Szymon Kaliski

Reusable Code Components for Glide

Glide ↗ is a no-code platform which allows end-users to build custom applications from spreadsheets. The users start with providing their data, and then assemble the application from a set of available high-level components. The problem here is, that when the use-case doesn't neatly fit into one of the existing components, there's nothing that can be done — the system is closed, and can't be extended by end-users.

The focus of this research project was prototyping a UI-builder that fits into Glide's aesthetics, and provides a way to edit, and re-use, the visual components available in the system.

The project is document with a long write-up at the Glide research page ↗, and below you'll find some more thoughts (and a demo video!) originally published in Q3 2022 newsletter.

Transcluded from Research at Glide

Glide ↗ is a no-code tool for building mobile and web applications from spreadsheets — you provide your own data, choose how to render it from a set of high-fidelity components, and you can get to a working application in minutes. This incredible convenience comes at a cost, of course — if you need something outside the set of pre-made components, you are pretty much at Glide's mercy to make new one for you.

The main goal of the project was to prototype a possible future in which technical Glide users have more freedom in how their apps look and behave, while still keeping the convenience of easily assembling ready-made parts. We followed the intuition that at some level, some code, is ok — and the main question is how it's being packaged and composed into bigger wholes, and re-used at different levels of abstraction.

Below you can find a short narrated walkthrough of the prototype that we've built, to give you some sense of what we've made:

There are a couple of things here that I'm excited about:

• creating a space for local developers (after Bonnie Nardi) — power-users who are comfortable working with small pieces of HTML/CSS/JS, and/or assembling complex graphs for other users to re-use
• using the exact same components through nesting in the layout tree, and inside other graphs
• the semantics of multiple inputs and outputs which allow creating components with custom configuration UIs, and packaging related functionalities together
• this is already a part of Glide, but worth repeating ad nauseam: working with real data inside a live system — the changes that you make to your data tables, to your logic, or visual components refresh live and are always visible — you never have to simulate a computer in your head to figure out what values flow through the system

I know that Glide is actively hiring, and if that sounds interesting, feel free to reach out to them directly ↗ or let me know if you want an intro!

Backlinks

1. 2024-05-17Live-Programming Issues¹
2. 2023-04-03Joining Replit, and musings from the Job Hunt¹