If you’re anything like me, then you appreciate what a superpower and privilege it is to write code. Coding, to me, is the ability to pour one’s ideas, emotions, and feelings into electronic devices and networks. It is a way to make one’s self manifest in the digital world.
If you’re even more like me, then you also worried when you heard about the rising trend of No-code/Low-code products such as Bubble. Because these are the kind of tools that threatens to make developers like you and me invalid. Or at least that was my first impression of them.
However, it would be arrogant of me to assume without trying it out myself. So I went ahead to work with a company named ToolJet(https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet) which is building an open-source low code platform to build internal tools for enterprises.
In addition to building the platform, I was tasked with using the platform to create internal tools for a large enterprise. I ended up delivering them a production-grade application which they now use to record and keep track of their service delivery, all within two weeks.
What should have taken several months of programming effort was done in two weeks, with minimal code. Contrary to what I expected to feel, I now felt even more capable as a developer: developers are now equipped to quickly come up with software products, iterate with several startup ideas without having to write thousands of lines of code. No-code/Low-code tools don’t relegate developers, it empowers us!
What the No-code revolution truly represents is perhaps the solution to a fundamental issue that the software development community has not addressed: It has factionalized into several cultures centred on different technologies that attempt to solve the same problems, making it difficult to abstract and automate features every app would need.
Let me try to draw an example: To develop a web front-end, we have React, Angular, Svelte, Vue, and so forth, all philosophizing the greatness of their fundamental technical decisions, which may very well have been made by some developer while he was drunk or stoned. And this, for instance, makes it difficult to build a universal login/sign-up mechanism that developers can just plugin with minimal configuration.
The bulk of the effort made in building software is currently about finding one’s way through this mesh of technologies, and in making them all work together, instead of writing code just where it matters. And this is precisely the selling point of low-code.
I started this write-up by sharing my experience, but let me happily upgrade it to an invitation to try out a low-code tool. And while you’re at it, ToolJet would be a good place to start.
NB: I use No-code and Low-code interchangeably in this article. However, No-code refers to application development without any code. While it is an ambitious proposition, I’m personally more inclined towards Low-code as it seems to solve a real issue with software development today, as opposed to No-code which focuses on arming non-coders with software development capability.
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