October 2015 Summaries

The author created a Twitter clone called NotRealTwitter (NRT) using Bubble to demonstrate its power. Before starting, they figured out the app's structure, which consisted of four main pages: index, home, profile, and notifications. The database was structured with data types such as Tweet, User, and Image, each with their respective fields. For UI elements, the author used conditional formatting, screenshots, and custom states to achieve a similar look and feel to Twitter's buttons and page layout. The app included features like creating tweets, notifications for follow/favorite/retweet actions, and displaying unread notifications. The workflows were created using Bubble's visual interface, allowing for dynamic content and interactions between elements.

We were invited to present Bubble at the Harvard Innovation Lab. We built an app during the first 20 minutes and answered questions for the remaining hour. Bubble is a leader in the no-code movement, offering a powerful point-and-click web editor and hosting platform that allows users to build fully customizable web applications and workflows. Over 350,000 users have found success building and launching businesses on Bubble, with many going on to participate in top accelerator programs and even securing venture funding. The company has created a strong community of builders and entrepreneurs united by the belief that everyone should be able to create technology.

Kollecto is a web app designed to help people become art collectors by providing affordable access to their own personal art buyer. The founder, who has experience in product marketing and had previously worked at Microsoft, Microsoft Foursquare, built the initial version of Kollecto without writing any code, leveraging various tools such as Bubble, Strikingly, Typeform, Email, Plasso, Stripe, and Paypal to operate a business with operational costs under $600 per month. The app quickly gained popularity, reaching over 400 active users and $30k in art sales before being accepted into the 500 Startups Accelerator. However, as user growth increased, the founder realized that relying on human labor was unsustainable, leading to a transition to using Bubble, which enabled the development of a fully functioning app with an integrated art-matching algorithm.

Measuring programmer output based on lines of code written is a flawed approach, as it fails to account for the true cost and value of coding. Writing code is a necessary evil that requires significant upfront time investment, but its full cost is revealed when maintenance and compatibility issues arise. The goal of programming should be to accomplish goals efficiently with minimal code, making programmer skill, language choice, and tool usage crucial factors in achieving this objective. A company like Bubble aims to minimize the amount of code required for users to build their products and apps, pushing the limits of what is possible while striving for "no more code".