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by bloudermilk 2235 days ago
This is a great concept! I'm not surprised to see you getting flak for building on Airtable, but as a "real developer" leaning heavily on low/no code lately I wanted to share how well it's worked for our open source team over the last few months.

In terms of scale, it has supported dozens of editors, hundreds of public submissions, and several thousand rows of data. We have also successfully scripted a number of use cases using the API for workflows that can be automated.

The biggest benefits from my perspective are:

1. Minimal overhead for schema changes. We have been able to overhaul our schema on more than one occasion with no intervention from developers up front. We let the content team shape the data in a way that makes sense then update our client code to fit

2. The UI is obvious to technical and non-technical users alike. Who doesn't know how to use a spreadsheet?

3. No-code workflows are trivial to prototype and launch with blocks and forms.

Is it going to work forever? No, we're already moving the more stable+dynamic tables into a SQL database. But I'm sure that we've saved dozens if not hundreds of hours of time in our frequent iterations these first few months. I'm sure we'll keep using Airtable for new features.

[0]: https://climatescape.org/ [1]: https://github.com/climatescape/climatescape.org

1 comments

lol "real developer." I was the Director of Engineering for Bump, a YCW18 company. I've run mobile teams as well. I just wanted to mix two tools together, no need to hop into who's real and who's not a real developer here.

If you want more: https://linkedin.com/in/zackshapiro

You realise that GP's "real developer" wasn't a challenge to your pride, yes? It wasn't to denigrate you or your skills, just to give context for the remainder of their own post about their own experiences — as an experienced developer using tools that may not necessarily be aimed at experienced developers.
I still don't see why he said "real developer" and not "developer"
By the context it's clearly in response to others giving OP flak. That's why he put "real developer" in quotes, as a dig at anyone who might presume a "real developer" would have no use for this kind of solution.
To make much more explicit the differentiation between traditional developers, using programming languages, and the sorts of people at which things like PowerApps, Google App Maker, or this AirTable are aimed — usually more database-y, business/data analyst types.

(Not to say developers don't use them as well, of course they do.)

Apologies if I wasn't clear, but I was trying to defend you not offend you. In my experience, a lot of people hate on Airtable for being a toy, but I've had a great experience with it. I really like what you built!
bit of a hack