We’ve built Lowdefy to address this use case and more, check it out https://lowdefy.com
Happy to answer some questions and show you what we’ve built with Lowdefy - It’s very powerful and easy to get started with and maintain. gvw at lowdefy.com
not really. Depends on what you mean by in the framework. The plugin system allows you to create npm plugins for blocks, actions, operators, connections and even auth adapters and providers. So it’s usually as simple as creating a react component or writing a js function. with an pnpm monorepo setup, you dont even neep to publish it to pnpm to use the plugin in your project.
Could have a click to dail link just with a phone number.
What are the advantages?
Really like it!
Taking to conversation to whatsapp would also be cool for small businesses.
Emailing both parties an transcript of the conversation could be a nice +1
Good article. An additional problem I find with this, is on bigger projects, it is time consuming and frustrating when a client try to micro-track what was done per day. Not the recording of what was done, more the non-technical explanation of what it means and why its required.
I’m thinking to also charge for such reporting requests and communication, but that feels weird.
Don't feel weird. I'd even itemize the task being being requested on their invoice (e.g. "reporting requirement fulfillment"). My perspective changed on this after doing a gig for Boeing, where they charged us for invoicing them. When we complained about this, they instructed us to bill them for their invoice fee, which they explained was how their internal cost structures worked so that the accounting department could calculate their profitability. After that revelation, I stopped asking questions and just put in the contract that all reporting requirements are considered billable work (duh).
Good management means defining when success criteria are evaluated. Shorter time increments are necessary in low trust environments, or with reports who need a lot of management.
"check-ins" should be defined and negotiated in the contract. Charge the ones who want frequent check-ins extra.
We use infisical to manage 100s of secrets in our various environments. Honestly don’t know how we coped before it.. Makes it very easy especially for a team where devs jump between projects. It has a few areas which can get frustrating and they had a few bugs some time ago.. but it has been a excellent improvement in our workflow for day to day dev and deployment.
A well structured pnpm monorepo and a plugin system / architecture has made all the difference for us at Lowdefy [0].
Additionally we’ve architected a way to build complex web apps using config - not everyone’s cup of tea, but with a small team we are building a LOT of complex apps for customers. We are really happy with how this is scaling and we have all the flexibility we need on project.
The config first approach might be controversial, but have a look at the Lowdefy repo, after a few years of iterations it works well for us.
To add on as another example, I recently created a monorepo for three npm packages I publish that depend on each other (not in a circular dep way). It uses pnpm + turbo + changesets + syncpack to publish and manage the versions for cross-deps:
It’s worth adding that each customer app, is setup in its own monorepo which contains the app config and apps specific plugins. With a dependency on the main repo. Thus a updated framework version is easy to roll out to customer apps, while allowing custom components to be used where as needed.
Pretty much. But you can do a lot more. For example, we’ve built advance CRMs which share data between 5 companies, many customer portals, order management apps, ticketing systems, and even an MRP like app, as well as many BI apps.
I'm really enjoying reading through the docs and the tutorial. We've created Lowdefy, a config web-stack which makes it really simple to build quite advanced web apps. We're writing everything in YAML, but it has it's limitations, specifically when doing config type checking and IDE extensions that go beyond just YAML.
I've been looking for a way to have typed objects in the config to do config suggestions and type checking.. PKL looks like it can do this for us. And with the JSON output we might even be able to get there with minimal effort.
Is there anyone here with some PKL experience that would be willing to answer some technical questions re the use of PKL for more advanced, nested config?
I like text-based editing but found plantuml lacking in this regard, so I created my own thing. It's basically a html/css template engine with a library of (hand-drawn-ish) components. You can use it as a VSCode extension ('WireText'), featuring a live preview.
Love the indentation based DSL - this looks very intuitive.
I do a lot of quick sketches with excalidraw but I easily see wiretext-code replacing that with a better workflow where I can extract out components and prototype by composing those instead of copy pasting around.
Draw.io (freeware, cross-platform desktop app). I have used it for diagrams mainly, but also for quite a bit of UX mockups.
Its strength is diagrams though. But it is quite generic also in a way.
I find balsamiq is quite easy to get to grips with. My biggest complaint (at least for the desktop app, haven't tried the cloud version) is the lack of an "infinite" canvas.
I've used Zeplin on a few projects and it was a good experience.
> mockup does not quite get us there (not sure why)
I can only speak as a dev, but it's incredibly frustrating when design agencies leave out too many details or don't consistently follow guidelines. No tool is going to fix that.
On my side of the fence we generally don't care about the tools used as long as we have a completed design to look at that isn't late and isn't going to be pulled out from under us. I've seen product managers lie about all reviews being completed to "get devs started early" only to see the next revision break a ton of work. They also lie about copy text being final not realizing the impact even one word can have on everything. I've seen designers commit sins ranging from using system or licensed fonts causing them to have to rework an entire layout to not even exporting assets properly or at all before handing off to devs. If you have people like that, the back and forth and pain is endless for everyone.
I use Excalidraw for this kind of stuff. It has the best interface of all the tools in its class and it's easy to create diagrams/flows/mockups that peope recognise are 'in progress', but still look great.
I use excalidraw for almost everything. Brilliant tool. I already mentioned it in another response in this thread but using excalidraw inside obsidian via https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin has been a game changer for me.
Happy to answer some questions and show you what we’ve built with Lowdefy - It’s very powerful and easy to get started with and maintain. gvw at lowdefy.com