Is "traditional" coding now unnecessary for you guys?

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In the past, I’ve thought of learning java among other programming languages to help bring my tech business ideas to life, but after finding bubble, i’ll get to focus more on learning about the business side of things like marketing, finance, management (the part that really matters in the end).

After all, what good are your coding skills if you can’t market your app/service properly?

Are any of you guys still thinking of learning traditional programming after bubble? If so, why? Should I still pursue traditional programming?

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First, I’m a non-programmer, so keep that perspective in mind when reading my five cents. I’ve had some of the thoughts you have, so thought I’d sum them up. These are very much train-of-thought sentences, I aplogize for that. They’re as much for me really :slight_smile:

You’re stuck with Bubble
Bubble is amazing for startups, as it allows you to create a prototype/mvp or even a finished product in a matter of weeks, instead of what could take months. However, as with all programming languages (I’ll call it that), there are flipsides. The most important one in my view, is that you are “stuck” with Bubble once you have chosen to use it. Should Bubble be discontinued for some reason (and there are many realistic scenarios where that might happen), other programming languages would be far more robust and likely to survive and keep growing.

Bubble does have limitations
At this point in Bubble’s development, coding does offer you more freedom. As Bubble is still relatively new, close-sourced and with limited documentation, it’s not always apparent what those limitations are. Many limitations can be overcome by use of API’s and programming plugins, but from your perspective of not needing code anymore, I’d say we’re not quite there yet. That being said, I have never seen anyone come so close to achieving that as Bubble has, and it’s still very much in it’s infancy. I’ve said numerous times in this forum, and I’ll keep repeating it: the rate of upgrades and new features the Bubble team keep publishing is astonishing, and the system, in all its complexity, is wonderfully stable and robust.

Learning traditional programming
I am, as you seem to describe yourself too, more interested in growing the business, building good teams, great marketing and product development. I have a decade old education in programming, which has helped me understand how to talk with developers and understand their perspectives, but I am nowhere near good enough to actually develop anything myself. For my sake, I will not be pursuing any more learning in traditional programming. I have three startups behind me (pre-Bubble days), and I have mostly succeeded in finding people that are much better than me to do the programming job, and focusing on the business side myself.
This is my biggest project to date, and for the first time I am building large chunks of the product myself in Bubble. The amazing thing is that I alone work quicker than a team of 3 developers I’ve worked with in other projects – on the other hand, going for Bubble long-term is a leap of faith. I personally am ready to take that leap, from what I’ve seen so far.

After all, what good are your coding skills if you can’t market your app/service properly?

I see your point, but this could really be turned around in any way; what good is proper marketing, if you can’t build a decent product? For me, this boils down to focusing on what you are good at and what you enjoy doing; keep doing that. If marketing is your thing, you’ll find good developers. If coding is your thing, you can hire a great marketing guy. If you care mostly about coaching and leadership and are not technical – hell, I’ve seen people build great tech companies that way too.

This was long and rambling, I know, and not sure I answered your question really. But I felt like jotting it down :slight_smile:

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Hello there,

As I´ve learned to use Bubble, we´ve seen that it´s really powerful in terms of functionalities but it´s really really slow once you´ve deployed the app.

We´re in mayor concerns about this situation since we´ve seen other platforms that are hard coded run really really fast compared with what we achieved in Bubble. And the problem is that it´s not getting faster since we´ve developed, and it´s been 7 months already.

So at this point I think you can deploy something great with Bubble, but if it´s an app that users are going to use everyday and needs to be fast while using it we´re thinking about other possibilities.

Of course you´ve the chance to move to a dedicated server but it´s really expensive at this point.

Anyway it really depends on your needs. Bubble is awesome and the team behind the service are great but for us it lacks on performance.

Hope this helps.

Cheers.

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@ryanck Great write up. Quick question- Are you running your application on a dedicated instance of Bubble?

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The way I would think about is to use analogy.

Take video games - especially first person shooters.

They were typically coded from the ground up -but along came Unity then everyone could make a first person shooter. It eventually expanded and became fast and smooth so now everyone makes games with the Unity platform. I see bubble going the same way - it becomes the standard for app development.

So for learning I would shoot for what meets your needs today and in the near term. Is your need to build and validate a business? If so go bubble. For me bubble meets my needs and if people are screaming that it’s slow - all the better validation of the need for what I’m working on :slight_smile:

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I believe we will see the emergence of an arcihtectural stack for #nocode.

Bubble / Webtask.io / Zapier currently does pretty much what I need. And it does require Node.js “coding” for my Webtask microservices.

I think eventually Bubble will let us code our own microservices that run internally rather than extternally.

Something like NPM within Bubble, where you can installl and call modules would vastly increase the potential, and much quicker than waiting for E&J to build the function natively.

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Hi there,

Nope. That would be awesome since people say that it´s faster but I don´t know how faster it could be and for now it´s really expensive for us to try it out.

We come from other platform named Knack and I can tell you that loading tables or lists is so much faster on Knack. But Bubble is more reliable, more functional, etc.

We´re happy with Bubble, the problem is that our users require more performance than features and that´s something that I agree with them. So we´re figuring out which direction we should take.

Have nice day guys.

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Definitely agree - it’s a tradeoff - what kind of app did you make?

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It’s a pre-ordering app for my school’s cafeteria. Lines tend to get extremely long at our school (up to 20+ people queued, it’s ridiculous), so the app aims to solve this by shifting the ordering / preparation stage during the food stalls’ downtime.

The students only have to show up and pick up their food at the counter (should take about 10 seconds)

I’ll soon be porting this to iOS’ app store! Makes for some good side income for a student

Hopefully everything works out tech-wise once I release this full scale at my school (around 3k students), and when I expand into other schools which also experience this infrastructural burden

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Awesome - that’s a great problem to solve and I’m sure other schools have that problem as well so it’s a good problem to solve. I wonder if corporate cafeterias also have that problem - seems they would.

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I agree with the speed issue, but I also think its not just Bubble. Some plugins are very slow (like the SelectPDF) which I’m not sure is on the Bubble side. Also, optimizing the data structure also helped for me. Don’t do ‘search for’ all the time.

Having said that, I think performance can indeed be improved upon. But I think that is top of the Bubble list if I look back at the end of year email they sent out.

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I use “search” for extensively but the way I limit it is on the display side where I only show a maximum of 3 rows of data at stone on desktop and 1 on mobile. This conscious front end decision makes it speedy enough for my app. So that would be something to consider in the app design as well.

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If there are still only 2-5 people working on Bubble, then that’s a bit scary. Bubble was started in 2012 and whilst there seems to always be an impressive amount of new features coming out weekly, I would’ve hoped by now they would have hired a dozen engineers to make the product even better. That would be my only complaint :smiley:

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