Low Code No Code

No code and low code tools are being used more and more frequently. Whether it’s because a company didn’t have enough developers on staff to meet a critical business need, an entrepreneur started a brand new company and needed to just get something working, or because developers saw that a no code tool solved a thorny problem, you are going to eventually run into these tools. As a developer, if you do run into them, you need to know why they are being used, what value they offer, and how to integrate with them. We frequently talk about how development environments are increasingly heterogenous with respect to language, but not enough attention is really given to the fact that environments show even more variance when you start looking at the larger set of tools that is required to manage and run business processes. In most organizations, some things will be custom built by developers, while other things will be commercial software packages (hosted either onsite or available as SAAS apps, or both). Further, it’s very rare for an organization not to have workflows that were entirely conceived by (and still managed by) reasonably non-technical people, using third party tools for various purposes. Truth be told, no code and low code tools fill a set of niches that have been with us for a very long time. However, with more investment coming into tech, along with the increasing complexity and cost of enterprise business solutions, an opportunity has developed for companies to build more general purpose software that can be heavily customized for the purposes of individuals and individual companies. In effect, common application usage patterns (such as CMSes, CRUD apps, orchestration, dashboards, and payment processing) have become more democratized and often don’t require custom development to work with. While you could look at this as constituting a risk to your career, the advent of these tools means that instead of working on boilerplate that every application needs, you can instead focus on the most useful (and valuable) areas of the app you are building. No code and low code solutions are increasingly being used by businesses to reduce the expense required to quickly roll out solutions to business problems. While developers may panic at the thought, the reality is that many of these tools actually get rid of a lot of tedious, boring, and repetitive development work. Developers need to learn what is available so that they can effectively help businesses in reducing their costs if they want to continue to be employed over the long term. It’s simply a change in the landscape that you have to adapt to. Episode Breakdown Why Use Low Code or No Code Solutions Cheaper Developers are expensive, especially when you start talking about recurring costs that happen every time you change your mind. Faster to set up Development cycles are long. People in business want to iterate on an idea before iterating on an implementation of an idea. Financial reasons It’s easier to get approval for smaller operational expenses than it is for large capital expenses. Ease of disconnecting If the tool doesn’t work, they can bail quickly without firing anybody. Outsourcing of risk If there are regulatory concerns around certain processes (payments, for instance), they’ll be the vendor’s problem. IT folks can be annoying There is usually friction between IT departments and other departments. Using low code and no code tools, people can often sidestep that friction until they are in a better political position. Areas to Use Low Code or No Code Content management systems Companies typically don’t roll their own content management systems and haven’t ...