No-coders! No-coders! No-coders!
Living in a bubble of friends and colleagues that live and breathe code, this tweet has made me think about this form of “social disparity”.
Becoming a developer is hard. In spite of frequent assertion that everyone can learn how to code, it is a multi year effort that require constance and dedication.
Once mastered, this skill can prompt to a wide range of career opportunities, including being a nomadic developer, travel the world with a backpack and a hotspot, and never have to wear a shirt if you don’t like.
I believe that in the future this 0.3% of population will be enlarged by a new breed of developers that know how to no-code.
Nothing new under the sun. Maybe an example of a product ahead of its times, Yahoo! Pipes released on February 2007, was a web application to create new pages by aggregating RSS feeds from different sources by point-and-click. Yahoo! Pipes had many modules which could be used either to grab data from sources or to edit the data that was grabbed from the sources.
This concept is now the core principle of tools that allow to move info between apps automatically as Zapier or IFTTT, and more generally of every successful product launched in recent years like Airtable, Figma and Slack.
The possibility for a software to be integrated in an ecosystem it’s not an afterthought, it’s at the centre of a well executed strategy.
This translates in a renovated request for skills in mastering and correct usage of the right tool at the right moment.
Benefits of this knowledge are:
- Build and collaborate more creatively with people from different backgrounds and contexts
- Ship products and features faster without reinventing the wheel or have to maintain complex codebases
An heritage of the last decades of development we mustn’t leave behind are the practices of domain exploration and the decomposition of a bigger problem into small manageable bits.
Tools like story mapping or event storming can help us slice problems to the desired level and map them with the right tool.
For this demo we will put ourselves in the shoes of a new business developer and not a code developer.
Using the story mapping we can feel the pain points of Sara workflow, for every new lead that can become a prospect she has to create a new deck of slides by hand, plus a whole series of repetitive operations with little added value.
We can automate the most part of it, with little or no code involved. This is our no-code stack:
All the potential leads are managed in Airtable, enriched with data and a status.
Once the due diligence is done and the lead is considered valid, it is moved to a custom view for “Prospect” state. This is when a new slides deck is prepared and sent to the potential client referent.
Instead of repeating this operation manually, she creates a template with placeholders between curly brackets.
Then, in Zapier, she can set the automation flow to create a presentation from template in Google Slides when new record in view is created in Airtable.
Through a guided process she can map fields from CRM to the previously set placeholders on Google slides
With few configurations click a previously time consuming activity is now automated.
No-code FTW.
