Buildingblocks.io

Since the pilot project my life was put upside down. I sold my agency and became father (twice). Little time was left to work on this project. Even worse, I started a whole bunch of other projects now I finally have the room to do what I want... In-between spending truckloads of quality time with my new family.

Professionally as a consultant, I’ve been creating a couple similar systems. As those are property of my clients, they have nothing to do with this project, but it has encouraged me to restart this project and get it to the finish line. To get this done, I need some help keeping me motivated, so today I joined indiehackers. I hope you guys can keep me on track.

One of my old agency clients contacted me to create a match-making website. This seems like a good first candidate for testing my prototype. Budget for the creating the website: €4000 time spent creating front and backend tailored to their wishes: 1 hour and a couple of hours styling and wrestling Google Maps.
Although setting up the entire website was done in just a couple of hours, the system itself needed a lot of work in both front and backend. It was clear that the scope of this open source library was just too large to do at once as a hobby project. So, I decided to first focus on getting the front-end just right.

• Income: €4000
• Expense: €500 on domain, website and some cloud resources.
• Profit: €4500

Lessons learnt: Success, but the system proved far from being mature enough to publish yet, I need to change tactics if I want to publish it for others to use.

The systems is in production for a while and we hand over our baby to a maintenance and support team. We go on to the next big thing and start some industry 4.0 project...

But all that time I kept thinking: what a waste that this magically elegant solution is hidden away in a set of bunkers. So many companies, agencies, freelancers, hobbyists could benefit from this. Is there a way to recreate something similar and open source it?

The market seems to be more and more willingly to use low-code and no-code systems, but the existing solutions still have some serious downsides. Generally, they are too expensive for small players and lack flexibility for large enterprises. So an open-source turn-key solutions that allows you to create your no-code / low-code system has the benefit of both worlds. I start some testing in my spare time to see if I can create a first prototype from scratch.

After being granted a huge military R&D budget, we hired the best UX companies, the best consultants in design and development we could find to help us come up with the “ultimate web development system”. It should be perfect for building large scale enterprise apps, unlimitedly scalable and extremely flexible. It should also be future proof or at least technology independent, we were not going to keep switch technologies every time something hot new popped up. Converting or wrapping legacy apps should be a breeze and maintenance should be as automated as possible.

In other words, software should write itself, developers are there to tell it what to write. A.I. proof anyone?

The first prototype was a big success, but the technical stability was not up to standards. It would swallow all the client’s resources in a matter of seconds, and this did not make users very happy. So, we put all our learnings into a second version. Built from the ground up and a much more elegant technical solution overall.

The ultimate (G)UI is born.