The Rise of the No-Code Movement

In the internet age, technological innovation has largely been driven by a community of software engineers, web developers, and hardware hackers. Until recently, acclaimed startup accelerator Y Combinator only accepted founding teams with technical backgrounds. Furthermore, the most valuable companies of today are tech-enabled, so there’s been a focus on tech talent for future-proofing economies. Coding education provider Lambda School has raised close to $50M to close this skills gap and there are many other courses teaching the next generation to code.

But what if coding was no longer vital to success in tech? Enter the world of no-code development platforms (NCDPs).

Over the past couple of years, the rise of the no-code movement has started to change the landscape of tech. Ironically, Lamdba School itself is a product of the no-code movement, building its MVP (that has served 3,000 students) using a combination of tools such as Typeform, Airtable, and Retool. The no-code movement has also been called low code or visual development. The makers of no-code platforms are still discussing the best label for the movement but for now, I will stick with ‘no-code’.

John Everhard summarizes no-code software on Forbes as a visual integrated development environment (IDE). “Within this environment, users (aka the citizen developer) drag-and-drop application components, connect them together and create a mobile or web app. Using this software, staff can design and build powerful applications that can scale for any organization—without writing any code.” All in all, users don’t need to understand code to be able to create an app and therein lies its power.

Benefits of No-Code

When we were in the thick of product development for CloudPeeps, I remember how frustrating it was for our developers (and me!) when I needed to make any updates to our marketing pages or funnels. While I can happily edit HTML, having a custom-built platform meant deploying changes was limited to the devs. Prioritizing feature development alongside bug fixes and tweaks was a challenge. Progress was slow. We tried numerous A/B testing tools and moving some pages to popular CMSs, but the user experience started to suffer. While tools like Webflow existed then, they weren’t touted as mainstream solutions so we lacked the awareness to implement them.

Since then, the rise of no-code tools has changed the game forever – not only for tasks like marketing pages but also for full-stack apps, which people can now build end-to-end. In 2014, if you wanted to build a marketplace, you had to develop it from scratch. After that, offerings like Sharetribe came along with standard marketplace software in a box with an ongoing price tag. Now, you can build whatever marketplace set-up you like using no-code tools.

Evidently, saving time and money are two crucial benefits of no-code. Co-founder of Tiny product studio and indie investment fund Andrew Wilkinson recently tweeted: “I used to spend $25k-$100k building an app over 3-6 months. It was frustrating, expensive, and slow. Then I started using NoCode tools like Webflow, Bubble, Zapier, and Airtable. Suddenly I was able to build my app idea in days instead of months, at a fraction of the cost. Craziest of all, I could tweak and maintain it myself instead of hiring expensive devs.”. He likens ‘native-code’ to being a bulldozer: great to use when you need to build something sizeable and commercial grade. He compares ‘no-code’ to a pickup truck: powerful enough to help you get most simple and intermediate projects done.

Why Now?

The tech industry has been increasingly criticized over the past decade for its lack of diversity and inclusion. Silicon Valley has bred a generation of founders who look like each other, talk like each other, and solve similar problems – and as these people gather further wealth through exits and investments, the cycle of sameness repeats. Teaching people to code and funding different founders is creating slow change, but the no-code movement has the potential to exponentially change the face of tech. If you no longer need access to engineers or capital to launch a product, anyone can have a crack at their idea. Perhaps it is the demand for the democratization of tech that has catapulted the no-code movement into the now.

The post The Rise of the No-Code Movement appeared first on SitePoint.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visual Studio Code: A Power User’s Guide

Image
In this guide, you’ll learn how to take advantage of Visual Studio Code to supercharge your development workflow. This article is written for beginners who may be using Visual Studio Code for the first time. VS Code, as it’s commonly known, is considered a "lightweight" code editor. In comparison with full integrated development environment (IDE) editors which occupy gigabytes of disk space, VS Code only uses less than 200MB when installed. Despite the "lightweight" term, VS Code offers a massive number of features which keep increasing and improving with every new update. For this guide, we'll cover the most popularly used features. Every programmer has their own tool set which they keep updating whenever new workflows are discovered. If you want to learn every tool and feature VS Code has to offer, check out their official documentation . In addition, you may want to keep track of updates for new and improved features. Prerequisites In order to follow alo
Read more

6+ Best Websites for Free Fonts in 2020

Image
I firmly believe that, in order to strike the optimal balance between minimalism and visual appeal, a user interface should display no more than what’s absolutely necessary while making those necessary elements look visually appealing. Keep it simple, but make the simple look amazing. But, what does simple look like exactly? Well, strip away all of the over-the-top marketing gimmicks, redundant features, and cluttering visuals, and most of what’s left is the UI copy and text content. As boring as this sounds, let’s be honest: this is the most important aspect of any app or website. Information and the ability to navigate it is the entire reason users are using our app or website. So with the right typeface coupled with the right font styles (see “ Font vs typeface: the ultimate guide ”), we can create designs that are quite simple and yet visually appealing at the same time. This emphasizes the most important aspects of the design while usin
Read more

How to Contribute to Open Source TypeScript Projects

Image
If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia – lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that’s meaningful. – Matt Mullenweg One of my favorite aspects of open source is the fact that anyone can contribute! It’s like “productive volunteering” (if you’ll humor me). It’s a fantastic way to build something bigger than you, give back to the community, and level up your skills. In this article, we’re going to talk about practical ways for you to get involved in open source TypeScript projects. We’ll first cover assessing your level then jump into how you can find opportunities. Assessing Your Level Before you get started contributing to open source, you want to find your comfort level. Where are you at skill-wise? What level of complexity are you wanting to solve? How much time do you want to spend? These are important questions to consider before diving in. This
Read more