DEV Community: Andrew Pierno

Code Generation

Andrew Pierno — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 14:17:24 +0000

Building a new application is a lot like building a new house. You need things you’ve built many times. Walls, plumbing, a roof. The walls are made of wood, then drywall. The pipes are plastic. You did more or less this same work on the last house, but this is a new one, so you do it all over again.

How many times have you built an authentication layer?

How many hours have you spent building CRUD APIs just to get stuff into and out of a database?

If you’ve been writing code long enough, the answer should be too many. Too many hours wasted on writing plumbing code. Too many hours wasted building commodity features like authentication.

In recent years, #nocode has been making its way into the lexicon. It’s a great choice for many non-technical founders to get their idea off the ground, and raise a bit of cash. I think over time it will be perfectly reasonable for a “tech” company to not have any developers.

That being said, the most common way to build an application is writing code.

But why are we doing the same thing over and over again? We know what our rest API is going to look like just by looking at the spec, or listening to a customer explain it to us in 5 minutes. Why not generate the code?

I think we're in the early days of code generation. Even no-code tools at some level generate code. The code they generate may not be human readable, but somewhere those drag and drop components are being translated into html and javascript.
NoCo is a code generator. We make it simple to build a NodeJS REST API and export the code to GitHub. If you're looking to get a jump start on your next project, give it a try for free at https://app.noco.io.

Code Trends 0.0.4

Andrew Pierno — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:17:07 +0000

The coolest thing I’ve found this week is IPTV. Literally 8000 public tv channels you can watch through your browser.

I’m working on a security camera solution and found a distributed sql
lite. I love the idea of raft consensus between smart cameras. State syncing, updating, etc. You could make an api call to one camera and update all of them.

An awesome-list of self hosted apps

Face rec (and other face ml things) in the browser. Yes it’s JS, yes it’s slow, but the cheapest machine to offload work to in the world
is the browser.

Fun. Spotify in your terminal

Want this in your inbox?

Hugs,

Code Trends 0.0.3

Andrew Pierno — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 15:15:23 +0000

Code Trends 0.0.3 — When code gets political

Given the events of this week, and without being tone deaf to the #blm movement, I want to acknowledge that code is not neutral, and we as a technology industry have a long way to go.

What happens when code get’s politicized 🤷‍♀️? Code is not neutral. Much like bias in machine learning, voting with what code does is not a neutral act. Github is used by many people around the world. However, most of the repos you encounter have READMEs in English. This is changing. Have you been coming across more and more foreign language repos? I have, and though I can’t read them yet, this is a good thing.

Native english speakers forget that from c to javascript, you’re mostly writing english. What does it say to a young eastern student that to learn to code, you must learn some english. English is a western language. Is code a western thing? What would make it more eastern? Yes, of course part of the answer is the problem you choose to solve with code, but acknowledge that this is not neutral territory. This is not a blank piece of canvas waiting to be painted on, there are rules written by mostly white people.

What kind of world do we want to build? Those of us who can write code have a unique skill to directly change the path of humanity. So what does it say when the top golang repo this week is titled **police-brutality?**

These are reasonable questions to ask at an inflammatory time. What can you work on to make real change? What will your dent in the universe be? Perhaps putting a dent in the universe is no longer the lofty kind of idealism we need in Silicon Valley, and beyond. The universe implies unity, the dent implies damage. We do not see unity, and we do not need any more damage. We see division, racism, and the very people sworn to protect us wearing riot gear and pepper spraying children among many other egregious acts.

So let’s not pretend everything is okay, let’s write code that does not aim to put a dent in the universe, but instead, aims to patch the holes in people’s hearts.

P.S. If do not agree that Black Lives Matter, please, for the love of whatever god you pray to, unsubscribe.

Open Source Material UI React Component Builder

Andrew Pierno — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 13:30:42 +0000

Hi everyone,

Today I open sourced part of a nocode web app builder I made. This is just the core drag and drop component builder. I struggled for the past year to get the nocode web app builder off the ground and so am chopping it for parts and open sourcing them to see if there's interest.

It's on Product Hunt today, if you have a few minutes to vote :)

It works like you'd expect it to if you're familiar with material ui.

Live Demo

Drag and drop material ui components on to the page. you can even style them!

Toggle between the elemets, the editor, and a tree view

Click the code tab when you're ready. Your scaffold awaits!

Hope this saves a little time for you on your next React/Material UI project!

Hugs,

Code Trends 0.0.1

Andrew Pierno — Sun, 24 May 2020 21:13:12 +0000

Welcome to the first edition of code trends. I’m going to give you the rundown on the most popular repos this week to keep you sharp, so you can pretend to understand what that new hire is talking about. Or maybe it’ll spark your next big idea. Let’s get to it.

State of Machine Learning. 🤗 Huggingface is still crushing it with their NLP models and open source code. If this name is new to you, I urge you take a look. They have a ton of great off the shelf models.

Republic of Javascript. A new state management library from Facebook called Recoil. The only benefit I can see from this is that it’s from Facebook, creators of React, and looks extremely well thought out. If you’re a hardcore React fan, it’s also going to be compatible with Concurrent Mode . That being said, popping this sucker into your ugly legacy app isn’t going to fix it.

WebRTC on the rise. Looking to build a video conferencing solution but ffmpeg and gstreamer make you want to run? MediaSoup is a newcomer on the trending list helping you build the video conferencing solution of your dreams.

Department of Getting More Smart And More Better

Torture yourself with these algorithms in C++ and these ones in C and these ones in Python. As long as employers keep pretending this matters, it will always be popular to have a repo of well documented algos.
🤷‍♀️ Lots of people want to learn Go.
Rust is awesome

Random

Spin up your own GraphQL IDE.
Another IOT big data platform blah blah blah
There’s still room in e-commerce.
Do you spend a lot of time drawing engineering plans? First, I’m sorry, second, maybe this will help.

If you have any suggestions or haterade, yell at me on twitter (https://twitter.com/AndrewPierno).

[I'm running a content experiment. For the next 10 weeks I'm going to do a once a week newsletter on trending open source software. If you find this valuable I'd love a subscribe. If I don't get to 100 people in the next 10 weeks, I'll kill the experiment.]

Hugs,

Looking for a JS job in LA?

Andrew Pierno — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 15:50:07 +0000

Hi Everyone,

I'm Andrew, CTO of a computer vision startup in LA. I've been helping a few friends source great JS devs for their companies and am now looking to help a few others outside my network.

If you're great at React, Vue, React Native, or Nodejs and are looking for a job in LA, I'd love to speak to you.

https://airtable.com/shrNyhuFLfsC0pSaU

Thanks,

Andrew

NoCode Accelerator (alpha)

Andrew Pierno — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:11:24 +0000

Hi Everyone,

I'm excited to announce we're going to do an alpha run of our no-code accelerator. We're going to select 5 companies and help them:

build their product
launch their product
raise money (or make money) depending on the goals.

What it entails:

8-week program
Meet virtually every week
We'll help you build your product
We'll help you validate your idea
We'll help you find funding if/when you're ready
We won't be charging for this in any way.

Requirements:

some work you've done to validate the idea and the market
you work on sales and marketing as hard as we do on your product for the entire 8 weeks.
I'd like to get this started in Feb, but I'm more focused on getting the right people together.

Why I'm doing this:

I don't know where this will lead to. Perhaps raising a fund, perhaps not, but the best way to find out is to give it a try.
I need NoCo.io to get beat up a little bit so that the product can evolve (or be killed)

Apply Here:

https://k8ty.typeform.com/to/QeJhfQ

Goats On A Map (no-code tutorial + free template)

Andrew Pierno — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 16:40:01 +0000

No-Code Google Maps

Hi everyone, I'm Andrew, and I'm building NoCo. It's a no-code development platform. We're just getting started so if you have any thoughts on other tutorials or are trying to build something, let me know!

Our latest feature is Google Maps. You can put custom icons, cluster icons, and create a custom pop up when an item is clicked on all without code. Your users can sign up and add goats to the map and they will appear on the unauthenticated home page.

You can view a demo here

Let's kick it off with the map component. In NoCo, you can choose custom markers, cluster elements, and add a custom info window.

You can also set the center, and tie it to a data model so users could upload coordinates and you could display them on a map. Now, in reality, this mapping feature would probably be used in a larger scope such as a field agent recording data on a car accident and geo-stamping their activity automatically. It's easy to think of more complicated use cases but just for show, we're going to stick with putting goats on a map.

Let's just briefly go over the data model for this application. It's very simple, with only one data model in addition to the users table (that comes out of the box). We don't have to do anything with the user model for this app.

If you notice on the right hand side, there's a lat and lng field. They're both of a data type called "float". Essentially we need to tell the database that a number like -118.199997 shouldn't be trimmed to -118. That's what the Float field type does.

That was probably the most complicated part, so congrats. You're well on your way to understanding Goats on A Map.

The next section lets authenticated users add a goat to the map.

No secrets here. Users can add the name, lat, lng, and upload a photo, and it will appear on the map.

The point of this template is to get you up and running with mapping on NoCo quickly. You can clone this template for free, just head over to https://app.noco.io to sign up and clone this template.

An Open Source Sci-Fi Novel (Chapter 1)

Andrew Pierno — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 15:20:15 +0000

Whenever I embark on a new project (a sizeable one), I find I also need a complimentary creative project that has nothing to do with "work". After many landing page launches, I've settled on a company to do, and a book to write.

I thought it would be fun/scary to open up the writing process and put it on GitHub.

I realize the inbound garbage I'm opening myself up to. So be it.

I've just put up a draft of the first chapter here. I'll be curious to see what people file as issues on GitHub.

Looking for angel investors?

Andrew Pierno — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 18:29:05 +0000

Hi Everyone,

In my day job, I've been around VCs for the past 4 years. I think it's too easy to get stuck in the perspective of a startup looking for funding and all the difficulties therein. The reality is, finding high-quality investments is hard for them too.

So, I decided to put together a free microsite focused on matching companies with investors. I'd love to have your startup on there if you're looking to find investors or have any feedback!

https://firstmoney.tech/

Thanks,

Andrew

6 Alternatives To Freelancing For Engineers

Andrew Pierno — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 16:05:50 +0000

Almost every engineer I know has dabbled in freelancing. It's a bit like a drug. Easy to get started. The extra cash can be kind of addicting. Irritability after you stop and you're back to your regular salary.
Let's explore some other ways of making money as an engineer without trading time for money.

1. Create A Course

Time to monetization: Short
This is by far my least favorite. There's a lot of people doing this, it's too easy to get started. There are services that are helpful though such as https://gumroad.com/ that will do most of the heavy development for you so you can get started right away. You'll have to do most of the marketing yourself but you'll be able to just focus on the course creation and your brand

2. Sell Code

Time to monetization: Short
Instead of starting a company, or building a product, you could make a useful module, component, npm package, theme, or any piece of software and sell it on SugarKubes. You can write and keep your code on GitHub and monetize a private GitHub repo directly.

3. Sell an API

Time to monetization: Medium
Through a site like Rapid API you could write a lambda or a backend and start monetizing it right away. They have a ton of APIs to choose from so make sure you find some open space to insert your product and get started very quickly.

4. Sell an AMI on Amazon Marketplace

Time to monetization: Medium
If your project is more involved than just an API, you might want to consider selling a pre-packaged machine image on Amazon's marketplace. You'll be able to add hourly fees for running the machines on top of what AWS charges for compute and it charges your customers directly from their existing AWS account so they don't have to set up an extra billing site. I haven't been able to get a hard number from Amazon upon request for exactly how much these AMIs drive revenue for the sellers but my suspicion is that it's relatively new and underutilized. The upside is that when people turn these things on, they either forget they're on or get so used to the convenience it's easy to just keep using them.

5. Create A Product

Time to monetization: Long
Obviously, this is the hardest one. If you're going to go this route, perhaps try a no-code version first. As developers, we're far to trigger happy to pop open an empty text editor and start everything from scratch.

6. Advising

Time to monetization: Long
This is a good deal if you can find it. You're going to have a difficult time sourcing projects early enough. By the time the company has taken institutional seed money, you're going to have to jump through more hoops to reach the founders and prove to them it's worth their time to take your call. If you haven't had an exit, or haven't advised before, I'd recommend getting to know a few founders and just making yourself indispensable as an advisor. The good news is that many institutional investors don't spend a ton of time on each company. While it's true that they're time and connections can provide immensely helpful, there is still a plethora of work that requires good ole' fashion elbow grease. Start with those tasks and it will be easy to be a value-add advisor not taking a salary and not asking for any equity yet. If the company starts to grow and starts to raise their initial seed round, at that point you've earned the ask to continue to be an advisor.

Bonus: Investing

Time to monetization: Long
Expect time horizons in the 6 to 10 year range. Companies are staying private longer and are thus not liquid for longer. There are ways to free up cash like https://equityzen.com but of course, you'll have to get approval from the founders, or the board, and good luck with that. Most companies don't want a cluttered cap table. It can confuse and annoy future investors. A messy cap table may impact a company's ability to raise in the future.

How To Monetize Private GitHub Repos

Andrew Pierno — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 01:35:08 +0000

I've written a ton of code, and have had a ton of projects that never went anywhere. Some of them were full end-to-end products that never got off the ground for one reason or another. They were a ton of effort and I thought it would be great to be able to monetize those somehow.

6 months ago I created SugarKubes to empower indie developers to make a living writing great code. It didn't work. I think part of the problem was that the old SugarKubes made people upload their code to our GitLab instance. It was also an experiment in a managed marketplace wherein the company created all the containers and code for sale.

I decided to simplify SugarKubes to allow anyone to easily sell a private Github repo. You just log in, set up your project, and will get a simple URL you can embed or send people to purchase access or a subscription to your project on GitHub.

If you're interested in getting started, feel free to hit me up on the chat at SugarKubes

Hugs,