📬This Week In Product #4
Low-code/No-code Tools, Advise on writing well, Book Review and Note Taking
Hi there, I’m Simran, and here’s my weekly round-up for you! ✨
💡 Interesting Technology
If you notice around, a lot many tools are coming up which are essentially reducing the dependency on a software developer. Some related terms that you will start hearing soon and often:
- No code platforms — 100% drag-and-drop tools with no programming knowledge needed.
- Low code platforms — Require users to have some knowledge of programming.
- Citizen Developer — An end user who creates new applications or programs with little to no coding experience using low-code/no-code tools.
Some interesting stats which validates this growth:
- Gartner estimates that low-code app platforms would account for over 65% of development by 2024.
- Forrester forecasts that the low-code market would top $21 billion spendings by 2022.
- According to TechCrunch, the companies operating in this sector are paced to raise around $500 million by 2020.
Below is the list of platforms/tools that I have myself dabbled with while at work or for personal projects:
- Sheet2Site — Loved the templates but the pricing is wee bit expensive for a beginner; otherwise would really like to use this one :)
- Sheety — Less expensive alternative for Sheet2Site but with a lot less features and templates
- Bubble — The most holistic platform in this list with best support, documentation, integrations, and templates available
- Glide Apps — Love the UI/UX of the templates with free to host website using Glide sub-domain and their free plan is good for a beginner’s project.
- Microsoft Power Apps — UI seems a bit outdated and a little too complex to begin
- Microsoft Power Automate — Love their ready to use automation flows!
- Amazon Honey Code — I used the Beta version the day it was launched and found it a bit too complex with limited features and functionality.
Some more No-code tools ⬇️
I feel inspired to look at businesses and projects built using these tools and one of them is http://Flexiple.com & http://Remote.tools built by Karthik and Hrishikesh ⬇️
Cons: No-code tools do have limitations which restrict the overall usability. This includes scalability, high quality, high performance, and other non-functional requirements which are not always easy to meet, nor is it easy to change them with the platform.
🎁 Twitter Finds
One thing that I have noticed about Twitter is that there is this small set of amazingly talented people who’s name come up very often and are hard to miss as their content is the real deal! Two of my favourite finds are David Perell and Julian Shapiro ✨
If you write at work and want to get better at it then I highly suggest going through their resources.
1) He consolidates his learnings as Handbooks; PS I love the UI of Julian’s website! ⬇️
2) This section of David Perell’s website called “Notebook” is my favourite as most of the articles written here are metaphorical ⬇️
📄 Impactful Book That I Read Last
Hell Yes or No by Derek Sivers
Theme: Somewhat at the intersection of Philosophy, Productivity, and Self-help
I love Derek Sivers and have been following his blog for a couple of years now. He’s easily one of my favourite modern day thinker!
Derek Sivers’s writing style is succinct; editing to the point that there are no extraneous words in his posts. The book is a collection of his own thoughts and stories about life, written in a short, straight forward and beautiful way.
Will definitely re-read this from time to to time!
⚙️ Tool I want to share: Obsidian
Note-taking using local folder of plain text Markdown files
Last week I had a painful experience while trying to migrate my notes from One Note which I had been using for about a year and a half to Notion. Hence I decided to look for alternatives which are not cloud based and open sourced.
Enter Obsidian — I learned about Obsidian during a live session by Lenny Rachitsky and immediately started exploring it.
It’s a markdown based free open source note taking software with advanced features and plugin support. Note taking in this is simple; to begin -> open a vault ~ a folder in your system and create a new note ~ a new markdown file to start writing; that’s it, pretty neat.
With Obsidian, your data sits in a local folder. Never leave your life’s work held hostage in the cloud again. I am loving it so far! ⬇️
👩💻 I would love to hear from you!
As always, if you’d like to drop me a note, you can email me at contact@simranpandey.com or find me on Twitter at @simranpandey97, on LinkedIn at @simran-pandey, and on Medium at @simranpandey97
If there’s any specific topic that you want me to write on or if you simply want to give some feedback then you can use this short form ⬇️
