It's funny how this area seems to attract titles like this. I used the same for my blog post, "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About SSL (but Were Afraid to Ask)"
It's a question I've asked myself too. I've also wondered how often others are being aggressively pursued by former colleagues to join them at another company. I've seen team strongly believe they hire strong candidates only, but rarely seem to pursue these same people after moving to a new company.
This comment resonates more than any other. I absolutely agree with it. A complete demarcation in my life's focus and goals before getting married and, especially, having children.
Nice looking client. I've been tipping away at a JavaFX application of late. I'm shipping with a JVM and bundling into .app/.exe distributions. Looking forward to seeing what you did to learn from it.
Yes I encountered similar issues but many of them were able to be solved.
With PDFBox I was able to deal with the content at a very low level (on a per-character basis), so that when for instance building a String, I would insert a pipe character when the distance between adjacent characters was greater than the width of the space character and then detect that when translating to a certain field.
Author here; well, PDFBox is good for simple text stripping. If I wanted to print all the text on the PDF, that would be very straightforward and not much code. However, the PDF chart here is in essence a representation of structured data. I wanted to get the content in that format so that I could both serialize to JSON plus have an SDK to boot.
A web endpoint. So think of an HTTP endpoint where the request body gets turned into the input data and the query parameters become available to be used/mapped anywhere in the pipeline. It makes the integrations pretty dynamic.
[0] Kind of. It's a filter, so "false" means "do not advance". We have different Snaps for If-Else (the Snap would have 2+ outputs and you would route to a respective "branch" of the pipeline)
[1] They denote different categories - parallelogram = READ (i.e fetch data from somewhere), square = Transform (modify existing data)
[2] For Each Issue - for each object in the specific, targeted array of incoming JSON object... (basically split the array chosen)
[3] Correct
[4] You can adjust the rotation of each output, so it could snake around. You also can drag the output of one to the input of another that are not side-by-side and it will mark them as connected, so you have layout in any way. Finally, you could split up into separate pipelines and use another Snap to tie them together.
I don't think you are being harsh - I'm not sure there is any way for a visual programming language to be both powerful enough to permit massive customizations and concise enough to be immediately readable. Some level of interpretation has to be done.
I work for SnapLogic (an enterprise visual integration product) - the "free canvas" works great for us with live preview of results/data; here's an example linking a third-party code review tool's webhooks with JIRA: https://i.imgur.com/gNr1gGD.png
All of our integrations can be converted into a API with a click of a button too.
I used to use UpShot, a OS X plugin that saved by screenshots to my Public Dropbox folder and copied the public link to the clipboard. It was super useful for referencing images in code reviews, wikis etc.
This is an area I work in [1]. Folks understandably mention IFTTT/Zapier a lot but the big players in the enterprise integration space are SnapLogic, Mulesoft, Informatica, Dell Boomi, with maybe a couple of others making noise also.
App integration is only one part of it (and arguably the easiest part) - there's also Data integration, IoT/event streaming pipelines, and integrations suitable for Big Data processing.
Enterprises naturally have quite specific demands on things like security, governance, encryption, support etc. that move things away from the free integration products, and also
I haven't seen much of Flow so far but will pay attention to it. The UX appears quite simple - it is difficult to build an effective integration product that is friendly to non-technical folks, while still being powerful enough for orchestrating complex pipelines by skilled data architects and developers.
It's a crowded space however, so getting traction may be challenging. I'm interested to seeing how they go forward with this.
