Lessons learned after 20 years of developing, managing and selling a software product
It was a tool to automatically create a CRUD Web front-end for MySQL databases and i t was an instant hit in the PHP community — there were very few tools of that type at the time and I think almost all of them worked by generating PHP scripts, producing code that became obsolete when database schema was changed. Instead, the idea of creating a model that could adapt and synchronize to schema changes, basically mirroring the database itself, was a rather new concept.
I went through several phases, it was released as Free Software (free as in freedom + free as gratis), then I started asking for a voluntary download contribution and finally it became a full-fledged commercial product.
It has evolved a lot, started as a simple front-end creator (DaDaBIK stands for “Dadabik is a DataBase Interfaces Kreator”) and is now a complete low-code no-code development platform.
In recent years I have been in direct contact with hundreds (perhaps thousands) of users, I have faced technical and managerial challenges.
