Ah, you should specify that you need to make an account. For some reason I was thinking this might somehow attempt to do SSO and grab your actual twitter data
> if we ever for some reason have to close down shop, we will release the Bubble source code under an open-source license so that you can set up your own Bubble server and keep your app running
That's quite a nice thing to read. I hope more people start committing to this.
The level of detail in this makes me doubt the claim (0 lines of code), but assuming it is true: really well done.
For those who are wondering if its just a login page: you can register an account (login is automatic on registration, and email verification is not required). The entire UI is almost exactly same as twitter.
I really like the idea of these 0 lines of code websites, but mostly for more static sites. As you can tell with this site, it's already suffering from lag in a bunch of places, which might be hard to fix. Disclaimer: I have never used bubble.is, but similar products
Too bad all those engineers are going to be farmers by 2020 though. Because when your prototype gets popular, I doubt Bubble.is can handle all the things that actually make your app run at scale (the deployments, maintenance, database, etc management programming that is really what makes apps like Twitter run .. not just the tiny html/css/js stack that the client plays with).
Today, only about 20 million people[1] are building software for over 3 billion internet connected people[2] (and even more who can get access to software in other ways). That's only about 0.6% of users contributing to the rest. Tools like bubble.is are not replacing the very scarce resource of software engineers, they're just vastly expanding the bubble (har har) of potential developers.
The world will always need people (or at least creative robotics) capable of designing and building hardware as well as the software that interfaces with that hardware. But the amount of resources spent on those critical systems will be minuscule compared to the resources spent building very custom things on top of it.
It's sort of like how you may be able to build your own computer at home with pre-made components and plug it into the wall and have it start up, without having to know how to generate the electricity required to run it, or how to make the hardware components.
In 2020 farmers may very well be building their own application, and if that is the case then most likely the number of people using these "WYSIWYG" tools will outnumber the kind of software engineers we see today. I personally think 2020 is a bit optimistic, but it's clearly the direction in which we're going.
The best example of this happening successfully that I can think of, albeit in a much narrower scope, is the recent shift in game development. Game engines used to be super expensive to license and tricky to develop for, but just in the past year several of the biggest game engines have become open for anyone to use, and have also made their development tools work really well for people who don't write code. We're not quite at the point where you can make elaborate games just by dragging and dropping, but a lot of serious effort is being put into it. And as advances are being made, we're quickly growing the potential number of developers out there.
This change doesn't necessarily mean there will be much more higher quality content on a global scale, but it will definitely increase the amount of content and shift consumption into narrower scopes by providing many specialized solution rather than one monolith solution for the problems out there.
EDIT: To clarify that, I don't mean that in a nasty, snarky way. VB drove a lot of business software and got huge numbers of people writing software, many of whom weren't employed as developers.
It reminds me of all those people saying wysiwyg editors would kill the need to know HTML. Really, they made it possible for developers to work on more complicated and exciting projects. Uncle Phil wants help with his flower store website? He'll be happy with WordPress.com or SquareSpace.com and you can continue working on your stuff without being a bad nephew.
This may very well be a cool product - I like the idea of people being able to build things without code (how do they architect a DB?).
Of course, as a lot of people are pointing out, this approach doesn't scale very well. To be fair, neither did the original Twitter, and it was built on Rails. They're different levels of scale, but if all you really need is a proof of concept this could solve the "How do I find a CTO so we can build a quick app and see if anyone cares?" problem.
I'd be careful pitching it (yet) as a "we'll never need engineers again" product, as I don't think that's the case; it is incredibly slow, and it errored out for me three times (http://take.ms/iwa9W). I still haven't been able to get in.
If the resulting sites can't handle a traffic spike, it's not that great a tool, is it? No one wants a hammer that shatters if you swing it too hard...
Being optimistic, it might just be a hosting problem.
Ya, to be fair I've seen Wordpress blogs go down under an HN spike, as well as a lot of stuff using socket connections for each user. Not many people build products expecting 100+ people to simultaneously use the site on day one.
Haven't been able to create an account, bugs out constantly and is very slow. Cool for prototyping but honestly it just highlights why we need engineers.
Don't post on HN of all places and claim we don't need programmers...
On a serious note, cool product but we've seen many many many of these sorts of platforms before. They never work outside a niche market simply because programming isn't about typing, but assembling logic.
I think lots of people on HN are programmers, so probably a good place to post it, no? Good to get the people that will be 'replaced' in 20 years or whatever to start thinking about other ways to use their knowledge or at least thinking about how the industry could evolve in the future!
The hard bit of software engineering is not knowing the syntax and typing the lines of code, but the design and problem solving, that abstractions can't solve.
You can make it easier to produce software with better tools, but the fundamental intellectual requirements of software design and implementation will never go away (until you have AIs genuinely powerful enough to write code themselves)
Very soon you might realize, that Twitter is good not bcoz of frontend but the major tech expertise is in the backend systems to handle super high traffic and dispatching messages quickly.
I've been using Zoho Creator for years (http://creator.zoho.com) as a tech-savvy non-developer. Anyone had any experience with both Creator and Bubble and can compare the two?
I honestly don't think I will ever use something like this because you have to stick to the resources provided. Also they might have released it too soon. I tried signing up and this is the message I get "Sorry, we ran into a temporary bug and can't complete your request. We'll fix it as soon as we can; please try again in a bit!"
If any of the site's devs are browsing the comments, you might want to address this problem I found while navigating the site: http://imgur.com/h0iUIVw
It's seriously slow and it lost my user account picture and status after I clicked away.
Maybe this could be a good thing in the future for simple prototyping (to show off to investors, not a general public kind of thing) but the bubble.is pricing advertises "Grow" "Scale" and "Flourish" plans for $460, $1700, and $4200 respectively.[1] I would definitely wait until the architecture here becomes more advanced before trusting them with your entire app.
I noticed their architecture was built on JS. JS is a pain in the butt when it comes to sandboxing. Either you run multiple contexts in a V8 engine that can crash each other if one OOMs, or you start up a new process for every instance. Single-threadedness is also not fun to deal with, in terms of efficiency.
(Yes, I've explored building a service like this on Node.js. I summarily discovered that it's probably not the best plan.)
I got a good laugh out of this- definitely very creative and a good idea. I'd just be careful about the whole "please don't sue us" line. Companies like Twitter take these things very seriously.
Yay for frontpage 2.0. All this seems to do is make it easier for people to not better themselves. "What's this? I can make a website without having to learn anything?! Great! Let me put a million animated gifs on here!"
I kinda have an issue with the openning statement on the site. It's almost a threat, saying that most programmers will lose their jobs and have to do other things.
It's an interesting concept, but the slowness and buginess of the site only show why that will never happen.
It's good at creating prototypes/static interfaces, but bubble.is most likely will not be the future of programming for the web.
Most sites rely on a complete infrastructure of networks, and unless you can provide a really solid PaaS creator for this, and charge money for the actual infrastructure, most users wont take it seriously. Personally I probably wont use it, but it might be nice for some people on Shark Tank :)
Why does Bubble.is make me confirm every single time I try to navigate to another one of its pages? Extremely annoying, and makes me think the product doesn't actually work.
67 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 74.8 ms ] threadCould have been a SHOW HN indeed, even though it's more about the idea that you can do that without code than showing twitter
That's quite a nice thing to read. I hope more people start committing to this.
For those who are wondering if its just a login page: you can register an account (login is automatic on registration, and email verification is not required). The entire UI is almost exactly same as twitter.
Link to the framework used: https://bubble.is/
Too bad all those engineers are going to be farmers by 2020 though. Because when your prototype gets popular, I doubt Bubble.is can handle all the things that actually make your app run at scale (the deployments, maintenance, database, etc management programming that is really what makes apps like Twitter run .. not just the tiny html/css/js stack that the client plays with).
Today, only about 20 million people[1] are building software for over 3 billion internet connected people[2] (and even more who can get access to software in other ways). That's only about 0.6% of users contributing to the rest. Tools like bubble.is are not replacing the very scarce resource of software engineers, they're just vastly expanding the bubble (har har) of potential developers.
The world will always need people (or at least creative robotics) capable of designing and building hardware as well as the software that interfaces with that hardware. But the amount of resources spent on those critical systems will be minuscule compared to the resources spent building very custom things on top of it.
It's sort of like how you may be able to build your own computer at home with pre-made components and plug it into the wall and have it start up, without having to know how to generate the electricity required to run it, or how to make the hardware components.
In 2020 farmers may very well be building their own application, and if that is the case then most likely the number of people using these "WYSIWYG" tools will outnumber the kind of software engineers we see today. I personally think 2020 is a bit optimistic, but it's clearly the direction in which we're going.
[1] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/there-a... [2] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
This change doesn't necessarily mean there will be much more higher quality content on a global scale, but it will definitely increase the amount of content and shift consumption into narrower scopes by providing many specialized solution rather than one monolith solution for the problems out there.
EDIT: To clarify that, I don't mean that in a nasty, snarky way. VB drove a lot of business software and got huge numbers of people writing software, many of whom weren't employed as developers.
Of course, as a lot of people are pointing out, this approach doesn't scale very well. To be fair, neither did the original Twitter, and it was built on Rails. They're different levels of scale, but if all you really need is a proof of concept this could solve the "How do I find a CTO so we can build a quick app and see if anyone cares?" problem.
I'd be careful pitching it (yet) as a "we'll never need engineers again" product, as I don't think that's the case; it is incredibly slow, and it errored out for me three times (http://take.ms/iwa9W). I still haven't been able to get in.
Being optimistic, it might just be a hosting problem.
On a serious note, cool product but we've seen many many many of these sorts of platforms before. They never work outside a niche market simply because programming isn't about typing, but assembling logic.
http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf
The hard bit of software engineering is not knowing the syntax and typing the lines of code, but the design and problem solving, that abstractions can't solve.
You can make it easier to produce software with better tools, but the fundamental intellectual requirements of software design and implementation will never go away (until you have AIs genuinely powerful enough to write code themselves)
Yeah, that worked out great for FrontPage didn't it?
What product manager wouldn't like to be able to quickly test and iterate on concepts without bothering the developers?
I feel like if bubble.is can nail this, in a year 90% of "Show HN" product launches and new ideas on Product Hunt will be built with this tool.
It's the new and better launchrock as it's actually a reflection of the product.
If any of the site's devs are browsing the comments, you might want to address this problem I found while navigating the site: http://imgur.com/h0iUIVw
Maybe this could be a good thing in the future for simple prototyping (to show off to investors, not a general public kind of thing) but the bubble.is pricing advertises "Grow" "Scale" and "Flourish" plans for $460, $1700, and $4200 respectively.[1] I would definitely wait until the architecture here becomes more advanced before trusting them with your entire app.
I noticed their architecture was built on JS. JS is a pain in the butt when it comes to sandboxing. Either you run multiple contexts in a V8 engine that can crash each other if one OOMs, or you start up a new process for every instance. Single-threadedness is also not fun to deal with, in terms of efficiency.
(Yes, I've explored building a service like this on Node.js. I summarily discovered that it's probably not the best plan.)
[1]: https://bubble.is/pricing
Yay for frontpage 2.0. All this seems to do is make it easier for people to not better themselves. "What's this? I can make a website without having to learn anything?! Great! Let me put a million animated gifs on here!"
It's an interesting concept, but the slowness and buginess of the site only show why that will never happen.
It's good at creating prototypes/static interfaces, but bubble.is most likely will not be the future of programming for the web.
Most sites rely on a complete infrastructure of networks, and unless you can provide a really solid PaaS creator for this, and charge money for the actual infrastructure, most users wont take it seriously. Personally I probably wont use it, but it might be nice for some people on Shark Tank :)