Experienced Developers Needed
I have been building and using a low-code development library since 2009. It includes all the basics that most websites need. I'm asking for feedback and estimates from you, experienced developers. How long does it take to build these basic features?
- Account Registration
- Forgot Password
- Login/Logout
- Bug Reporting
My goal is to publicize on the low code development library website how long it takes an average developer to build these features from scratch. Hopefully I will receive enough responses to have an averaged comparative value for these features.
Are these basic functionalities already included in other development tools? Or do they have to be built each and every time you start working with a new client? Of course experienced developers may be copy/pasting code from prior projects but it still requires copying the SQL tables and modifying the web pages to work for the new client's website.
If any of you could give me rough estimates in hours or days for each of these features I would greatly appreciate it. Let me also know what language or development library you are working with. This is with the assumption that it is a client asking for a brand new database and website built from scratch.
I am not interested in time estimates from no-code environments. Anything that requires hosting on their servers instead of your servers... is what I consider a "no-code" environment.
There's other features and functionality that are included in this low-code development environment but these may be less standard or difficult to give an estimate on because functionality differences could be significant. If anyone wants to give estimates on how long any of these features have taken to build from scratch for their projects, that would of course be much appreciated.
- User Management
- Error Logging and Tracking
- Failed Access / Hacker Tracking and lockout
- Update Logs - who changed what and when
- Data-driven Menus
- Help System
- Tracking Emails sent from website
- Report Creation (from SQL queries) and Usage Tracking
- Widget Creation and Grouping by Department
Thanks for reading,
-Alec
@ProgrammingLabs, are you still working on the implementation of the Authentication? I'm currently evaluating some Authentication as a Service solutions, after having build this functionality myself serveral times in both Python (Django, Flask), SvelteKit and Go. Happy to share my experience with you and exchange thoughts, if you are still up for it?
As a service provider often building software platforms from scratch for customers, I have pre-built libraries for this sort of functionality so the answer to your direct question is 15 minutes to an hour depending on customization.
I think the real question is what would make me abandon my custom pre-built libraries and use a OTS product. To that I can only answer:
I know that's not exactly answering the question you asked, but I hope it helps.
Also, the fact that we are a C#/.NET shop may make this entire answer irrelevant to to you.
Thanks @jackerman, although C#/.NET is not my market that is exactly the kind of response I need to hear.
That helps tremendously and I greatly appreciate the time and insight you provided!
This is probably hard to impossible to estimate, because there are so many different factors. I myself would not build this myself, but use any service/framework providing this.
In my experience it is even recommended by security experts, to not reinvent the wheel when it comes to storing and hashing passwords for example. It's wasted time compared to using premade solutions and also most of the time less secure (apart from having a very special use case maybe?)
I currently use Supabase as database/backend for my projects which comes with user authentication and everything needed for that.
Setup time if you know what you are doing => at most 1-2 hours, probably 30 mins This assumes basic email/password or email/magic link login.
Depending on how many other login providers you wanna have, thinking of google and apple validations of your app, which will take a way bigger amount of time than setting it up.
Thanks @kirbby for the response. Good insights and I'll add Google/Apple validation to the todo queue.