No Code perspective from a developer

While trying to understand how people use No/Low code tools, I had stumbled upon this article from Fraser Gorrie, a former marine biologist who's been coding for years.

I reached out to Fraser to chat a bit more about his experience, and he was super nice and accepted to take a call.

We went over some content that was already in the article above mentionned: The story of how he got into No Code, which are his go to tools and how we chooses and evaluates them, limitations with no code... And we went over his process of using No/Low code tools with his clients. That was quite interesting. Fraser believes so much in creating tools that his clients could use without him, that his approach is to first try to guide his clients to build the solutions themselves and only get back to him if they hit some roadblocks. Which reinforces the idea that the ecosystem is already a bit cluttered and that one benefits from the help of someone with experience in this field to figure out which tools should be used for the job.

His views on the limitations of no code tools were pretty interesting too. The main thing is that these tools don't really support version control or mutliple environments. So in comparison to traditional development, that makes it tricky to work collaboratively, to cherry pick changes, to stage new features and most importantly to revert breaking changes.

Resources

I walked away with a few things to checkout:

• No code list : A curated list of no code software
• Lambda functions as a service (seems to be alternatives to firebase) : Xano, Supabase
• Noloco to create a web app from a sheet or airtable. Might be useful to see what can be done from the cam projects with that.