packaged SaaS platforms like Shopify, but don't really need a fully custom solution built from the ground up. No-code is good for these.
2) No-code quickly hits a wall when things start to get more complex or as the scale grows. At some point, trying to coerce the no-code solution into doing what you need becomes increasingly painful and a custom solution becomes necessary.
In reality, I think many small businesses and simple startups are actually a good fit for no-code websites. The Wordpress analogy is a good comparison because we all know how unnecessary it is to write a blogging platform from scratch in 2021 (unless for hobby, of course). Likewise, it's going to become silly to write a custom backend and frontend solution for a client whose entire business is basically a couple of web forms and simple workflows.
It's all about picking the right tool for the job, and no-code tools can be the right tool for many jobs.
But they're not the right tool for every job. Knowing the difference is important.
"I'm afraid many are only showable on a Zoom call. Please book a consultation call and I'll share a project that aligns closest with what your project."
At this point in time, there is more demand for bubble than supply of service providers.
When turning down work and struggling to scale, our own website https://azkytech.com takes a hit.
Also, I'm working with a coach and his words are correct. Need to figure out ideal customer profile first and then invest in these.
E.g. have worked on 3 mobile apps
. And they are really hard with bubble. The divert challenges app [1] is one of our projects. But just today I asked a guy to find someone else to work on their mobile app..
> You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way.
This makes absolutely no sense at all. You obviously have not read _The Mythical Man-Month_, and judging by what you've written I completely doubt the entirety of what you've said.
Speed is one thing. The long-term maintainability and usability of a system is another thing altogether. I have serious doubts about this 'no code' movement.
I think you can read the statement through a charitable or uncharitable lens - the uncharitable way is "throw 30 engineers at a problem and it'll get faster"
However, in the context of the other comments the GP made, I interpreted it as, "You can have a larger team with a properly built system with usability and maintainability, with good separation of concerns, and speed things up that way, but we have a smaller team and so bubble serves us well by allowing us to get things done quickly".
> I have serious doubts about this 'no code' movement.
I think the GP was pretty transparent about what it is good for and what it is not - I think the "wordpress for apps" is a good description. Wordpress is great for a particular class of problem, and then when you get to a certain level of complexity, you end up throwing it out and rewriting it, or putting so much on top of/around it that it is unrecognizable.
Given the kind of cocky tone elsewhere in that comment, I read it as “the biggest problem with Bubble is that if you’re an engineering manager who likes maintaining a fiefdom of 30 engineers, you won’t get to do that anymore”. No-code folks often try and make it seem like their biggest antagonists are corrupt middle managers, because they make for better rhetorical punching bags than individual contributor developers.
You’re right about the mythical man month, but I have a feeling this person is trying to grind an axe more than make a coherent point.
I really really miss git, version control systems, pull requests, automated ci checks etc.
Imagine a world without git and version control systems. Then apply that to NoCode.
Who changed which line. When did it happen. These things are normal with code/git. But not with NoCode/bubble (yet Jul2021).
Which file is the master. Which change to merge.
And then throw 30 software engineers at the project. Chaos will happen.
The comment was less about architecture and more about version control and merging which is still early days in the world of bubble compared to software engineering
Incidentally the only Bubble app I've seen online was mentioned in the Bubble FB ad: Revetize. It actually made me do some research when I saw the ad last week as it seemed so absurd.
What are the limitations? You say it's suited well for MVPs. Is it well suited for our typical web app that has evolving and increasingly technical logic as business needs change?
If it is a business that needs
Standard CRUD, relational dB backend, a front end. The web app is in a zone that is perfectly viable and can stay in bubble.
Cosmetic Limitations can easily be overcome with custom plugins built using nodejs. We had to parse a large CSV once and wrote a bit of JavaScript to overcome it.
What I wouldn't do in bubble
- make a game. Tricky stuff.
- intensive math on bubble server. E.g. any machine learning should be done elsewhere.
- make something like bubble in bubble. Nope. Don't.
Sounds like a great case for MVPs and startups. Perfect for basic CRUD web apps I imagine. Also the extensibility with plugins means you can still "code" in things you need, which helps with edge cases.
How easy is it to debug something in Bubble for a dev and non-dev? They're using Javascript for the custom code part of the platform. Is it the same for the no code part?
Debugging the NoCode part in bubble is super super super easy.
When logged into bubble, add ?debug_mode=true in URL.
See the bottom toolbar. Step by step through any workflow action. (Event based paradigm) or inspect any element and check any state/property. Not chrome inspect tools. Bubble has its own debugging.
Backend debugging is slightly trickier. The logs are harder to read. Sprinkling some database entries makes it easy
Very cool! I have not tried a ton of Nocode but have been watching with interest from afar. My main question is: How do you go from Nocode MVP to a fully productionalized system? It seems like there's a gap there that would still require a team of engineers building the thing with code. Or do tools like Bubble provide ways to incrementally transition?
I left my job (Embedded software engineer, linux, raspberrypi, no web, no javascript) to dive into NoCode and started bubble freelancing and then quickly a bubble agency by hiring/building a team in Pakistan..
Tried a few other platforms (wappler, adalo) but not much luck. Focusing only on bubble now.
Getting a foot in the door is definitely hard.
Place I work at isn't hiring at the moment.
Have several suggestions.
1- Have you considered looking at freelance platforms like Upwork?
There is a bit of a game that needs to be played to get the first few projects.
- bid quickly (as soon as job posts come up)
- underbid
- keep trying.
It'll probably help you hone your skills and have specific projects to talk about during interviews.
I helped my wife step into this. Quite quickly, a few projects led to a nice part-time role with a US startup via Upwork. A while later, tried applying full time locally and the projects and work was easy to talk about during the interview.
2 - Have you considered going to local/slightly distant meetups via https://www.meetup.com/ or eventbrite? Networking in person makes it easier to push the CV through HR. And in some cases, there are HR folk attending the meetup to step in. I once attended DWPs Hackathon in Leeds (which turned out to be a recruitment event basically. so sign up to those perhaps?)
3 - I'd recommend having a LinkedIn profile.
Saw some questions about how to put the homeless time gap in there. Don't have any suggestion. But I think having a profile would be better than not.
If you had a LinkedIn profile, I can share that easily. Have lots of recruitment people connected in my profile.
And there are some other people I wanted to share your profile. Perhaps I could try sharing the CV. But definitely easier as LinkedIn is super easy to parse. The format is the same for everyone. One glance is enough.
Add a little udacity/coursera online course icon and that is sufficient to push the profile through the door sometimes.
It was the same in the heavily industrialized parts of Germany till the 80s or so. There was a documentary covering the history of these sites. And the oral history part of it was just shocking. Like certain departments being known as the "blood pissers" because basically everyone working there for too long got bladder cancer. Or the fact that it was normal that people just vanished during their shift because they fell into melted iron and nobody realized until shift end.
But what even shocked me more than these stories was how people thought about them. Somewhere between pride and it-is-just-like-that. From all levels, workers, managers, chemists with PhDs, their families...
> It was the same in the heavily industrialized parts of Germany till the 80s or so
Like you very well pointed out, most of that industry and the associated pollution has moved further East. As a citizen of such an Eastern European country I was unpleasantly surprised to feel the air suddenly tasting "chemical" as I was driving on a highway in Transylvania, near a town called Sebes.
Sure enough, I then soon found an article of the local residents complaining about a chemical company polluting the air they breath (in here [1], article in Romanian, unfortunately). The culprit is an Austrian (not German, but closed enough) company called Kronospan, and on its wiki page [2] one can see that its latest investment was made in Belarus, presumably only a dictatorship still allows this sort of thing to go unchecked. The same wiki page also details some pollution-related incidents for which the company was responsible in Wales in the early 2000s, that is in another relatively poor area like the Southern US states mentioned in the article.
Industries moving as local populations wise up to the health problems they cause has been going on for a long time. The book Toms River[0] briefly covers the history of the synthetic dye industry from its inception in Germany, moving to Cincinnati, OH, and subsequently to Toms River, NJ (then a sleepy backwater location).
The book is highly worth a read, and I was thinking about some of the outcomes in the book when I read the article and comments on Scientists Rise Up Against Statistical Significance[1] here.
And these companies usually refuse any responsibility for the aftermath. Kind of worked back when they still produced basically at home, but even the they knew the risks. But after they moved because of all the dirty shit that's just cynicism. They literally look for poor regions and people to pollute. Which sucks...
>But what even shocked me more than these stories was how people thought about them. Somewhere between pride and it-is-just-like-that. From all levels, workers, managers, chemists with PhDs, their families...
Other cultures have different priorities. I can't quite put my finger on it but there's something I really don't like about how your comment just takes for granted that their prioritization is wrong. Of course Germany has changed since the 80s but your comment may as well apply to the Ukraine or India.
Well, basically trading in your health, knowingly, and risking death in exchange for a salary in private industry is kind of weird to say the least. And to be somehow proud to voluntarily become a corporate drone in the process even more so.
One interviewee even went so far to attack environmental activists because one of the more polluting production was shot down. Same guy didn't have any issue with letting his kids play in the polluted waste dust and sand. I assumed that in that case you would be grateful as the improvement directly impacted your own lively hood.
But I get how you can be sucked into that, kind of. Especially if you are otherwise poverty struck. From the management and the chemists I found that attitude very cynical.
Reminded of Burke in Aliens and the question which creature is worth, but at least the Xenomorphs did get themselves killed for a percentage.
Not only you are proposing someone to trade off their health for some money but also you get to trade off your children's health.
Poverty sucks, but is it a really an ethical choice to give to anyone, it's almost a biblical choice you're giving in this case -- sacrifice your first born.
Is this what people in power, want to be?
Give devil's bargain to anyone who has only bad option to save a few percent on environmental scrubbers; or continue a business that is at very core environmentally unsustainable.
> your comment just takes for granted that their prioritization is wrong
Firstly i doubt it's a prioritisation choice of which they have agency over. I find it more likely that they were powerless to change it, but i have no evidence of that so i accept it could still be their choice.
Secondly, this prioritisation - whether by these people or whether, as i suspect, by others and forced upon those people - IS wrong Unless it is explicitly negotiated in the offer of employment. Which, we know it was not.
I.e. in the case of a public venture then you are joining a military function - i do not think civilian police should expect to give their life. In the case of employment with a private venture then there's a dedicated line item on the paycheck "danger money" and the worker is suitably educated of its meaning before they are allowed to accept the offer of employment.
This is not hard. Enterprise can be accomplished, profit can be made, and human capital can be fairly compensated. Greed does not need to prevail in all business decisions.
Lousiana is particularly bad, but there is a huge stretch of I-10 in Texas from east Houston to the border leading into Lousiana that is lined with chemical plants that make things worse - I drove it about 30 years ago.
Also in Texas - large companies have eminent domain rights on private property - this probably is going to lead to pipelines through the Hill Country (near Austin) in a few years in spite of most of the open space there being in individual owner's hands.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/permian-highway-pipeli...
I find it interesting that there's a disproportionately large amount of these kinds of stories that come out of the US (compared to other western countries). As you said, there should be enough educated/financially able/motivated people in these areas that would mobilize and do something about it.
> ...there should be enough educated/financially able/motivated people in these areas that would mobilize and do something about it.
I beg to differ with this point. If you're an educated person not looking to work in a blue collar job your economic prospects in areas like this are limited. The technically inclined and the otherwise ambitious move away to seek better opportunities elsewhere.
I lived in a small industrial city for a while many years ago and saw this phenomena for myself. Those who were able left in their teens to major economic centers for tertiary education and considered going back home worse than a death sentence. What was left in the wake of this phenomena was a creeping ghetto, an economic wasteland that only begat more poverty.
Which... is pretty much what he’s saying? If all those who can command a higher wage leave (and don’t return), the local economy becomes hollow and a creeping ghetto sets in.
I read it as more of a "they actually like it better in the rich cities" which many people do not. Specifically the sentence "the people who could left in their teens to major economic centers for tertiary education and considered going back home worse than a death sentence." If a nuke were dropped on SF tomorrow there's a large number of people who would be like "welp, I'm out of a job but this is a perfect opportunity to move back to BFE". The same goes for every major city. There's a reason all (for smaller than average values of "all) the wall street types move either upstate or to Florida once they've become rich enough that they can either let their career coast or retire.
It’s worse than that... whole states are experiencing brain drain. As agriculture continues its consolidation, significant parts of the country are losing anyone who can leave.
Not many countries are anywhere near as big as the US, and those that are mostly have similar issues.
I think a part of the problem is that, for someone in a little town like the one in the article, regulatory authorities and the federal legislature are peopled largely with individuals who reside a thousand miles away.
That just can't happen in basically any European country.
This seems like a bit of a cop-out. States and municipalities have regulatory power and are much closer to citizens. Many states are roughly the size of European countries.
Perhaps the state of LA has the power to stop this pollution, but the residents lobbying for help from regulators， as depicted in the article, seem to be focusing their attention on the federal EPA. Unless I accidentally skipped a paragraph that talked about lobbying at a regional level.
If the state doesn't lack the teeth to fix this, why would they choose to compete for federal attention with an order of magnitude more people?
==If the state doesn't lack the teeth to fix this, why would they choose to compete for federal attention with an order of magnitude more people?==
I'm not sure, Louisiana does have a Department of Environmental Quality [1]. In Illinois we had a similar issue play out this year. The Governor is the one who ended up banning the plant's use of ethylene oxide [2]. It looks an obscure state law allowed for that action:
"Invoking rarely used authority in state law, Illinois EPA Director John Kim prohibited Sterigenics from pumping ethylene oxide gas into massive chambers used to sterilize medical equipment, pharmaceutical drugs, spices and food."
> I find it interesting that there's a disproportionately large amount of these kinds of stories that come out of the US (compared to other western countries).
From what I gathered this is rooted in the difference between the regulatory principles of the US and most other Western countries. In Europe you usually have to proof first that whatever you do will be reasonably safe, then you can do it. In the US you can do many things without someone checking first, but if it's later shown that you harmed someone you have to pay damages and/or people will be send to prison.
Thanks!