Ask HN: Why isn’t visual programming a bigger thing?
Story time (and a post-mortem of sorts): a long time ago I built a startup using Visual Programming for algorithmic trading.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;on-kloudtrader-and-visual-programming-5161e1e2b89f" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;on-kloudtrader-and-visual-programming...</a><p>It wasn&#x27;t the most novel idea or anything but most existing systems were either clunky, expensive, or had UIs from the previous century. Ours was a hip SaaS inspired by Robin Hood, Bubble.is, and all the new Bloomberg terminal clones. We built an initial prototype using Google Blockly, did a ton of UI&#x2F;UX research (studied every visual programming system from Sutherland&#x27;s Sketchpad, to the Soviet DRAKON, to modern day MindStorms, Scratch, and the various PLC control systems and LabView derivatives) and slowly built out the rest of the algorithmic trading stack. It was tremendously difficult mainly because of lack of labor, our small startup only had 3 people. We were essentially translating by hand entire trading frameworks, backtesting tooling, and blotters into virtual Lego bricks. It was my first startup and I was inexperienced. We were fresh faced and between trying to raise funding, sales and marketing, product development, progress was slow. Patio11&#x27;s (Kalzumeus) blog posts on Stockfighter were highly inspirational and we saw what they managed with only a small team and we tried to replicate. But between Patrick and the Ptaceks, they had several decades more engineering and business experience than us, something we completely discounted. The tooling around Google&#x27;s visual programming system was like early Android development, works in theory but tremendously difficult to use. Microsoft&#x27;s Makecode (which is also built on Blockly) had a magnitude more engineering manpower than us. Visual programming was not easy to build quickly — a production quality system wasn&#x27;t something that you can clone in a weekend. We looked towards automation, around the same time, a code synthesis YC company called Optic appeared and we strongly considered leveraging them to allow us to build out faster.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17560059" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17560059</a><p>However, a couple months later, YC funded a similar company called Mudrex who had a prettier UI and a founding team with a stronger fintech track record.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19347443" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19347443</a><p>At that point we crossed the rubicon and pivoted to DevOps&#x2F;PaaS, launching a Heroku-style product.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;KloudTrader.com&#x2F;Narwhal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;KloudTrader.com&#x2F;Narwhal</a><p>Did the whole tour of Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, KVM etc. Built out our own cloud almost from scratch. Signed a contract with a broker to offer comission-free trading and everything. But it was a difficult product to sell in a crowded enterprise market with only a few (but big) customers and we were playing catch-up with companies like Alpaca, our product was being eaten from the corners by new features launched by companies like Quantopian and Quantconnect. Quantopian was where I cut my teeth on computational finance and automated trading, it was what inspired me to build a fintech startup in the first place, so in many aspects, our product being displaced was a validation of product-market fit if nothing else. In retrospect, at that time we should have switched to the ML Ops market instead, which is booming right now. Algorithmic trading, or at least the consumer focused variety that we were trying to sell, had a stack that is very similar to your usual ML stacks. In the two years I learnt about enterprise sales, the various shenanigans involved in FINRA, SEC compliance, and was tremendously valuable in terms of growth.<p>These days however we are mainly doing productivity software for voiceovers and transcriptions with a bit of ML thrown in (voice cloning research). Fast growth, easy traction, great market. Not as lucrative as fintech, or at least a lower ceiling, but at our current rate of growth I am certainly not complaining. It is hosted mainly on Google Cloud, AWS, and other providers (after having to build our own Heroku we have had enough of DevOps)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;narrationbox.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;narrationbox.com</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;narrationbox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;narrationbox</a><p>If you are looking for advice or suggestions on building your own visual programming systems, I am available for consulting services.<p>(On second thought I should probably turn this comment into a Medium post)