Nimsical
Joined 14 years ago
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410
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145
Member since
Sep 10
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
Unclear to me how much of the negative perspective of this is because of her gender. Media has a bias against female leaders. The fact that they don't put the whole email in there is concerning as well.
E.g. Stripe had a similar tone in that they basically wanted to maintain their margins but didn't get anything close to this type of negative coverage. No MLK quotes though
Comment · 4 years ago
This is cool and in some world where the company becomes massive and basically commit to properly maintaining the product I could see it being a player.
I'm skeptical of open-sourcing UI and workflow builders.
The upsides are that you enable a community to build connectors and the UI builder + maintain them, but the downside is that you have to manage the community well enough that enterprises can trust the connectors and the UI builder. The challenge of maintaining the community + maintaining some sort of an SLA is very hard. This type of software is extremely hard to test for –writing integration tests are much harder for the frontend than they are for something like a database (e.g. MongoDB) because of the permutations of use-cases). The OSS+managed model seems to have succeeded in areas where very you can regression tests are much easier to maintain and there are clear benchmarks to test the community's output against.
As a buyer (we recently bought SuperBlocks (https://www.superblocks.com/) which is just a managed version of the same idea) it's hard to commit to an open-source version of something like this given the problems above. I may be totally wrong – I've never run an OSS+managed business, and as much as I love the ethos, I still have to not care about the stability of an internal tool builder that my company is being built on top of.
Comment · 4 years ago
[Disclaimer: my company is using Superblocks and have been paying for it for about a year]
Been reading the comments and I think there are a bunch of questions about why companies would use a tool like this and that integrating your product / company into it is potentially risky. Here's why we decided to use it.
First thing you should know is that before we moved to Superblocks, we were using a combination of Retool, Google Cloud Scheduler, Mode Analytics, and a few small Google App Engine apps to solve our problems.
There is a whole ecosystem of apps and mini-products our engineering team has to build which require slow-paced maintenance, but are still mission critical to our business. Analytics dashboards, Slack reporters, revenue dashboards, customer service dashboards, Discord bots, etc.
There are plenty of different tools which solve some of those problems in silo, but the main problem (and beauty) of building internal apps is that you can fully solve for your unique business problem. We're a tech-enabled advertising agency (there are a handful of companies like ours in the world) and we both have our own external product as well as a series of internal apps that power our operations.
We decided to move all our internal apps to Superblocks effectively because we could merge a few different platform layer things (Google Cloud Scheduler, App Engine, Mode, Retool) and be able to build much faster within our team. The big thing for us was that we have engineers writing in Python (more data heavy stuff), and engineers writing Javascript. Previously, we had to have them offer APIs to each other and it wasn't as agile as it is today for simple things we had to build for our business stakeholders.
I remember seeing one of our first Workflows on Superblocks when our data scientist built a BigQuery step, a Python step, and then our Javascript engineers grabbing that to do some post-processing with it to display the data and thinking "this is probably how most tiny apps will get built in the future".
I don't want to have infrastructure for every tiny solution I built for our team. I just want things to work.
Comment · 4 years ago
I've been using Superblocks (https://superblockshq.com/) to do this.
I'm generally a fan of reducing complexity for building internal tools. We used to use Retool with a combination of Google's App Engine, Google Cloud Scheduler, and Mode Analytics to support our internal teams but we consolidated all of it under Superblocks.
They have charts, you can build backend functions (and call them on a schedule!), and you can build a UI just like you can with Retool (they have feature parity in most areas with Retool on the UI side).
The best part has been that they support Javascript and Python at the same time, which has let our data and engineering teams live in the same eco system and work together to build internal data tools for our team members.
Huge fan!
Comment · 5 years ago
Based on this data (someone else shared in another thread): https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware – the numbers shared in the link on this post are misleading.
Looks like the sample size has some bias built into it given the data is from those who use their performance software. I would trust the numbers from Firefox much more (higher scale, much more ubiquitous product).
Comment · 6 years ago
On 1: this is because they've done a great job with partnerships. Cerkly's corporation set-up becomes free if you sign up with FRB – this was a YC deal we used. So this doesn't mean much.
2. I recognize that this is generally a hard job. Our original product/company was along the same lines as Wirecutter (https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ask-suto-launch/) and it's an extremely tough path to take. I do feel that it's easier for businesses since the value-props/features are a lot more distinct in how businesses make decisions.
Comment · 6 years ago
Looking at your "The Best Store of Money" – I'm baffled that First Republic Bank even made the list. We're in the process of switching away from them because of how broken their web interfaces are, and how hard it is to connect them to other tools which makes it hard for our accounting team to automated their work.
I think you really need to do a lot more interviews with people that have been users of these products.
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