Race to Faster Innovation
The years 2020 and 2021 transformed our lives drastically. Many learnings came in and thus many transformations that came through. Disconnected to these shifts in our way of living there is another silent transformation, rather a “Revolution” that has happened in Web and Application Technologies and it will stay for coming times as more and more people see the benefit of adopting it. That is the “No-Code and Low-Code Revolution”.
Introduction
Low-Code technologies were present in some form already in the industry for past few years through many products and tools like Salesforce, Pega, Mulesoft etc. The categorization of such product offerings as “Low-Code” has recently (couple of years) seen rise in usage.
The intention behind No-Code and Low-Code is to develop applications and solutions in short time by the business stakeholders or their small technology teams instead of having an army of developers, testers, leads, managers to do the same. In other words “Bring the Power of Innovation back to Business Power Users than technology teams”. This works well for many projects in our world today as they do not involve high complexity in them.
Needless to say, but a nuance to note, some complexity in existing applications developed in conventional way creeps in because of the extra flexibility that comes to the hands of the decision makers or technology heads because of putting entire team of developers behind the project. Realizing such projects and solutions through Low-Code and No-Code platforms puts the power back to hands of business decision makers and at the same time poses challenges to the decision makers in terms of how far they can realise (and thus ideate sometimes within constraints of low-code or no-code) through the chosen platforms due to inherent limitations and orientation.
This article intends to demystify some of misconceptions while enhancing the current understanding of these platforms and the impactful significance they have in the “Digital Transformation” of this decade.
What about all the Engineers?
Yes, this is a transformational time. The impact of No-Code and Low-Code Revolution on current software development methodology will be like what Cloud did to IT Infrastructure and Automation did to testing or business workflows. They didn’t completely remove the jobs, rather new jobs were created and so the need to up-skill and cross-skill. Low-Code already created a lot of jobs and early takers benefitted a lot both business side and practitioner side. No-Code is also on a similar path. There are already 1000+ No-Code or Low-Code platforms created in the world right now either competing with each other or addressing different sections of digital transformation needs.
Increasingly with the ability to integrate between different No-Code, Low-Code and special platforms like Zapier and Stripe etc., the power of the No-Code platforms has risen so much that $10M companies are being built and operated completely on such integrated platforms.
According to one analysis as of 2019 only 0.3% of the entire world population is coding literate in some sorts. It is not easy for everyone in the world to wrap their head around writing programs and so many choices of those languages brings a choice paralysis for many either in the beginning of their coding careers or middle of it. Needless to say, the rest of the 99.7% population of the world, of which even if 20% of the business population is in need of some technology, will never be able to get work from this 0.3% coders keeping their dreams of changing the world a dream far away because of dearth of technology enablement.
So coders, programmers and Engineers are here to stay! That is good news…
Will No-Code & Low-Code Takeover everything?
No, but taking over everything is the vision of some of the No-Code/Low-Code platforms. But there is no way to make a generic platform for all the computing needs of the world!
There are some attempts to bring in automatic code completion and such needs using AI. Even few days ago in this very month, Github announced pair programming powered by AI. These tools help developers instead of enabling non-coding Business Power Users to fully devise a solution.
Coming back to the “No-Code/Low-Code Taking over the world”, every No-Code/Low-Code platform addresses specific needs (though they generalize in that specific space). If they generalize too much they have a steeper learning curve, like Bubble, as expected due to the complexities involved. NoCode.Tech is a good place to check the plethora of tools available categorized in a user friendly way.
Will Businesses really transform so much?
Yes. Look at our website, when we started designing our startup Cantellat Software’s website we tried to work with some designers and website builders. But there is always a perception gap between business owner and a technology team. We struggled to convey what we wanted to. I am sure many of you found this problem.
Since we had No-Code & Low-Code practice intrinsically adopted in our advocacy for “Intelligent Digital Transformation”, we tried exploring No-Code platforms to at least build some content ourselves. We first reviewed WordPress but then came across some readings where people switched from WordPress to Unstack or some other platform.
We chose Unstack and as we created and discovered more and more we figured that the site we were building was no more an MVP! It is the real website!! We could not be more happy than that. Of course some embellishments can still be done using custom CSS, HTML and JavaScript. But hey, a non-UX person building a website for the first time it is quite a good job! And the base layouts took just hours to build just by this one person, me!
The Future or shall we call it Rising Sun
Full Stack development is here to stay but not for every landing page or even moderately complex applications with multiple pages and workflows. It will cater to special needs of the applications which are not addressable by No-Code/Low-Code platforms or when the application needs to be hosted in secure environment or more ownership of data is needed. But the world will transform for sure, to No-Code or Low-Code based Engineering. So get ready to up-skill and cross-skill for this tide which already arrived.
Conclusion
Almost every writing needs a conclusion though it is the writer’s conclusion. To sum it up, more engineers will start focusing on problem-solving, architecture glueing, Deep Technologies like AI, Cryptography, in the form of Blockchain or Domain Expertise powered by Technology, than the laborious details of HTML tags, CSS styles and names of the variables! Isn’t that sweet!
