I've been coding for the past 20 years. I built websites using Microsoft Word (yes, really), Geocities and the like; used open and closed source software to setup bulletin boards; configured my fair share of joomla, Drupal and Wordpress installations. Using these tools and very little code, I ran successful communities (back when there was no social media).
Later, I learned and worked in several programming languages, Along the way, I had to also deal with a bunch of infrastructure tooling just to get the simplest application up and running. While I worked on interesting projects and businesses, a lot of the work I was doing in code was repetitive and hardly critical; what’s more, we often invested a lot of money and time in MVPs way before we knew customers actually wanted them.
In recent years, I’ve seen a rise in No/Low Code tools that “Just work” and make my life easier. As a software engineer, this was a bit weird and frightening at first: if these tools do what I used to be paid for doing, what will I do?! Well… do more important business stuff! No ones cares if you have 14 microservices to send an email to a customer when a new inventory item is in stock; and no one cares, especially not your customers, if those 14 microservices have 95% coverage and the test to code ratio is 2:1. No one cares. But customers care that they can do order today and not have to wait 3 months, 2 PRDs and 6 sprints.
I would not, at this point, bet my whole business (if I had one…) on no/low code tooling for critical parts of it; at the same time, I would 100% start a lot of the product/business experiments with No Code tools and only when (if!) validated, move to something more robust. At my previous company, we did just this: until we know it works, let’s do it in No Code. Forms, surveys, CRM, connecting systems and tools, analysis, etc… it not only empowered everyone in the company to contribute but also freed up software engineers for more differentiated work.
Yes, No Code is a space where we will explore No Code tooling and what it can do for businesses, especially to increase Time to Market for your business, either for the next product iteration, new customer care workflows or operational improvements. We will focus on glueing tools and system together so that the outcome is more valuable than the sum of the parts.
Enjoy!