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Thursday was an exciting day for our team at Superblocks as we launched on Hacker News.
After we posted around noon, we were pleasantly surprised to watch as engagement from the HN community boosted our post to the front page within about an hour, eventually reaching the #1 spot.
Although maintaining the #1 spot proved difficult, the hours we spent on the front page drove 1,000s of developers to www.superblocks.com and tons of candid feedback from the community.
As a company, we listen intently to all feedback - good, bad, ugly. HN is a community that specializes in 2 out of 3 of those types of feedback :)
Since our product roadmap is driven by the pain we hear from developers first-hand, we thought it would be helpful to summarize the feedback -- both positive and negative -- to show how it will inform the direction of Superblocks moving forward.
Feedback #1: Tooling consolidation increases efficiency
Nimsical, an existing customer, spoke about the efficiency gains across an engineering team when consolidation takes place in Superblocks. This was certainly positive feedback, but this story inspired us to think of new ways to further the value to customers around consolidation.
Action: Add more programming languages and more building blocks outside of Apps, Workflows, and Scheduled Jobs. We noticed another comment about RPA (robotic process automation) to make web scraping and web form-filling simpler, which could be a great next candidate.
Feedback #2: Recipes and templates are missing
phoenixbox called out that Superblocks needs more templates to accelerate tooling development further, especially on the App Builder.
Action: Add use-case specific templates like “Postgres Admin,” “Deployment Monitoring,” “Credit Card Management,” “Insurance Claims Management,” and provide users the ability to modify in-app to accelerate development.
Feedback #3: Vendor lock-in risk is a barrier to adoption
edf13 shared hesitation around vendor lock-in with tools of this nature. As developers ourselves, we thought about this deeply when building the product and agree that the ability to extend, export and leave without a major cost is important. We’ve taken some steps by making our self-hosted agent extensible and source available.
Action: Enable exporting of app definitions to manage as code with your own CI/CD process and git repo (already in the works). Brainstorm the best way to export as code so you can maintain a functional app off the platform. We researched and found that Webflow has an interesting code export capability for static websites which could work similarly in Superblocks.
Feedback #4: Custom components to replace React-based tools
a24white, a current Superblocks customer, mentioned they use us for some internal tooling but also still have some of their own tools in React because of component re-use.
Action: Good news! We’re actively working on ways to reuse components and import your own custom components. You can sign up for the beta here.
We are incredibly thankful for the feedback from the Hacker News community and understand how difficult and rare it is to reach the #1 spot (even for a brief time). With the support of amazing users like you, we’re aiming to do it again soon – we even built this Superblocks app on startup funding that may be worthy of its own post!
Keep the feedback coming, and have fun building.
Your tools, your rules 🚀
Stay tuned for updates
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Table of Contents
Multiple authors
September 10, 2024
Announcing the Superblocks Testing SDK: Build Mission Critical Apps in Low-Code
In an environment where time-to-market is crucial, low-code platforms are game-changers, allowing developers to build full-stack applications with a fraction of the time and effort. Traditionally, low-code platforms have offered limited testing support - resulting in trading development speed for unstable applications and long, tedious manual testing cycles. As a result, developers are often disincentivized to use low-code to build complex applications and mission-critical tooling for their support and ops teams - often resulting in it never being built at all.At Superblocks, we're taking a pro-code approach to the traditional low-code setup by introducing the Superblocks Testing SDK. With this new SDK, you can easily integrate testing into your workflow, letting you confidently build resilient and complex applications. Never worry again about the stability of your mission-critical applications, just write and run tests as you build in the testing frameworks you love. When you're ready to review, just integrate your testing into your CI/CD pipelines to automatically detect regression before you deploy. Now, creating powerful applications that meet the demands of modern businesses is not just possible—it’s a breeze!
Multiple authors
July 9, 2024
Velocity Global: Leading Employer of Record provider achieves efficiencies in time to market, scale, and cost savings with Superblocks
EOR provider Velocity Global is leading the future of borderless work by helping organizations onboard global talent in more than 185 countries. The company offers a full spectrum of HR and payroll solutions, including talent acquisition, payroll administration, benefits management, and vacation time oversight, all while ensuring the highest compliance standards and strict adherence to local governmental regulations.
Multiple authors
July 2, 2024
Introducing Superblocks Multi-Page Apps: Build complex enterprise admin suites
Most enterprises depend on comprehensive, multi-functional administrative suites to support their internal workflows and critical business operations. For example, a payments-focused FinTech company might want a single application for support and ops teams to handle customer onboarding operations, underwrite customers, manage transactions, and respond to support requests.These applications typically span many pages, each serving distinct operational workflows and teams. This segmentation enhances user experience and productivity, but often results in increased maintenance burden as the application continues to grow.Although businesses often look to low-code to accelerate the development of internal tools and reduce maintenance burden, these platforms are often designed for building single-purpose applications. Consequently, end users often have to switch between different tools, limiting their ability to serve customers efficiently and effectively.
