Is Ui The Easiest Part Of Building Web App Reddit

I love no code! Wait. Wait. Hear me out... Building software is easy. Changing people's minds is damned near impossible.

As an engineer:

- I'm constantly handed shitty (or a complete lack thereof) requirements from non-technical people. No code lets people figure out that they haven't thought something out nearly as much as they think they have. I no longer am the bearer of bad news.

- I constantly see business people undervalue the design process or skip it all together. No code is making non-technical people realize that they have to plan out before they just throw engineers at a problem.

No code is changing the dialog around this. I see that as a net positive. Of course us software engineers know the problems around no-code - we'll deal with them as we deal with all problems.

> I'm constantly handed shitty (or a complete lack thereof) requirements from non-technical people. No code lets people figure out that they haven't thought something out nearly as much as they think they have. I no longer am the bearer of bad news.

Personally I find this to be part of the Job. The way I look at it i'm the one looking at sites all day, I'm the one caught up on all the latest trends, I'm the one who knows what looks good and what doesn't. My client on the other hand, they will likely know what they want, but when it comes to describing it, they may offer a nebulous response.

My job here is to take that nebulous response and form it into requirements. One thing I do all the time is if a client asks me to do something on the site and I can't discern what they want me to do, I will usually ask them where they go the idea. They will say something like "Oh pinterest, instagram, facebook, etc have something like this", we pull up that site and they show me, and from there I adjust requirement accordingly.

I don't hold this against any of my clients, it's ok if they don't quite know what they want, I'm the professional and it's my job to figure that out.

In one sense I agree with you. I find it enjoyable to take an idea and to flesh it out, breaking down the different parts.

What I don't find enjoyable is when clients don't have the budget for their grand poorly thought out ideas and refuse to accept a solution which will get them 90% there with 1/10th of the effort.

don't you have a project manager that acts as an intermediary between the customer and the coder?

I agree entirely with you, except.. i don't mind the design process (or lack there of) you describe. I feel i get paid for it.

I'm in a smaller org and yea, the product team definitely skimps on plenty of details. When i have to point out drastic UX flaws or impossibilities it is definitely frustrating. However i legitimately think that is what they hired for. They wanted someone (well, a team of devs) to deal with this stuff. To be the architect of their general direction.

The bigger question to me is if the positions we have that more traditionally handle a more complete design.. are they being overpaid in our org? I don't think i'm being _underpaid_ for my architect + dev hat, but i do wonder if someone else is also being paid for architect but i'm cleaning up for them lol.

I've also found that the designers seem to.. for better or worse, take what you give. I notice they give me a far more loose definition than they give less experienced devs. I suspect this is because they expect/trust me to follow through, and i do - but this also effectively takes "advantage" of what i offer. I use quotes because i also get paid much more than the other devs i speak of, so i go back to what i said earlier, i think i get paid for this.

It's frustrating. But i also enjoy it a bit. If they laid everything out perfectly i'd be left with just writing the correct design patterns in code, using the right data structures, etc. Worse yet i wouldn't have the ability to shape the UX for better performance. I dunno, all the companies i've been at have been like this. I don't feel it's unique, but maybe it's just how i put myself out there.

> the positions we have that more traditionally handle a more complete design.. are they being overpaid in our org?

Probably, depending on the size of the org. There are lots of places for semi technical people who sort of know what they're doing, but don't really provide value, to hang out in a large and growing enterprise sales org. They can collect what I believe are reasonable salaries and just route between the engineers on the customer side who actually know what they want, and engineers on the provider side who can actually provide it.

Any giant coupling between an application and platform ends up looking like this, I.e. pick your favorite Fortune 500 company and their cloud provider, security engagements, hardware vendors etc.

> I don't think i'm being _underpaid_ for my architect + dev hat, but i do wonder if someone else is also being paid for architect but i'm cleaning up for them lol.

Yep. I made a joke recently that in companies that have a formalized promotion process, if you apply for promotion and are denied, one of the consolation prizes should be that you get to apply for someone else to be demoted. I jest, but sometimes it feels like that would be just as helpful and fulfilling.

Great point! It's scary how little thought people give to this.

My all time favourite was when I made a news portal for a trader who wanted to create a hub around the commodity he was trading.

It was mostly customized drupal with a few tweaks he desired, and roles for writing/reviewing/members.

Come demo time he was upset there were no news articles in his "news portal". At first I thought he wanted more lorem ipsum content to see what it would look like. But no, he really expected that I would also have written the initial news articles for his website.

What if he meant having the news related to his commodity delivered via some news API?

I had a tech-savvy friend want to build an app but the project wasn't very well defined. After a short period of angst I suggested that he build an MVP in Bubble and that I could step in to work on any integrations that needed code support. It worked exactly as you said.

Thank you. HN is one of the few places where no-code is discussed at length, and it's frustrating how many programmers default to replying with "I would never use this in production."

You don't have to. The no-coder is building a prototype, safely sandboxed away from your precious CI/CD pipeline. The benefit of building a robust prototype is that the idea-haver person doesn't bother developers with unfinished requirements, and the developers don't have to write a damn thing until they look through the prototype and start mapping out some changes.

No-code is going to be used in production for sure. It's not something only for sandboxing and prototypes.

My point is that the conversation about such tools is derailed by HN programmers who automatically jump to the conclusion that these products are the wet dreams of non-technical CEOs, who will force their org to go no-code exclusively.

If no-code tools are used in production, that implies that it will have to pass QA and code review, just like anything else.

Completely agree with the sentiment.

But the definitions for both "production" and "application" are not so black and white. Take a super simple no-code app like a Google form survey. Some people would argue that that is not an app, others would say it is. Is it production? If I send that around to my team of 10 people, there will be no code review or QA. If I send it to 200 customers, then of course I let someone else review it.

Just wanted to let you know that these are very good points and you've changed my mind about no code.

It's great if it stops at dialogue and they don't force you to stay on the no-code platform.

It kinda sucks we need to develop products to convince people that hired us that we might know a thing or two about building software

Can you elaborate on the list of problems with no-code? Of course I'm not denying there are problems with no-code, I'd like to learn about other developers' issues, particularly with larger, longer-term projects.

No-code eventually becomes so complex that it becomes a bad programming language eventually, or lacks the expressiveness of a programming language to do what the business wants.

The imagined problem no-code addresses is business people thinking that their requirements are simple, and the source of their problems are expensive software developers and programming languages. Just get a junior business analyst to drag some boxes around, and job done. They are wrong.

This pattern has been repeated for decades now.

I think there's an interesting analogy to be drawn with Lego. You can build interesting and useful things out of Lego, more than you may even realize. It can be fast & effective, it's certainly easy, especially if you imagine we've abstracted away the question of what bricks you have so you have as many as you need of any kind & color.

However, you end up with two sorts of problems if you start letting people just build solutions to whatever they like with Lego:

1. The solutions may work, but they aren't really that good. You can only do what there's Lego bricks for. When it comes time to solve the problem at the next level, the Lego stuff can be less helpful than it looks even as a prototype, as even at small scales a lot of the engineering in the Lego was solving around the limitations of Lego in the first place, rather than solving the problem per se.

2. Eventually you get people trying to build sheds and houses out of legos, struggling to put up shelves, all kinds of silly things that the solution isn't really suitable for. And there's a variety of pathologies here, too, like how they don't understand why their Lego solution isn't good enough, and why you can't just buff up their shelf since it's just that the shelf is falling over, and explaining to them that they basically just built a shed that is made out of code violations may not be very easy, etc.

There are advantages, too, like letting them get their hands on some engineering and stuff, and there are a lot of problems in the world where a Lego solution is no big deal. I don't know if I've got anything right now, but I've done it before; I had a lego setup for holding tablets & phones for charging that was better than anything I've bought, because it actually had the correct sizes for things, for instance. But there's limits.

And at that point all of that no-code turns from an accelerator into a giant pile of legacy crap outside of your control which will cause you to hit a wall of ability to evolve the software far sooner than later.

The primary problems with some no-code platforms are:

Access to the code base - it's hard to build on top of, or around the platform

Long-term viability - if i build my company on top of your product, how can I be sure you'll always be around?

For transparency, I am the cofounder of Budibase: https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

most obvious would be you are building your business on rented land and could be deplatformed at any time plus strong armed into extreme markup prices with no leverage against the platform.

The other issue is that it seems doubtful the product could scale beyond a certain level in terms of traffic and also employees collaborating to add features

You made me laugh so hard as just yesterday I was re-watching 'The Expert' on youtube[1],just always hit close to home. Mylanta, try designing a Logo for a business, or website, or front/back-end, or apps... I think it's the customer never knowing what they really want that's the common denominator.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

> I'm constantly handed shitty (or a complete lack thereof) requirements from non-technical people.

My solution to that is that for every missing requirement I will make own personal decision and fill the gaps as I see fit. If that's not what they want then the development window is extended to incorporate changes and refactoring. I am not going to work late or stress over deadlines because that isn't my failed delivery and it is working as designed.

One of the problems with examples like this is that it gives an unrealistic expectation to non-technical people that large & complex sites are actually quite basic. There is a lot of functionality that a typical user never sees and is often where the complexity lies.

And as the "app too busy" error message proves, there is a lot more to a site than it's front end alone and cloning a front end does not clone performance. Good for proof of concepts or low use, non-critical apps but I would hesitate to build a business on one.

Ironically, it seems this clone does a great job of cloning the performance of reddit, at least when I tried it (bunch of unnecessary requests that takes multiple seconds each, sometimes just returning errors)

Hard to meet a person that doesn't at least dislike reddit, but at least old.reddit.com is quite an efficient page.

I had an internet outage that left me with a few kilobytes/s upstream/downstream. Most of the modern web was plainly unusable, often requests got terminated before all data was transmitted.

But reddit among few other sites did work quite well. Of course not for pictures and media, but the text and comments were quickly displayed. In hindsight I am not sure if that was better than a complete outage, but that is a content problem.

I will only ever use old.reddit.

If they take that away, I will kill my account. My account is 15 years old on Reddit, with near daily use.

On mobile web, you can also select an option from the hamburger menu to tell it to give you the desktop interface (which persists until you clear your cookies), and in your user settings you can set your default desktop interface as old reddit. Call me crazy for using the desktop site on mobile, but I find it far more usable to pinch and zoom than to navigate the redesign.

Nope not crazy at all, I do the exact same. I'm not sure what exactly needs to change about the mobile reddit design (I'm not a UI designer), but it's just obviously worse when compared to using the desktop version, even on mobile.

Have you tried the /.compact mode? It's not the same as the redesign, it's essentially old.reddit.com resized for a mobile interfact

> And as the "app too busy" error message proves, there is a lot more to a site than it's front end alone

I get at least monthly "our servers are busy" messages when accessing Reddit, and their (redesigned) website is so bloated that it takes great effort to replicate such bad performance in a simple clone.

Reddit is the one site where you really can't make this argument, it's bloat incarnate.

It does handle many orders of magnitude more users than this thing does though. As a site that is the source of many hugs of death, it's serving a hell of a lot of traffic, mostly successfully.

It could serve even more traffic if it was less bloated of course.

EDIT: Some random stats from 2019 suggest that they're handling ~1000 pageviews a second on average over a month, and a view can take >100 requests to load. Combine with surge load and you're dealing with some serious requests per second.

Over 100 requests per load? That has to be static files like images, right? Do they not have a cache system for that (like what Cloudflare provides)?

A friend worked on a project that reached several hundred requests at one point.

Basically they had a 10 request component. Only one on the page so even though it wasn't that efficient, they didn't care.

But then their PM wanted 20 of them on a page. It was a Scrum team so velocity mattered, so they just had a for loop generate 20 of them.

Great point. There's certainly much more that goes into building a site like Reddit than what goes into building a clone in two weeks. The purpose of this is to show the potential of what can be done in no-code.

No-code is still in it's very early days, and I think that a lot of its capabilities will improve over time. Also, it's very possible that a lot of the inefficiencies in no-code apps are a result of the builder not the platform (i.e. me in this case). I've been building with Bubble only for a few months, and this is only the second app I've built. I'm sure there are a number of inefficiencies in my workflows, but I'll also improve on that over time as well.

> No-code is still in it's very early days

This is simply not true. WYSIWYG is no code and has been around since long before people had catchy names for it. Dreamweaver and FrontPage were early examples of it, the benefit they provided was they attempted to let you design by a GUI first, then they'd let you peak the code underneath. Usually, no-code or low-code these days does not come with the source, which makes it especially useless to anyone who wants to do anything meaningful with it.

I would define no code & WYSIWYG as different things. No code includes deeper, server side functionality; whereas WYSIWYG for HTML is simple page editing. Even the Javascript based actions an editor provides are only client side.

Isn't no code and GUI software builders an idea that has been tried for decades? Wasn't Adobe dream weaver one of the early tools?

Dream weaver was a WYSIWYG website builder that offered the ability to edit the "raw" HTML. If you want mockups/wireframes/etc., there's Adobe XD.

Tangent: who names these things? XD? Where did that come from? It looks like a laughing emoticon…

XD stands for eXperience Design but I like the emoticon interpretation.

Performance and the deep level tweaking is exactly what I would worry about with a no-code app (much like with WYSIWYG UI editors you end up with inefficient oversized webpages). Generally having less control over the details results in the details needing to be overly complex generalizations.

Of course, maybe someone will solve that problem. (Or computers will get so powerful efficiency ceases to matter). It also doesn't change that things like no-code could be great for people less programming focused to prototype ideas, or create scripts to run over data much like people have used excel for ages. It might just remain necessary to eventually pass the implementation onto a non-visual programmer when scaling the solutions up for production.

I didn't intend to slight your work, so apologies if my comment came across too harsh. My concern is with no-code in general, which I think is a great toolset for some use cases but can quickly become too complex to handle. I've seen non-programmers get into all sorts of messes using no code applications as they didn't want to go through IT (for understandable reasons) and ended up with applications being buggy, inefficient and, in one case, insecurely harvesting & storing credit card numbers. They then turn to IT to fix their mess, which is difficult as being a programmer and knowing a no-code ecosystem are very different skill sets.

Of course, the only reason Reddit has value at all is also its user community providing and ranking curated information. It's not the frontend, but it's also not the reliability or scalability or whatever else they have going on in the backend. Just as no one ever bought Encyclopedia Britannica back in the day because of the technical quality of the binding, though I'm sure it was top notch.

Reddit's reliability is a major point and it's something that has actually gone better. As horrible as the new UI is, back when the old ui was the main one, the site would go down almost daily and often for hours at a time.

Users will ask for three things they can describe in a simple sentence. One will take someone half a day, one will take a whole team a two-week sprint, and one will require fundamentally rearchitecting the project, or not be possible at all.

Hey HN:

Thanks for everyone who has tried to visit the site. The surge in traffic was unexpected, and I realize that it slowed down the load time, so I've added a 'boost' to the site.

Besides that, I should also clarify that this site was built to be 'web first'. It currently does not work on mobile (I didn't design it to work on mobile since I was only working on it for 2 weeks).

Hope the site loads better now. Will try to respond to other comments below

Very cool that you built this in such a short time!

It makes me wonder if there will be a new segment of programmers that specialize in superfast no-code app creation.

We still have many programmers whose entire programming work is customizing WordPress/Drupal themes so I don't doubt it.

I really hope so.

Also, I think there are a lot of opportunities for coders/programmer to to improve the space and come up with ways to support non-technical folks like myself.

I think those folks will do pretty well.

> specialize in superfast no-code app creation

Rapid prototyping has been a valuable skill forever and I think this falls squarely under that.

Webflow is trying to build such a community, but it's a website builder only, it's not for CRUD apps. Their blog posts usually have interviews with "Webflow-only" agencies. The work seems kinda amateurish though.

That's a subtle throwback to visual basic, I think, but not in a negative way.

the thing with most no-code is that ultimately its exactly the same thing as coding only not typing letters into an ide and instead dragging around logical blocks that have the same functionality as keywords or libraries in a given language. It's removing the most surface-level features of programming but not the actual work or skill that goes into it

Slow as hell, to the point it does not load.

Isn't this the typical application you don't want to run as nocode? High loads, viral growth.

Actually it is the exact application to develop with no code. It is a clone of an existing website, where there are already 100s other clones, so it will extremely likely amount to nothing and not surpass 10 users, meaning the performance impact will not impact anyone.

I feel like that's a bit harsh and you may be missing the point if all you see in this is another clone.

There's obviously been a lot of effort put into this, and there's so much to be learned from what's being presented both from the perspective of a seasoned developer and those who aren't. The discussion above and below your comment is proof of that.

LOL

It was completely my bad for not being prepared for a surge in traffic. Should be less slow now since I added a boost to the site. But, yeah, it's definitely not perfect I'll admit.

If you do try again, check it out on desktop not mobile, and let me know.

Maybe it could also be a result of a bunch of people using the test acct, so feel free to create your own test acct.

Thanks for at least giving it a shot :)

Yep, definitely the authentic new reddit experience.

Could even do twitter too.

Actually someone already built a twitter clone in Bubble. Worth checking that out too :)

https://notrealtwitter.com/

But as for this site, I've added a boost to the site which should help somewhat with the surge in traffic. My bad for not being prepared for that

It was working rather well until the traffic surge from HN. Added a capacity boost to the site so it loads now, but you're right it's rather slow. So you may have a point.

As far as an experiment though, it's good to know what the current limitations of no-code are. This was never meant to be anything serious. Just a learning opportunity.

> This was never meant to be anything serious.

Remember the Linux kernel was introduced to the world with pretty much those exact words.

Still pending for me too. I'm going to assume this is here because of a voting ring

Either that or it was really impressive for the few minutes it did load. Kind of hard to figure out at this point.

Though the fact that it grinds to a halt under high load is also interesting.

Looking at how the DOM is being dealt with and how poor the actual rendering is, I don't think network performance is the only problem here.

That was an issue based on the plan I was using in Bubble. I upgraded to a production plan which should work better now.

Maybe, although I loaded it less than 4 minutes after it was posted. HN Hug of death must come really quick

I was gearing up to be irritated at seeing "no-code", but this was apparently built using a glorified WYSIWYG editor. That's really impressive, especially given how close it looks to what you set out to imitate. Nice work!

Isn't "glorified WYSIWYG editor" basically what nocode is? Why would the terminology decide your mood when the two are basically synonymous in this context? Bubble (which been used for building this) describes themselves as a nocode tool quite literally ("The best way to build web apps without code") but because you see it as a WYSIWYG your irritation disappeared?

> Isn't "glorified WYSIWYG editor" basically what nocode is?

Does bubble also handle deployment/infra?

I haven't deployed anything myself on Bubble (only tried their editor briefly) but since this submissions URL is reggit.bubbleapps.io I'd wager that yes, Bubble does handle everything for you once you've actually built your app in their editor.

Most terms don't have any meaning. As far as I can tell, no-code and serverless (no-ops is a close one too) fall under that category.

This is impressive for sure. It really makes me think how hackathons must be evolving with this type of tech available (last hackathon I participated in was ~8 years ago).

That said, and I feel a bit old for saying this, but I still prefer to write the code myself.

In every instance (so far) I've found I can produce the exact outcomes required faster by writing code (Rails is still crazy fast to scaffold solutions and install libraries) than trying to force a no-code/low-code platform to produce an equivalent outcome in a similar time frame.

Anyone else feel this way?

So... I wish I could share how my company/team-within has been approaching federal procurement tech challenges. We've built automation from a design-first perspective, to combine what generation tools like Create React App, Ruby On Rails, .NET Entity, JHipster, openapi, etc all do. But with further abstraction through templating and initial app overhead buildout.

We'd have an mvp reddit in a day, scalable as needed (right now on K8s in any cloud).

Working on open source!!

I prefer code in the end because the flexibility is provides. At the end, a bunch of edge cases and weird situations that can't be handled by the simplified solution will arise, and in those situations having a complete programming language is the only way to get above them.I find the simplifying assumptions that low-code frameworks rely on sooner or later end up braking.

Worth pointing out that bubble.io has different tiers. So, while this app is obviously overloaded, you have the (somewhat expensive) option of adding dedicated hardware to your server pool.

True, I've got some Bubble credits so I've upgraded the plan (for the short term only). Will see how that helps

Not sure if it's my computer (Arch Linux, 5.13, i7-7700K, RTX 2080 Ti) but the page behaves the same in both Firefox and Chrome where it basically slows down the browser to a halt, seemingly contiuing doing HTTP requests forever (loaded the page once 3 minutes ago and it's still doing more requests to some ElasticSearch instance).

It is pretty amazing what you can accomplish with nocode tooling (like Bubble, that is being used here), but I think this demonstrates that we have a long way to go before production applications can be built with it. It is a pretty good starting point though, and with a little optimizations to Bubbles backends (and probably the way they render stuff/deal with the DOM) we can be pretty close to shipping nocode apps for average users.

None the less, nice work! The UI itself is pretty close which is inspiring to see, although the new reddit UX leaves plenty to ask for.

This may have had the opposite effect on me. I am no longer worried about being replaced by "no code" Bubble apps now.

Nocode/lowcode is excellent for company internal apps & GUIs. Imagine things like barcode/QRcode scanner app for warehouse that just needs to send an HTTP call somewhere. Stakeholders/business people might be able to complete some smaller apps & views & GUIs themselves an no need to wait for engineering support.

It's likely never going to produce production quality web UIs for sites that have millions of consumer users where everything has to be optimised by hand but that's not really most use cases or the case for NoCode/LowCode.

Sure, it won't be used for millions of users, but I am already seeing plenty of startup MVPs built entirely from no code.

I can see a near future where no code offers the ability to take the model as built and start hand optimizing the code once things start to get off the ground.

I'm quite surprised that Bubble doesn't handle high traffic for you (no posts are loading for me and the site took ages to render anything), because I can't imagine that's something you can sort of plug in yourself somehow. Fair enough if they didn't actually intend for you to deploy or market your app and it was just an excellent prototyping tool, but their website does say "empowering entrepreneurs to build production-ready web apps." Surely you have to do something to help people's production ready apps serve production traffic if you're in this space.

I guess it's to do with their pricing tier. At $115/mo you get "3 units of server capacity", I assume you get 1 below that since they don't say. So the free tier has Bubble branding and insufficient hardware for the apps you can build, which seems a bit of an awkward marketing situation I guess.

To be fair their "Production" tier at $475/mo has "10 units of server capacity". So maybe they do empower entrepeneurs who want to spend $475/mo on hosting to build production-ready web apps. Which is certainly cheaper than a dev team if their code and 10x server capacity works for most apps.

These tools seem pretty decent for non technical people to build and test out ideas.

If anything it forces them to think about their problems and recognise where complexity exists.

Looks like reddit, for sure.

OP: why did you build it? practice? hn points? hate on the nocode haters? work for bubble? consulting sales? all the above?

i think it's strange that folks are using the "but it's good for rapid/throwaway prototyping/design!" argument.

is it?

if rapid prototyping is the argument for no code, well i get it -- but it's not the marketing i've seen for at least 10 years.

outside of that, the biggest drawback is the cost, with the ever-looming threat that you're going to get pandora'd by the rent-seeking no-code platform (anything you potentially make will just be siphoned off).

i know there are successful no code businesses -- even ones that are not just landing pages for no-code lessons, or no-code consulting, or no-code marketing, or no-code no-coding -- no-code tools really are a blessing for helping to democratize technology a tiny bit.

but if you want to do something that no code tools _should_ be designed for, imo -- namely, prototyping ideas very quickly with an actual fair shot of beating out the big boys -- you can't do it without tons of expertise and money and influence and connections and all the stuff you usually need.

you can't do it, in part, because branding / functionality / performance / etc. is all severely limited.

want to try a new idea?

sure - please go ahead - learn our 'no code' stack, give us $50/mo for your 'hello, world', and if you want to try Idea II, that will be anotehr $50/mo, thanks.

working moms? poor/working class teens? 99% of the population?

getoutttaaheeeere.

I made a reddit-like app/website on Bubble about 1.5 years ago and overall I was very happy with the speed I was able to get it out there. I built it in a few days which I personally never would have been able to do in code.

But since it relies on SEO to succeed, I'm now considering coding it from scratch because it's a huge limitation in Bubble.

https://tastejury.com

Can you share more about the SEO limitations of bubble you experienced? I wasn't aware that is a limitation.

Tried out bubble recently, and I am more pro nocode than most I would say, but it wasn't for me. Learning curve too high for inferior results imo

Inferior results to what exactly? Interested to know about alternatives you've used

You are right, haven't tried many alternatives. I suppose I've built a site for someone in squarespace, also backseat helped someone out with their wix based site. I want something really intuitive which would take no learning curve which is perhaps unrealistic. One person I know has used bubble and was satisfied with it, but to me it seemed like a bespoke type of language / gui based framework that had to be managed with a lot of dials and knobs, not eliminating the complexity just reformatting it in what is to me a foreign language. Also, I was not impressed by the quality of the site that was created with bubble but maybe that varies per user.

Dreamweaver 3.0?

Wasn't there some IDE like that in the past where non technical people could build data driven apps visually? I don't remember then name of that application. Wasn't it related to Microsoft Access or something? Hmm, the name eludes me...

That was Microsoft Frontpage I think. Dreamweaver was very similar to Frontpage in the 00's, I'm surprised it still exists.

A doctor I know set up an appointment scheduling workflow using FileMaker on MacOS.

Why is there an otherwise helpful response to this that is already downvoted to [dead]?

edit: It's back now, but I notice this happening a lot more than it used to. folks, for pete's sake if you find something inaccurate or unsupported in a post that causes you to want it gone, at least support your point with a comment for folks like me. Clueless people like myself end up wondering what the hell I just walked in on when it's dead comment after dead comment that otherwise seem like rational points in an interesting discussion.

The Reggit site plan has been upgraded and should load a little faster now.

Also, I'm not technical so I am probably not the best equipped to answer technical comments.

Thanks for all the feedback, both positive and negative. This has been quite the experience.

To use a Reddit term, ELI5 what "no code" actually means. As someone who's only ever seen the term in passing on HN, I don't understand if there's a distinction from coding in a very high level and/or visual environment. To try and make it concrete by comparing with things I've personally seen: Is LabVIEW "no code"? Is Max/MSP "no code"? Was Dreamweaver "no code"? Is building an FX pipeline in Houdini "no code"?

Dreamweaver is no-code, but you can't build a web application with it. Just a static website. Maybe there's some interactivity like being able to submit a "Contact Us" form. But that's it.

A web application has application logic of some kind, maybe like a retirement calculator. That kind of application will accept user input (e.g. "age", "monthly savings amount", "exp. rate of return"), and apply that data to a model of some kind. That results in an output "You need to save $X to retire at age Y, assuming ROR is Z%"

Bubble is a full no-code app-builder. There are other no-code tools like Zapier, but they're not used to build full apps, but rather to connect two different apps without writing API queries yourself. For example, let's say you're running a virtual conference. Your tickets are sold on Platform X, and your videoconferencing solution happens on Platform Y.

When someone buys a ticket using X, you want to auto-send an email from Y with their videoconference link. You do that by connecting the two services visually via Zapier.

I feel once you introduce conditional logic, loops and retrieving/processing/storing data you are in a code mindset regardless of how you construct that logic (e.g. through drag and drop icons, pictures or typed words)

Perhaps "borrowed code" and "borrowed server"? That's what they really mean. You're just using someone else's preexisting code/server to solve your problem instead of writing/deploying your own.

I gave bubble a serious look and quickly discovered its performance was abysmal. I suppose it is OK if you want to prototype or create an MVP, but if you think you are going to create something that can scale you are sorely mistaken. Considering this, I found it to not be worth the learning curve since the time I would spend would be a sunk cost if the app were to actually take off because it would need to be completely rewritten in actual code.

i guess these really are for a subset of apps, that you know wont grow a lot!

Internal apps in companies around processes, etc.

Nice! Pretty easy to compose a new post. Video, photos, text links just like Reddit.

It was a bit slow but getting things loaded but choosing to log in as a test user I was able to load things to desktop and post a great video. Kinda took me back a few years. Very nostalgic.

I like it. Reddit is like your sink drain sometimes, clogged with all the hairy goo that no one wants to see or deal with. This feels like a new lavatory just waiting for content to start flowing.

Good job.

You're welcome.

I tried to view the video link but received an error. I posted the error contents in another post for you. I couldn't find a way to post a screenshot of the error bubble so I just posted all the text from the message.

I also think that while logged in as testuser I was able to upvote my own post. Is that allowed? Perhaps there are a few others also logged in as testuser and one of them upvoted it.

Anyway, I like this. With faster load times this could be as fun as Reddit used to be.

I tried to use the twitter api with bubble and failed (not just authentication). I'm sure I'd have figured it out with plain code.

There was a badly documented plugin for twitter and it could do a subset of what the API was capable of, but I didn't see how I could extend it meaningfully.

I really wished API usage and low-code would get a bit more love.

"No code" here means they are "no-programming-language" not "no-coding". We've used several no code solutions years ago and business could not expand them so in the end developers sat with a complex application that would be maintainable in text code but not with a UI because a UI it's hard to understand what is going on.

This looks awesome..

I would ideally like a solution that builds it all out, and then allows me to download a docker container etc to deploy on my own...

Essentially a builder that i can then deploy on my own (cloud or local) infrastructure.

If I need to make code changes, I would come back to the website, make changes (version them with git) and build an updated docker container to roll out...

I suspect most no-code platforms are targeting users who have no idea that docker even exists let alone how to use it.

It's not really an exact Reddit-looking clone, but we built a tool called Newsy, which builds content aggregator like Reddit without code.

https://www.newsy.co

We focus on users with un-used domain names and try to spin up a news site like Reddit quickly with various features built in.

I wanted to try it out but the page keeps on loading.

Maybe that's the final stage because there is no-code, so nothing will be shown.

Once it finally loaded all I saw was icons and no text. Bizarre and not very usable. Stick to code.

I wasn't able to get it working. I'm on mobile. Page load very slow at first and resolved to an error (didn't copy it, sorry).

Second attempt loaded a header and some elements but no content. I tried to click every element that looked interactable but nothing responded.

Sorry for not clarifying earlier. This was built to be a web-first clone only. It does not work on mobile.

The problems with code are only compounded manyfold with no code, no code as a concept is still not as superfluous as something like gpt3 for ex, but beyond solving simple problems, I have little confidence in anything built with no-code YMMV

Well, to be fair, a very big chunk of reddit is dealing with the scale of users. In and of itself, it's not a new software (forums have existed for ages)

This is probably a 50% clone at most that's how far it will get you. It's not even 80% feature wise. So the title is a bit of a click bait

You probably need to log in. The landing screen is only a preview of what's in the app. You can interact with the app when you log in, and you can even log in as a test user.

Click login, go to the bottom of the login page, and click 'log in as test user'

What happens when this org bans you or gets cancel requests from wing groups?, I assume you have to start over from scratch?

Nice! I'd really like to see what owning, maintaining, scaling, customizing etc would be like in no-code context.

I didn't specify on the original post, so sorry about that. It's a web-first platform. It does not work on mobile. Try viewing from desktop.

And the platform I used to build it is bubble.io

Error: OwnerError

Message: Operation timed out -- app too busy Code: 1628248706218x559231799994115000

While amusing... the value of most of those sites is not the site themselves. But the people network that is there. Why is everyone using it? Because everyone is using it. Then suddenly the 'crowd' will move to the next one. There will be a few holdouts that stick but it will be a zombie site that lumbers on. For example myspace, digg, and fark are still around.

I think you will always find a core that stays and a core that leaves.. the reason is that people don't feel heard so they look for other places to voice themselves. I went from slashdot to reddit to HN. Even now HN doesn't feel satisfactory.

There is content, and a few people have added some since. It just loaded slow earlier because of the surge in traffic that I was ill prepared for. I've upgraded the site and it should work better now.

This site is not optimised for mobile. Updated the site to reflect this. I built it for desktop viewing only

Yep.

The purpose of this post is more about the potential of no-code. Just trying to illustrate that it's possible to build a web app like Reddit using no-code.

The goal really isn't to build a new Reddit.

Reddit is not exactly a hard to build site. Any experienced React developer could do this in less than 2 weeks.

I'm not sure how to draw comparisons between the two.

Timeout.

I think this shows one problem of no-code. The underlying code and data structures are probably horribly bad.

Every $5/month box should handle HN traffic easily for a reddit style application.

With the right indexes on the DB tables, an out of the box Debian LAMP stack is insanely fast for this type of use case.

While I think a $5 VPS is under kill for something like HN due to the traffic, that actually sounds like a fun challenge. Especially if you don't show point values, you can cache the majority of the page (everything but the username and points) until a new comment is made. That would require only doing a query and template completion once per comment, which is probably tiny compared to the number of reads. I imagine that if you had an extra GB of ram for Redis, you'd be in a great spot.

Sounds like a fun hackday to me.