back to article MessageBird, Twilio tout low-code tools for DIY comms app plumbing

San Francisco's developer-oriented messaging infrastructure service Twilio aims to make creating communications apps a bit easier – with the launch of Twilio Studio, a visual application builder that just graduated from beta status. Not to be outdone, MessageBird, a competing cloud comms biz based in Amsterdam, has quietly …

  1. onefang
    Flame

    "Developer resources are becoming so scarce within companies,"

    Um, hire more? In particular, hire more greybeards. Ah, to hell with it, hire me, and don't be so anal about what I look like. Stop trying to hire suit models, go for brains over beauty.

    /rant

    1. Martin Gregorie

      Um hire more? In particular, hire more greybeards.

      Never going to happen as long as companies are run by MBAs, accountants and so-called 'activist investors'[1]. who wouldn't recognise talent or experience if it walked up and kicked them in the nuts.

      [1] back around 1900 these 'gentry' were known as robber barons and corporate raiders - much better names for anybody whose main aim is to syphon off money made by the hard work of other people.

      1. onefang

        "who wouldn't recognise talent or experience if it walked up and kicked them in the nuts."

        I was planning on turning up at my next job interview barefoot, wearing an old t-shirt, and cargo shorts. Think I'll try your idea to.

        1. JulieM Silver badge

          Isn't that standard issue IT wear?

          You don't want to be wearing anything that might get ruined while you're crawling about under desks following cables or repairing all the non-computer stuff that "technical" people are supposed to know about (including kitchen appliances, radios, other staff member's cars and the toilets).

          And it never hurts to be able to feel the vibrations through the floorboards, and know whether or not all the equipment in the racks is functioning correctly, at all times. If they insist for you to have s#%&s on, I recommend ISO 345-rated industrial safety boots; just in case you drop something you are carrying on your foot because you stumbled due to the loss of sensory information from being shod, which would not have happened in the first place had you been déchaussé(e) comme d'habitude.

    2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      /rant

      The techies I used to succesfully compete with for business would use the "shiny shiny" approach to selling. I would ask whether it was more important that the figures were adding up correctly, rather than whether the screen background could be customised. I still have one customer using a DOS accounts package, and another using Pegasus Mail because they do the job, even though the underlying OS conspires to disrupt people from using legacy systems.

      Nowadays I'm not competing peer to peer, as it were, effectively I'm competing with mega-corporations with the "shiny shiny" of The Cloud. "Your data is safe in The Cloud." Who are they going to believe? I've had clients telling me what they want, based on conversations they've had with The Joneses at parties.

      Peer group pressure is causing people to abandon rational thought in order to pursue the "shiny shiny" of promises that cannot be kept. "It's all right though, everyone is in the same boat" is the answer given in response to my concerns as to the efficacy of such moves.

      1. EnviableOne

        Re: "shiny shiny"

        Ahh The Apple generation, take inferior out of date tech and programming, that no-one else could seel for a couple of quid, slap an apple logo on it, advertise the hell out of it and flog it for £200.

        No-code programming, WTF employ someone proper to code something that is secure, works, uses one quater of the code, and does exactly what you want ....

        O I forgot, there arent many of them now, all we have are these young coders that wouldnt now how to invent the wheel, theyd go an use 6 librarys from other people, using one fucntion from each to kind of do what you want, but eat memory, cycles and storage, and take severeal years trying to make it work properly introducing far too many byugs.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "low-code tools"

    Remember how BASIC was going to eliminate programmers?

    Then fifth generation languages.

    "The One" program - that was going to allow you to automate your office without programming.

    As T S Eliot said in another context, "According to thy word they shall praise thee and suffer in every generation".

  3. Warm Braw

    Imagine your kids texting at 10 cents a message

    It might encourage them to edit their thoughts.

    1. onefang

      Re: Imagine your kids texting at 10 cents a message

      "It might encourage them to edit their thoughts."

      Not if daddy and mummy are paying for it.

  4. SVV

    Can't wait to see one of these in action

    Build your own application based on messaging over SMS? Wow. There will be lots of work unravelling that mess.

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