Hello everyone, I am the developer of Orange List, my friends call me "Orange Man", thinking about the fact that after 70 years, I am still working as a frontline developer, that's really old enough. In recent years, I've been publicizing our products in the technical community, and I've been lucky enough to meet a few industry leaders, we often have some technical exchanges, and many of our difficult problems have been elegantly solved.
Options after failure
Before doing Orange Sheet, I had experienced two successive business failures, the first one was that I had a product with no sales, and the second one was that I had a market but the R&D cycle was too long, so I finally chose to give up. Now I think about it, it should be because I did not familiar with the industry products, so when encountered major difficulties, they do not dare to fight. But fortunately, after all, no debt, but also gained a lot of valuable experience value.
The team was lucky enough not to be disbanded, but rather to become more and more courageous, and it wasn't long before we made up our mind to develop a product that really suited our needs, the "low-code fast-opening platform".
Why? First of all, the team members are all frontline developers with 20+ years of experience, so it must be true love if they can last this long. Another reason is that we have just experienced a painful lesson that indirectly led to the failure of a startup project due to the lack of R&D effectiveness. Out of empathy, R&D cost reduction and efficiency will be an urgent need for most similar companies.
OK, now that we decided to start from scratch, we had to come up with a suitable name first. In order to reflect the pragmatism and commitment of our old Programmer, we named the product "Orange List".
preliminary
In the summer of 2017, before the official launch of the R&D, I first flew to Guangzhou to visit my university classmates who had successful careers, communicated clearly in person about the technical cooperation for the following two years, and then flew straight to Harbin to meet up with my family with a two-year commitment of income from the team, and took a dip in the last family trip before the start of the school year.
On the return highway trip a week later, I quickly flipped through the book Anti-Instinct, recommended by a friend, and came to the conclusion that since most of the previous judgments and choices were wrong, what to do afterward was very simple, everything in reverse.
In September 2017, the team started writing the first lines of code in high spirits.
An arduous research and development process
The original plan was to go live two years later, but due to people quitting halfway through the process and an underestimation of the difficulties, version 1.0 was not officially released until September 2020, and the entire development process can be described in two words, sour.
Subsequently, R&D entered a rapid iterative stage, in order to ensure that the final delivery of all the source code is complete and controllable, for the core functionality, we chose to do all the self-research.
For example, the early version of OrangeSheet did not provide support for workflow, for the simple reason that none of us knew how to do it, and optimistically misjudged the need for workflow in low-code, on the grounds that most enterprises would choose to buy a mature process product, yet the reality hit us hard in the face. We had no choice but to choose a quick self-learning, hard-headed cobbling together, and finally in four months after the first online version of the workflow support.
Luckily, we met Mr. He Bo, the author of the book "In-depth Flowable Process Engine: Core Principles and Advanced Practices" (with a foreword by Tijs Rademakers, the founder of Flowable), who is a passionate process technology expert with deep skills. In the subsequent upgrades, Mr. He has helped us overcome technical difficulties many times, and also provided very professional guidance on technology selection and other aspects.
Previously, I often heard peers say that the low code began to use the cool, late abattoir, the reason is mainly because of the excessive encapsulation of the framework code and obscure, as well as the function of the code in the existence of serious quality problems. It just so happened that we were digging into the highlights of the product, and that's how the team unanimously decided to make all the code in OrangeSheet pass SonarQube scanning with 0 warnings guaranteed. In order to achieve this remarkable goal, we invested months of continuous time in revamping and re-testing the entire code until it met the standard.
Time has passed, and after 4 years of the team going over the hill, the Orange Sheet has seen a transformation.
Where we stand
Time comes to July 2024, Orange List 3.0 is online, the basic architecture and front-end UI adjustments have all been put in place, the back can finally happily carry out the development of new features again, and this time the goal is to align with the industry's well-known fast-opening platforms for the core functions.
However, at this time, we also have a common problem of technicians starting a business, only focusing on pulling the cart with their heads down, without looking up at the road, and the promotion issue was delayed again and again. After deep thinking, we found that this is a kind of escape from the instinct, is the courage to break through the fear of the unknown field, "Anti-Instinct" can not be read in vain, we decided to reverse the operation, and immediately start a comprehensive promotion.
In order to get the attention and recognition of more developers, we will be the first core online code generation tool, permanently open to the public for free, hoping to allow more programmers to experience the pleasure of 80% of the business code generated by one click. The open source repository, which has been stagnant for many years, has also been rewritten based on our latest version.
The results are obvious, the circle of friends has expanded several times, and our product has successfully entered a positive cycle of R&D iteration and promotion of customer acquisition.
Seven years of fun, we are from the older programmers into young entrepreneurs, the mentality of maturity, eye-opening, the next goal is also more and more clear, looking back on the previous only to pay, it is really painful and happy.
concluding remarks
We welcome you to use our free online code generation tool, and we hope you will remember Orange Sheets and always undertake for you.