How the No-Code Philosophy Can Transform How You Think About Data
Its undeniable that the ability to code is an incredibly powerful skill. As the world has shifted towards software in the past few decades, we’ve seen that the capabilities that you can unlock by understanding the inner workings of software development are vast. Those who can use these skills to build products, systems, and solve problems are held in very high regard across all industries.
For a time, some were worried that this would create a gap between those that could code and those that couldn’t. There was a concern that it would be a significant barrier to entry to play a role in any form of modern entrepreneurship. Some purists still believe that.
Those who happen to be technical tend to fall prey a little to the confirmation bias that suggests that the way that they’ve gone about their career is the only way. So, when you hear from them, you’ll likely come away thinking that coding skills are the only way to truly develop your own things.
But if you take a slightly more open-minded look at the situation as it stands, we’re seeing a range of new technologies that are commoditizing a lot of these skills and making them more approachable for non-technical people. Instead of slogging through years of coding training before you can build something, companies are working to allow rapid prototyping and sophisticated software to be built without that prior knowledge. This is incredibly exciting for the future of the industry, and it means that building digital businesses is much more inclusive than it ever was before.
This general movement has been characterized as the ‘No Code Movement’.
What is No Code?
As alluded to above, the No Code movement¹ believes that coding should not represent a barrier to entry when someone wants to build something. Those that have been inspired by that mission have gone above and beyond to build tools that can be applied in a simple, non-technical way — but can get at some of the powerful capabilities that is possible through coding.
The term itself has only become part of the zeitgeist over the past couple of years as we’ve seen more and more companies enter the space. It was undoubtedly kickstarted by website platforms which began to offer DIY website development through intuitive interfaces² — on a foundation of templates and modular functionality. But now, we’ve moved beyond HTML development and expanded into every range of development that you might imagine.
The most canonical example of this might be Microsoft Excel³. As a spreadsheet program, it has modularized a lot of its core functionality so that it can be leveraged through a graphical user interface (GUI) in a simple and efficient way. When you use the formulas in Excel, you don’t have to understand how they were built, you only have to know how to apply them. A lot of the hard work has been done for you and you can stand on the shoulders of giants as a result.
That being said, Excel is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve seen a number of companies take that philosophy and expand on it in very interesting ways. These innovators are helping everyone to use programming mindsets and applications without having to understand the technicalities behind the scenes.
One of these companies that is walking this fine line is SeaTable.
Combining Spreadsheets with Databases
SeaTable comes into the picture because Excel can be quite static in how it works with data. As companies have invested more and more into spreadsheet-based information, they’ve begun to realize that there are certain inefficiencies that you really can’t get away from when you’re working with a static spreadsheet. Most specifically, it’s the database-related functionality that has been missing.
When you’re working with a database, there is a focus on keeping information well organized, structured, and up-to-date, as things change in the organization. They are typically quite complex and difficult to work with because the focus has been purely on developers. What SeaTable strives to do is to combine the user-interface of a spreadsheet with the functionality of a database.
On first glance, this might not seem that revolutionary. It’s all just data at the end of the day. But it only takes a little bit of time working with SeaTable and you start to understand the possibilities that open up in front of you.
When you add database functionality on top of your spreadsheet, you can enable a range of different automations, processes, and systems to be built that remain dynamic across your entire organization. In other words, you can replicate complicated software engineering without having to write a line of code. Instead, you leverage SeaTable’s functionality to create the sorts of internal processes that can supercharge your efficiency.
All of a sudden, your spreadsheet starts to work for you, rather than you having to do all the heavy lifting. It’s magical once you can appreciate the use case.
Collaboration
Another key piece of the value proposition here is that a product like SeaTable allows for much more efficient collaboration between colleagues. If you’ve ever worked before on a large Excel spreadsheet in a team environment, you’ll know of the pain that comes with version control and maintaining the integrity of the information. The moment you have more hands on the same data, things can get messy quick.
Applying a database mindset on top of these projects delivers incredible value because it takes away all of that. Immediately, your data can live and breathe — regardless of how many people are working on it. You have a single source of truth⁴ that you can rely on, and everyone can pull in the same direction.
This allows for a much greater scale of collaboration than was ever possible before. And that’s a key value that comes from No Code. It’s this idea that everyone should be able to contribute to these processes, not just those who have been given the keys to the kingdom. When you can build in parallel, combining the best pieces of data from each team, you can craft your very own company-wide operating system that manages everything that matters.
SeaTable recognizes this and has spent a lot of time crafting the user experience for this very use case. Companies who embrace this form of internal collaboration can unlock synergies and opportunities that they never thought were there. And that’s because you can work with the data, regardless of your technical expertise. You’ve got more minds to throw at the problem.
Modularization
It’s worth talking briefly about how modularization can transform the way your company operates. Let’s focus on data analysis for a second, one of the most important pieces of any modern company. The ability to scrape, clean, filter, and structure data is often left to the Business Intelligence team, or even to highly-trained data scientists who are tasked with answering queries from the rest for the organization. It’s done this way because working with data is finicky, and you need to have a good idea of what you’re doing so that you don’t break things.
SeaTable has found a way to commoditize⁵ these technical tasks and make them feel as easy as you could ever imagine. By understanding the sorts of things that companies need to function, they’ve built components and modules into their software that can be applied to any dataset that you throw at it. These modules act as plug-and-play software components that can be turned on and off at will, by anyone who wants to slice and dice that data.
It’s difficult to understate just how transformational that is. Instead of having to rely on a bottleneck like a data analysis team, your average employee is empowered to work with that data themselves. They can access more powerful functionality than is possible with Excel, all while not being overwhelmed with the complexities behind those modules.
That’s what No Code is all about. By abstracting those functions one level higher, you can focus more of your time on what really matters — which is the interpretation. The data processing is all but automated, and your sole focus can be what you do with those insights.
This has significant economic benefits, as you might expect, but it also creates intangible improvements in the work environment in which you operate. No one likes fighting with data and the easier you can make it, the more they’ll be encouraged to dig in. When you use a product like SeaTable, you encourage the sort of data-driven decision making that you always wanted but were unable to get because of the technical challenges associated with doing it well.
Plugging into the Community
The final piece of the No Code philosophy that plays a role here is how you can leverage the resources of the community. As the movement has grown, there has been this open-source inspired mindset where its actually encouraged that you build on the work of others. Instead of trying to figure out everything on your own, from scratch, its encouraged that you leverage the best of what other people have already figured out. The key criteria for success changes from ‘Can you build this?’ to ‘Can you find this?’. It’s the resourcefulness that is celebrated⁶.
You can see that in the way that SeaTable deals with plug-ins. Right from the start, they’ve been focused on building the platform infrastructure and then letting developers create a wide range of plugins that expand what is possible. When you start to look into the community, you’ll find an incredibly diversity in tools and applications that can radically transform the data that you’re working with. Regardless of what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s likely that there are others who have tried it before and have created a plugin that can fast-track your success.
In this way, SeaTable functions as the hub through which your internal processes can be built, while you leverage other external models for specific use cases that are relevant for your specific organization. The company could have easily held their cards close to their chest in the hope that they would build out all these various features, but that goes against the philosophy of what they’re trying to do here. The idea is that we succeed together and that we can create much more when we combine our efforts, rather than competing.
This mindset is rare in the business world, but it’s what sets SeaTable apart and makes it such a special product to use. In just a few years, they’ve managed to build a culture and community that is focused on creating value in every sphere that they can. And they’re just getting started.
Conclusion
While we’ve focused heavily on SeaTable itself in this piece, we hope that you’ve got a better sense of what the No Code movement is trying to accomplish. It’s often through these sorts of practical examples that you can begin to understand the possibilities that this paradigm shift can create.
The future of development and company building should not be held to ransom by those with technical skills. Data processing, analysis, prototyping, and development should be something that everyone can work with — because that’s what’s going to push industries forward. It’s your application of the insights that matter, and not the technical complexities you wade through to get there.
SeaTable is but one example of software that is breaking down those barriers and helping regular people to contribute meaningfully to their organizations from their unique perspectives. When you get this right, your entire company can transform.
1 ‘The Rise of the No Code Movement’ by Kate Kendall. https://www.sitepoint.com/the-rise-of-the-no-code-movement/
2 A Brief History of No Code’ by Arpit Choudhury. https://icanautomate.medium.com/a-brief-history-of-no-code-59c532d90b7f#
3 ‘Microsoft’s low-code tools: Now everyone can be a developer’ by Simon Bisson. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsofts-low-code-tools-now-everyone-can-be-a-developer/
4 Single Source of Truth — What It Is and Why You Want It Yesterday’ from Talend. https://www.talend.com/resources/single-source-truth/
5 ‘The No Code Approach: Running a business without coding’ by Can Ozuysal. https://userguiding.com/blog/no-code/
6 ‘Be Resourceful — One of the Most Important Skills to Succeed in Data Science’ by Admond Lee. https://towardsdatascience.com/be-resourceful-one-of-the-most-important-skills-to-succeed-in-data-science-6ed5f33c2939
