Code. Pro code. Low code. No code.
My focus in my career has evolved quite a bit since I started, from being primarily technical to now where I am primarily business outcomes focused and planning tools/processes accordingly. Interestingly, the role code has played in my own career has paralleled the evolution/zeitgeist of the software industry. Let me explain, but first some context.
I know a physicist-electrical-engineer couple and the husband once said to his wife, half-jokingly: “the entire life’s work of a physicist is a small graph on page 443 of an electrical engineer’s textbook”. This stuck with me because that kinda fits the logic of an API, the building block of modern software engineering: I call foo() and someone else spent an year coding foo, hiding all its complexity away from me. Consider the following over-simplified levels of abstraction:
Physics → Electrical Engg → OS/Systems software → Software Application layers
As you go from left to right, you’ll notice the impact of painstaking innovation at every stage empowers the next consumer stage to do big things easier/faster/cheaper, but also leads to the creation of disproportionately more product offerings and jobs at that level. With that in mind, onto the story.
Code. I started my career as a systems software developer writing code for kernels, device drivers and distributed systems. The primary reason I got into the field was the school I studied CS in (Clemson) which revered systems software, largely due to a super-star OS professor. Turns out, systems technologies have seen a lot of changes since I started: thanks to the Linux kernel, various levels of virtualization and developments in large scale distributed systems that led to Cloud computing becoming the go-to architecture. There is still a ton of innovation happening in systems, but it has enabled way more jobs at net new companies that use these systems to build their own businesses — building software applications. Within software engineering, kernel programming is about as “code” as it can get — complex, but also an area with the least amount of visual tooling, by design (because WYSInotWYG). Onto the next stage.
Pro Code. My next stop was my first startup, where I was building platform-agnostic, location-specific mobile user experiences — that do not require installed apps — using Wifi captive portals (that tiny sign-up window you see when you connect to a public Wifi) and Mobile web. This was purely application code written in PHP/JS/etc.. Traditional mobile native apps, which came of age to take center stage of tech around this time, used Java/Objective-C (and sure enough I co-published a couple semi-successful Android apps). Opening up the mobile app platforms to developers led the app economy to create millions of jobs and changed our lives dramatically. This is all pro-code, where code got written, but there’s friendly IDEs — still very, very technical.
Low-code. When I’d decided to move on to take a full-time Product Management job, I joined a company that did very well in that mobile wave with a USP of “write code once, compile it for 6 mobile platforms”. 6 eventually became 3 (Android, iOS and Web). The core product was an app development platform that provided drag and drop visual/WYSIWYG tooling, where you could still write custom code for advanced use-cases/workflows, which in the enterprise market is inevitable. And same goes for the backend — the product came with easy out-of-the-box middleware integrations. To be a low-code developer, you still need to be technical, but the tooling gets you considerable head-start for accelerated app development. But low-code platforms are expensive and enterprise grade. Friendlier Open-source, JavaScript stacks made leaps of progress during this time, primarily for the web and even the backend, which kept simplifying development recursively leading us to the present.
No-code
When I set out to build Yuga, with limited resources, I learned about the slew of no-code platforms out there. When I poked around, I realized these are legit, literal no-code — you can build sophisticated features (both frontend and backend workflows) without a line of code! Yuga is a SaaS product — basically a web-app version of a business flow — and is a perfect match for these platforms. No-code means your time+cost to build is super low, cost to tear down is super low and “total cost of ownership” is super-low.
You hear all kinds of products/businesses claim “leave X to us, so you can focus on your business” — no-code is the peak of that claim. And guess what — you don’t have to be technical — for context, my team-mate who built our app is a premier school MBA who can, but does not want to do technical work and he didn’t mind no-code :)
No-code is the culmination of a looooooot of innovation and evolution of developer tools that finally made app development for non-tech people genuinely possible. These are still early days and no-code does have limitations (it is mostly web-only/no-mobile and is obviously not suited for a TON of things) with possible issues of scale — in my own case, my plan is to build out my roadmap assuming a JS stack/team. But to get started on a new project or for rapid prototyping/validation, no-code is perfect: this article’s purpose is only to spread the word. Our Career Planner app, (get access at yugahq.com), is built on Bubble (bubble.io) — check out our app, but definitely check out Bubble, Webflow or any other no-code platform. You know you’ve been sitting on that idea for too long — at work or as a personal side-project — now is the time to build something fun. Enjoy!
PS: I’m new to the medium (pun intended) and would appreciate a follow. Do checkout my other posts related to careers, including a movie script like narration of an employee resignation (with Matrix references) – I think you’ll enjoy them. This is my job.
#code #lowcode #nocode #software #softwareenginering
#EmployeeRetention #FutureOfWork #SaaS #NewNormal #EmployeeEngagement
