
Google App Maker - djangowithme
https://developers.google.com/appmaker/
======
headcanon
It means we have a new prototyping tool. Cool. Don't worry, your skills aren't
going to become obsolete :) Just keep learning and building stuff, and you'll
always be very employable.

I once worked with a guy who embodied the "grumpy old man" (we were both just
out of college btw) attitude for every new, cool thing I brought to his
attention. I kept telling him that in order to stay relevant as a programmer
in the foreseeable future he would have to stay on top of technology and keep
his chops up outside of the very mundane engineering work that we did at that
company. He would flatly refuse out of hand and say things like "Someone who
only knows COBOL for 40 years will still have a job". It frustrated the hell
out of me at the time, but he's probably right. Not saying you're guaranteed a
great job or be making google-level salaries, but you have to try pretty hard
to become _completely_ irrelevant in technology. There's a huge long tail of
boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate
whole doesn't change very much.

If you have even enough interest to be on this website and explore things like
App Maker and question things like this, you're going to be just fine :)

~~~
cookiecaper
>Just keep learning and building stuff, and you'll always be very employable.

This is true, but there are a few caveats.

The one that I've been running up against most recently is that a lot of this
new-fangled stuff does not really have a strong value proposition, and I
personally do not want to waste time on it.

This has become especially true since "cloud" hit critical mass. Junk seems to
get generated 20 times faster than it used to and see much wider adoption.
GitHub profiles are now status symbols and everyone feels a need to have a
bundle of their own showpieces to display.

A lot of the fads are totally perplexing, from the perspective of an engineer
who is more interested in building a robust system than padding his resume.
JavaScript on the backend (or, even more horrifying, the desktop)? Single-page
app frameworks like Angular for everything, including very simple pages?
_Why_?

Yet, it's hard to find a web-oriented position that isn't asking for a
background with some SPA and some Node.js. Maybe it's a fad, but it's still
going to impact your job prospects.

The takeaway: stay on top of fads and new tech, _even if you resent it_ and
think it's really dumb.

I had the same experience with Rails; I hated so much about it and put off
getting serious experience with it for 4 years or so. Turns out I still hate
it after years of usage, but it was much easier to find work, both as an
employee and a consultant, when I had significant experience in the fad.

Didn't matter that I was learning all kinds of new tech that I thought was
interesting. As much as one may hate it, it's usually best to bite the bullet
and ride the market's waves.

The most frustrating one today is Kubernetes and Docker. Ansible was so
beautiful. I hate Docker with a seething passion (not necessarily other
container systems), and I see Kubernetes as a very rough toolkit for people
who have Google-scale problems that no one should be trying to make for
themselves.

Other caveats:

* sometimes techs DO go extinct. Though COBOL is not quite extinct yet, I've known COBOL coders who have gone years unemployed (that doesn't happen to anyone who knows a language/stack still in wide circulation). A small niche has pros and cons, and one of the cons is that the supply:demand ratio is fickle, and may not always be in your favor.

* It is very rare that your technical qualifications will be so unique that they will take precedence over your personal and political qualifications. This is something most developers try to dance around, but the fact is that tech is ultimately run by people, and they want to be comfortable more than they care about that loop's runtime. If you're looking for something that will confer huge career benefits, the odds are that improving your people skills will be more valuable than improving your technical skills. This is almost universally true. It's especially true if you think it's not.

~~~
ams6110
I'm like you; I looked at Chef and thought "WTF??". I looked at Puppet and
thought "WTF???". I looked at Ansible and thought "ahh, yes! they get it!"

Most of the application stacks I see that are popular I think of as being
invented by people who didn't bother to look around at what had already been
tried and rejected by the previous generation.

Caveat I don't build apps that need to scale to millions of users.

~~~
marktangotango
Yeah ui frameworks. has anyone else noticed that yahuda Katz seems to have
been completely unfamiliar with any other ui framework for the past 20 years?
For example the superfluous stuff removed from 2.0? Sure the browser has
unique requirements, but sheesh.

------
tyingq
I've tried a lot of these tools. The trouble is that things go extremely well
until you hit a wall. With no way to extend them with something like freeform
code, the wall doesn't move.

The best ones, then, tend to be the ones that have been around long enough, or
had enough foresight to have covered various corner cases.

The other issue is that most of them have "per user / per month" pricing,
which doesn't work for many use cases. Things like, for example, an applicant
tracking app. If you use the functionality to a high degree, every job
applicant is another end user license.

Two of the better ones: [http://quickbase.com](http://quickbase.com) &
[http://ragic.com](http://ragic.com)

Other ones I've seen: [http://caspio.com](http://caspio.com),
[http://knack.com](http://knack.com), [http://fusio.com](http://fusio.com),
[http://trackvia.com/](http://trackvia.com/),
[http://podio.com](http://podio.com),
[https://www.zoho.com/creator/](https://www.zoho.com/creator/),
[http://airtable.com](http://airtable.com),
[https://getzenbase.com/](https://getzenbase.com/),
[http://www.zenginehq.com/](http://www.zenginehq.com/)

One of the more promising ones was DabbleDB. Twitter acquihired them and shut
the tool down. It had a very smooth UI:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY)

~~~
jonathanedwards
My theory is that it is not the existence of a wall that limits these tools -
it is the invisibility of the wall. Spreadsheets have a wall too, but it is
pretty clear to naive users where it is. These app-in-a-can tools hit the wall
suddenly and unpredictably - you need a new UI feature, or the data model
can't be generalized, or you can't connect to some silo. Perhaps a better
metaphor than a wall would be a mine field.

~~~
tyingq
I've run into all the things you mentioned. Pretty quickly though.

One I hit in many of the tools was lack of a good UI widget for select fields
that have lots of choices. Something like a combobox with autocomplete.

~~~
jonathanedwards
Yeah - same story repeated decade after decade. "Build apps without coding" is
one of those Siren ideas - it seems so compelling and necessary, yet everyone
ends up using much the same design as has failed countless times before. I
don't really understand exactly why this is so, but I'm pretty sure we need to
figure that out to make progress.

------
zitterbewegung
It means that there will be two new jobs related to this project.

1\. App Maker developer wanted to create App Maker Apps .

2\. Web developer needed to transition our App Maker App to a javascript /
python / ruby standalone project.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Note my comment was in response to the original title : google released this
what does this mean ? (paraphrasing here don't remember the exact wording).

~~~
djangowithme
What does Google's "App Maker" mean for web developers?

------
brohoolio
I requested access a few months ago... still don't have it.

We are looking at a number of these rapid development tools. Hopefully google
opens it up soon before we select a different one.

I'd be curious if this platform has sticking power. Google rolls these sorts
of offerings out from time to time and then shuts them down. If I knew there
was a couple years of runway for this offering my fears would go away.

~~~
nthcolumn
I must need this since I can't even get the sign-up form to work. So do you
know any others?

~~~
GarethX
Here's a few: [https://www.outsystems.com/](https://www.outsystems.com/)
[http://www.matssoft.com/](http://www.matssoft.com/)
[http://www.appian.com/](http://www.appian.com/)

------
zenonu
From simplest to manage to most freedom:

App Maker < App Engine < Container Engine < Compute Engine (VMs)

So pick your poison for the business problem at hand. Don't host your blog on
a dedicated VM. Don't use App Maker for training neural networks.

~~~
markdown
I'd break App Engine into standard and flexible environments.

------
sopooneo
I've often wondered, if you could create a gui app maker like this where the
app itself could be exported as, say, a Rails codebase at any time. That would
help reassure organizations that wanted to use the service but were worried
about lockin or the service shutting down.

------
jwilliams
Very interesting! This concept has been around for a long, long time in many
guises - arguably recent examples are Zoho, Microsoft PowerApps, Salesforce
perhaps... And many more going back to Access, Lotus Notes and dbase.

The question is really one of execution (and remaining modern). Too generic
and it lacks a killer app. Too specific and it hides of a niche.

~~~
mythrwy
I've not seen one of these type of applications yet that allowed the
flexibility needed to handle many (perhaps the majority?) of use cases
gracefully.

What I have seen is non-programmers getting enough power to get overconfident
only to wind up with a mess.

These type of applications make it super easy to do 85% of the work.
Unfortunately the remaining 15% often turns out to be impossible. Additionally
when requirements change (and when don't they?) there often isn't the
flexibility needed to make the changes.

The last thing I've observed is when something goes wrong if the person can't
drill down into the internals and make adjustments they are just plain out of
luck. I've seen this with both Access and Lotus Notes. Companies struggle with
bugs for years. I've had a fair share of work re-writing these type of
applications into web applications which finally do what is really needed
without issue and can be changed when required.

In short I'm not concerned. Seen it before. Works for very simple apps, blows
up spectacularly when something non-standard is needed. And this makes work
for me.

Maybe this time it will be different but I really don't think so.

~~~
ruleabidinguser
I get the feeling that some day theyll get it right and 90% of programming
jobs will dissapear.

------
bitL
Alright, so what's missing before web developers aren't needed anymore:

\- speech recognition so that you tell what you want

\- LEGO blocks for simple things that can be composed and adjusted by voice or
AR gestures

\- large amount of working code so that "glue" between blocks can be inferred
using ML/DL

I am pretty sure App Maker 2.0 will have at least 1 of these finished.

------
jitl
@dang, this title seems to be editorializing.

~~~
vnchr
I thought it was framing a particular discussion, like an "Ask HN" post.
Editorializing would mean asserting some sort of opinion--seems factual that
this new tool has relevance to web developers.

~~~
joatmon-snoo
I think it's more of the clickbait nature of the title.

------
ja9urc311
Google SharePoint?

------
ge96
Not sure if related but right now I'd trade knowledge for business insight, I
can build things but I have no idea what to make that makes money. Right now I
just build stuff for people.

It's funny 3-4 years ago when I first started to learn web dev, I had a lot of
ideas that I thought would be "viral/make money" but now I have hardly any...
a lot of my ideas back then were pretty dumb too looking back at it.

------
jlank
If anyone here has requested access to App Maker and not received it yet
please PM me. SADA Systems (my company) is partnered with google and have been
in the early access program for App Maker kicking the tires. We offer app
maker development and consulting services for companies looking to deepen
their investment in g suite and build cool apps on top of it!

~~~
yorwba
You may want to put an email address in the about field of your HN profile,
otherwise you won't be getting any PMs.

~~~
jlank
Good call, thank you!

------
SnowingXIV
Are there limitations on data or records? I have a SQL database that I'd be
interested in migrating over to a solution like this if it can handle 1M+
records without worry.

~~~
7ewis
I believe there is a limit, but you can upgrade to use Cloud SQL.

------
mxuribe
And I've been thinking about moving my email to fastmail...And then Google
tries to tempt me with this! Dang it, they know how to lure me back! :-(

------
locusm
If there is one line of apps that has consistently failed over the last 20
years it is these.

------
andy_ppp
That everything will be replaced by machines including you? ;-)

------
cutler
All hail the new Wordpress of app development.

