Day 519: 10x engineers

Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc. | Hacker Newshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408

One guy, in 7 weeks, built a platform for building and deploying custom internal tools.

Not only that, but he built a clean marketing site along with comprehensive documentation.

I played around with the tool out of curiosity since all no-code platforms have to solve similar design challenges around balancing ease-of-use and flexibility, and boy, was it impressive.

I had a similar experience the other day when playing around with extension.dev — it’s a fully-featured platform for building and deploying internal Chrome extensions, and I was struck by just how well everything had been built. Especially having spent the last two years building browser extensions, I’m intimately familiar with many of the challenges in providing a great user experience and they’ve worked through them beautifully. It’s inspiring.

I consider myself a decent engineer — not bad but not great. I’m the chocolate chip cookie that gets the job done but not the one you fantasize about when the sugar craving hits. I’m proud of the code I’ve written and the ways I’ve designed things, but in terms of raw engineering ability, I am neither the fastest nor the brightest. That’s perfectly fine because you can do well without being the absolute best, but it does make one thing clear to me: Engineering superiority won’t be my competitive advantage, at least until I hire people much smarter than me. There are engineers out there who would be able to create a clone of Browserflow in a fraction of the time that I’ve taken to build it, and that means that I’ll have to work on differentiating the product through other means. Better marketing, better support, better documentation, better community, etc.

I’ve been focusing entirely on the technology side of things for a long time, and now it’s time for everything else.