
Twitter, but without code - estraschnov
http://notrealtwitter.com/
======
thebouv
So, it lets you prototype apps. That is awesome.

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).

~~~
blixt
I think you're looking at this the wrong way.

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...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-
technology/there-are-185-million-software-developers-in-the-world-but-which-
country-has-the-most/) [2]
[http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm](http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm)

~~~
blixt
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.

------
austenallred
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](http://take.ms/iwa9W)).
I still haven't been able to get in.

~~~
davidslv
I totally agree with you, the website is really slow, most likely because it
ended here...

~~~
paulmd
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.

~~~
austenallred
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.

------
captn3m0
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.

Link to the framework used: [https://bubble.is/](https://bubble.is/)

~~~
jamieomatthews
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

------
Singletoned
> 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.

~~~
estraschnov
We're already working on a distribution version and we'll open an API soon so
that people can add things that are missing.

------
mwill
It would be great if there was a link to explore without logging in, because I
don't feel particularly compelled to give my details to this site.

~~~
jamieomatthews
As far as I can tell, the login doesn't actually do anything...I think all
this kid is claiming is that he made the login page I guess

~~~
estraschnov
A lot of people are signing up though. Doens't work for you?

~~~
jamieomatthews
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

~~~
emodendroket
Lemme just give my actual Twitter login details to some guy I've never heard
of.

~~~
estraschnov
You can just type anything. Obviously we don't have access to twitter's db

~~~
nhumrich
Its called OAuth

~~~
estraschnov
yes, but we're not building a client for twitter. it's a clone :)

------
jackreichert
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.

------
Milner08
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.

------
skrowl
Oh neat, bubble.is is apparently a WYSIWYG no-code thing that the "developer"
of this site says is going to replace software engineers.

Yeah, that worked out great for FrontPage didn't it?

------
adambratt
People who are commenting and saying that this doesn't make any sense are
missing the real use case here: fast prototyping and iterations.

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.

------
markbnj
Finding a way to program computers to do what we want without requiring rare
and expensive skills is probably one of the largest economic opportunities of
the 21st century. Bear in mind that there are already plenty of people in
other disciplines who are good at decomposing problems and designing
processes. It is the syntax and structure of programming and the depth of its
connection to the way the machine works that bars the door to their
participation. Meanwhile the world needs more and better software every day,
and the overall supply of people who are good at the way we do it now isn't
growing at anything like a comparable rate.

I'm sure this is not the tool, but I'm also sure that when the tool comes
along that busts this open most developers (including myself, in all
likelihood) will fail to recognize what it can do and will mock its
intentions, just because that's the way we humans work. So, in closing, I
leave you with the lines of an old Scottish folk song:

If it wasn't for the weavers, what would ye do? Ye wouldn't have your clothes
that's made of wool! Ye wouldn't have your coat of the black or the blue If it
wasn't for the work of the weavers.

A confident bunch, those weavers :).

------
BjoernKW
Regarding software engineering won't be done by software engineers in 5 years
time:

There are engineers who seem to be focused on the mere plumbing behind
applications: DBs, ORMs, web frameworks, REST, SOAP, you name it. When asked
to implement a particular solution to a real world problem these developers
tend to first argue about whether to use PostgreSQL, MySQL or WhateverDB
without even trying to understand the actual problem first. I know this sounds
very clichéd but quite a few developers seem to try very hard to live up to
the cliché.

Believe it or not, in some areas this attitude is almost pervasive. I'd say
it's the main reason why recruiting freelance developers mostly works by
recruiters matching TLAs instead of developers pitching their services to
clients directly (like design agencies do).

Anyway, this kind of developers might indeed have a hard time finding a job in
5 years but there will - save for a possible technological singularity -
always be the need for people who can fathom a real problem and design a
solution.

------
onion2k
It's Visual Basic for the web then?

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.

~~~
estraschnov
Exactly, but entirely visual, no Basic

------
dansingerman
Haven't we been here before?

[http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-
NoSilverBullet.pdf](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)

------
srmann
The idea of lowering the learning curve for website development has fascinated
me for the past 10-ish years during my employment in the content management
system industry. Every once in a while the idea that a tool can replace a
developer surfaces, energizes a few people, and then falls flat for one reason
or another. Yet it always resurfaces, likely due to the revolutionary nature
of a successful solution.

The most common reason for failure I've seen seems to stem from the idea that
a website requires a developer due to a website requiring massive amounts of
meticulously written text in an esoteric language; by replacing this text with
a graphical interface, a website no longer requires a developer who
understands how to write this text. Experience leads me to believe a developer
serves a much different purpose in building websites.

Consider applying this logic to another problem, such as writing. If one
builds a tool allowing non-writers to drag correctly spelled words and
punctuation onto a page, then a non-writer now has the ability to write
gripping novels, impactful research papers, and influential editorials -- and
they can do this without knowing how to spell. This doesn't make sense, of
course, since writing a book requires a certain understanding of how to
communicate effectively, an achievement demanding a much more clever tool.

Much like writing a book, writing software also demands a much more clever
tool than a graphical, drag-and-drop interface. Developers understand more
than how to write text in odd languages; they understand how to solve
problems. Creating a graphical interface for building websites doesn't remove
the necessity of a developer. On the contrary, it creates more jobs for more
developers who specialize in building applications using a drag-and-drop
interface.

~~~
blixt
I agree with you mostly, but let's also consider the value of lowering the bar
of entry. Once upon a time "software engineer" meant someone punching cards
and running them through one out of a handful machines on Earth to execute a
piece of logic. In 10 years from now "software engineer" might mean someone
who practically draws something on a touchable, wireless surface that weighs
less than a couple of those punch cards that used to hold a single logical
instruction, and their software is instantly available to billions of people.

Or to translate to your analogy: there might have been a lot of brilliant
writers in the world that simply never learned how to write, or they never had
access to distribution so the only person who read their masterpiece was
themselves. Today, with the Internet and computers and better access to
schools, we have a lot more writers. There might also be more lower quality
content because the bar of entry has been lowered, but I'm absolutely sure
there will be a lot more high quality content as well.

------
striking
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.)

[1]: [https://bubble.is/pricing](https://bubble.is/pricing)

------
dfar1
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!"

------
lloeki
The side effect of such products (that I have to love day to day with) is that
it really devaluates the work done by software developers when it needs to be
done by someone of the trade. When a client comes with a feature request and I
say "that'll be 10 days, sir", many scoff at the value and don't understand
why, pointing at how easy and quick it is to do A or B in Z assisted
development system, glossing over even the skin-deep details.

That said I am totally in favor of the "in 2020 most programmers won't be
engineers, they'll be [whatever trade uses programming as a tool]". Empowering
the users should be the number one goal of every system builder, whether it is
via simpler systems (as seen on mobile), more accessible interfaces (from
colorblind to sensory to kinetic disabilities), or powerful coding (R, NumPy,
iPython, Matlab, Mathematica...) or non-coding (Hypercard...) environments.

------
busted
I'll wait until the site is responding faster/not erroring to be sure but if
it's really as it appears, this is amazing. Attractive customizable design is
one thing, but real logins, real graph relationships, real feeds, real
filtering for mentions, user photo uploads, potentially real messaging, all
without any coding would be (is?) really amazing and covers 99% of all the
site creations any laymen could want.

It doesn't need to scale especially well for the vast majority of customers.
If your first reaction is "this doesn't scale" or "this doesn't eliminate
programmers" you have to be a professional point-misser. I'd want to see how
intuitive the interface for making this is but it's cool stuff, and as it
matures I'm sure will only get more interesting.

~~~
profinger
Except for the fact that it's barking up the wrong tree. This likely won't
change anything. It'll just make a new programming market. Now, instead of
people going "I don't want to learn to code, I'll just hire a developer."
they'll go "I don't want to learn to write a website, I'll just hire a
developer".

If someone doesn't want to dig in to building something for themselves they
won't no matter how easy you make the tools. WYSIWYG editors have been around
for decades but programmers still have a job. They've gone from writing crazy
cobol to doing .net but they are still doing it.

------
binxbolling
I've been using Zoho Creator for years
([http://creator.zoho.com](http://creator.zoho.com)) as a tech-savvy non-
developer. Anyone had any experience with both Creator and Bubble and can
compare the two?

------
Bedon292
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.

------
mavdi
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.

~~~
Jonovono
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!

------
profinger
"Ran into a temporary bug..." lol

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!"

~~~
profinger
Haha bubble's site did the same thing. Seems like a stable platform.

------
Koldark
If in 2020, all those people are programmers, we are going to have some shitty
software! If the people I worked with wrote software, they might fix their own
itch and not think about the bigger picture nor the others in the
organization.

------
wo_oy
Nice! I often face the problem of wanting to demoing prototypes of ideas, and
coding takes too long. Eventually bubble could add auto-scaling when the app
is used by many users, and have a pay model similar to aws.

------
coffeebro
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.

------
leichtgewicht
The poor guy! If I look at the bubble pricing sheet then this month is going
to be a bit costly for him (My assumption is ~100000 hits = 920 USD). Not that
he would have any advertising on it ;)

------
kimmentr
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.

------
lbotos
Twitter is serious about others not using twitter in their domains... "Please
don't sue" isn't a real stance on this.

------
seba_dos1
Takes a really long time to just reply with an error when trying to register.
How is a non-developer supposed to deal with that now? ;]

------
sosuke
I went to bubble.is and every link I clicked asked if I was sure I wanted to
leave the page without saving my changes.

------
davidslv
is only me having a slow experience? The concept is actually very interesting,
it really makes it very easy to build websites for small businesses.

------
yAnonymous
Why should I use this instead of Dreamweaver?

------
mahouse
>Because in 2020 most programmers won't be engineers. They will be doctors,
teachers, farmers, executives...

I do not like this narrative at all, and it's becoming pretty common. Do you
imagine a doctor saying "Don't worry, in 2020 most physicians won't be
doctors, they will be engineers, teachers, farmers, executives"?

~~~
wo_oy
I would love it more if it's doctors teachers farmers executives and
engineers. Programming as a tool is apparent now. All these frameworks help
people to easily realize their ideas. People can be more multi-disciplined
than ever before.

~~~
mahouse
I understand, but the current situation of all software being shit is going to
go even worse with this new approach.

------
seivan
I liked their demo, but honestly we've seen this before. Even with tools like
Unreal you still need to write code if you want to make genuinely good games.
Same thing applies to stuff like GameMaker.

Build apps without coding - since the 90's.

------
jz10
The whole thing is built using bubble.is

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](http://imgur.com/h0iUIVw)

