Should you buy or build tools for your business?
appsmith.comThis article is a sales pitch for a specific platform. OP seems to just be posting commercial content. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but don’t expect a balanced, technical article - this is an ad.
Over a longer time (>5yr) frame I've seen a lot of value in the Build option. Like CRM? Just buy one with a good API. Billing process? auth? Build. Annoying up-front but years later they've both shown to be cheaper and flexible than the Buy options.
Maybe the line for me is how dependant we'll be on the service, and how hard to switch? How much ownership of the feature/service does the company need now and in 10 years.
One startup I know used an auth-provider-service. It missed on some feature they needed so they had to hack a workaround and now also it's expensive.
To me the points are far simpler:
- building a personal tool means not being tied to someone else future, so a good thing, but...
- ...building in modern crapware model it's purposely hard to makes people unable to profit from computing.
In classical systems where the OS and all the rest was a single application, with user programming concept where anything is just a function, live code, developing and integrating personally was easy. In a divide et impera modern model of base system, userland, apps, even worse containers and so on ANYTHING not already made is hard and integration is substantially impossible.
So? Well, IF we can do something at home/with FLOSS that's the way to go, if not we know we have an armed bomb on our genitals. Not nice, but not other options possible so far.
I knew this would be some plug for a low code platform. Does anyone have success with low code? From my brief exposure, low code == basically coding but slower and with extreme guardrails.
The only time I made low/no code work was with the unreal engine. Kismet/Blueprints is a great way to learn the concepts of programming when code seems intimidating. The only other platform that has not been horrible is nodeRed on raspberry pis for quick qpio programming. Besides that all other tools have been horrible inefficient (it would have been way faster to just code it)
If you have the money but not the time, buy the tools
If you have the time but not the money, build your tools
If you have both, hire someone to build them
If you lack both, there are other priorities than tools
Do what is sensible for your particular situation.
It depends.