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Andrew Pierno
Andrew Pierno

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Code Generation

Building a new application is a lot like building a new house. You need things you’ve built many times. Walls, plumbing, a roof. The walls are made of wood, then drywall. The pipes are plastic. You did more or less this same work on the last house, but this is a new one, so you do it all over again.

How many times have you built an authentication layer?

How many hours have you spent building CRUD APIs just to get stuff into and out of a database?

If you’ve been writing code long enough, the answer should be too many. Too many hours wasted on writing plumbing code. Too many hours wasted building commodity features like authentication.

In recent years, #nocode has been making its way into the lexicon. It’s a great choice for many non-technical founders to get their idea off the ground, and raise a bit of cash. I think over time it will be perfectly reasonable for a “tech” company to not have any developers.

That being said, the most common way to build an application is writing code.

But why are we doing the same thing over and over again? We know what our rest API is going to look like just by looking at the spec, or listening to a customer explain it to us in 5 minutes. Why not generate the code?

I think we're in the early days of code generation. Even no-code tools at some level generate code. The code they generate may not be human readable, but somewhere those drag and drop components are being translated into html and javascript.
NoCo is a code generator. We make it simple to build a NodeJS REST API and export the code to GitHub. If you're looking to get a jump start on your next project, give it a try for free at https://app.noco.io.

Latest comments (1)

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usegen

Wondering if this worked out