Is No-Code (or Low-Code) the Future of Development

so what are my thoughts on it is this something that's going to take over developers or is it going to put us out of a job is it going to put my freelancing career on hold because now companies can build things with no code what's the deal [Music] hey friends welcome back to the channel my name is don felker and for those of you that are unfamiliar with who i am i'm a software developer and freelancer based in the united states and on this channel i help you start survive and thrive in the world of freelancing and in the world of software development in general and today we're going to talk about a topic that's called no code we'll also touch on something that's known as low code so the topic's really no code and low code let's get to it so this topic actually comes to us from a viewer who asked a question here is low code or no code something that i should worry about in the software industry and also inside of freelancing is it something that's going to take over the industry and what are my thoughts on it so i think before we can really hop into that let's talk about what no code really is if you've never really heard the word no code before it's basically a series of tools and platforms and technologies that allow you to build applications with no code basically nothing at all so it's a very descriptive word no code what's gonna happen is some of these platforms are all inclusive you can build an entire web app or a mobile application just kind of by clicking and dragging different components onto a canvas and connecting things up and then you at the end have a working web application or mobile application now no code also encompasses the ability to connect multiple different tools together to create a different type of application so you're integrating a bunch of different tools and i'm going to talk about tools at the end and things you can use to do so now the term low code is very similar to no code because low code is just like no code except you can code a little bit some of these platforms do allow you to write a little bit of code that you can perhaps update particular parts of the site or a web application maybe you can drop some javascript in there and modify a bit here and there or provide a little bit of scripting however it's not a full-blown programming environment where you can create a brand new application kind of like you could do in rails or python or javascript or anything like that so no code you're not gonna be writing a line of code at all these things are very attractive right now because a lot of business users and people who are not technical can take the idea that's in their head and build something in real time just by connecting the dots together there's a ton of tutorials out there if you're interested in this which i recommend you do look into just go look up no code tutorials and there's a bunch of websites out there that will show you how to build different things with no code technology and then of course you're probably going to touch into various things of low code if you need to do any type of scripting however not required you can completely build an application with no code so that's what it is so what are my thoughts on it is this something that's going to take over developers or is it going to put us out of a job is it going to put my freelancing career on hold because now companies can build things with no code what's the deal all right before i answer that question let's rewind back a number of years to when microsoft came out with a product called microsoft access if you've been around long enough where you've seen an access database access is basically a database technology that allowed users to build forms on top of a database with certain validation they could click and drag buttons over and input fields and certain things could be required there was validation that could be built in and it was just meant as a personal database for kind of personal tasks and what it ended up turning into as a side effect was people would build these databases internally at companies they would put them on shared drives and then they would share the database among different departments and people and large organizations internally would use these access databases there's many stories of companies that were running on access to run their entire business now does that mean that database developers or dbas or just software developers in general were without jobs all of a sudden because microsoft access came out which was technically a no code solution really or low code because you could do a little bit of scripting in there no it just meant that the problem moved somewhere else so there's still developers that were needed to write shell scripts and integrations with back-end technologies and custom websites and custom applications and all different types of things developers were always needed for cutting-edge technologies it's just that the problem domain had moved somewhere else it allowed business folks to develop something test it provide value prove a market prove a concept and then once they kind of worked out all the details and the bugs they could then bring in developers and say hey this thing i've built in access is very limited and i like what it does but i need it to do these 10 other things but we can't do that in access can we build an application that does that and at that point the developers would hop in take a look at the access database model the data correctly because most likely it wasn't modeled correctly early on and then build an application around it so that's how these things happened early on and the same thing happened and still does happen with tools like excel if you look at any company that runs with a lot of excel spreadsheets that's usually an opportunity that you can find a business opportunity in if a company is relying heavily on a spreadsheet to make any of its business decisions or run anything or calculations if you can reverse engineer that you basically have a product on your hand so that doesn't mean that developers are out of job it just means that someone is using that tool for specific use so these tools that are around nowadays will allow you to build mobile apps that will allow you to build custom web applications that accept payments restrict access to content so a lot of the things that you required developers for before it's not really needed anymore to do these basic things but that doesn't mean that developers are not needed it just means that developers are going to focus on other areas so that's what the next question really is like where do we go from here if the no code revolution takes off which it has already started what does that mean for developers where are they going to move next now it's hard to predict the future in anything because 20 years ago i was writing shell scripts and unix and downloading dialer files for automated call systems and now i'm writing mobile applications and web applications however one thing has remained constant in the last 20 years i've been writing web applications it's just the underlying technology has changed it went from static html and css which is all we really had at the time into cgi scripts into classic asp to php rails you name it there's a ton of frameworks out there that allow you to build web applications and they're only getting better and better and better and as more components come around it just enables me to build faster and faster it allows me to focus on different problems when before it might have taken me a month or two to get to a particular feature or a problem area in an application i might be able to get to it in a few hours or a few days it just makes me more effective because a lot of these tools are doing things for me already and the same thing with a no code revolution someone's going to build a web application with these different node code applications all these integrations together and they're going to get to a point where they needed to do something special and it can't do it it's just beyond the scope of what's available and what's possible out there in the various no code solutions now again there might be another no code solutions built to handle that okay that's fine but most likely what's gonna happen is the business owner has an opportunity they need to capitalize on it immediately what are they gonna do they're going to go out and find someone who can help solve that problem that problem solver is going to be a developer and they're going to reach out to you or somebody else to say hey here's our app it's a no code app but i need it to integrate with this thing over here now you may be able to figure out a way to leave that entire application a no code app and then just perhaps send off a web hook somewhere and you intercept it and then build that integration for them or you might realize that they are literally on the brink of disaster because everything's just teetering on this no code solution that just needs to be either rebuilt or built from the ground up or simply customized in certain areas to handle their business needs so as a developer your focuses are just going to shift and even if everything does become automated we just build websites going forward with no code what does that mean well it just means we're going to focus on different things 30-40 years ago or fortran developers they were just punch cards there was all kinds of stuff where people were building software back then those things don't exist anymore but there's still still tons of software developers out there we're just focusing on different problems at a higher level of abstraction so we're just going to get a higher level of distraction and we're going to focus on new problems 30 40 years ago we really didn't have machine learning and artificial intelligence and now we do so we're just going to focus on new things so do i think you should experiment with no code solutions absolutely i recommend that you go experiment and play with some of the no code tools i'm going to recommend in a minute and see how you can build a web application or a mobile application with them just to test out your ideas sometimes you might have a friend family member perhaps maybe you know someone who's a realtor and they need a particular they have an idea that they want to build an application with try to use a no code solution to just validate that idea that's going to allow you to save a ton of time and just allow you to get something in their hands so they can actually play with it to see if it's going to be useful rather than you spending months weeks months half a year or more building an application that you have no idea if it's even going to validate whatever assumptions that they do have all right so what are some examples of the tools out there that are available in the no code area so here are some no code tools that you can look into number one's gonna be webflow webflow is a tool that's going to allow you to build web applications it has a database component you can kind of render things conditionally it works very well you can connect it with multiple other services works pretty well can do custom domains and so forth it's also very similar in the way that it works as a no code solution to other site builders such as wordpress squarespace wix and a number of the other ones out there which brings up a good point wordpress is probably the original no code solution out there when wordpress was announced it was just a blog engine really and then slowly added the ability to have plugins and these plugins got really powerful and in fact i actually built the first version of my training platform which was caster.io which has now been shut down which i ran for over six years the first version i built on was wordpress the entire training platform was no code for a whole period of three and a half years and most people don't realize that the first year was 100 no code meaning i didn't write a line of code and in fact that was the rule that i set for myself when i wanted to start the business i thought i had this idea for a training business i wonder if it's going to work and as a developer the first thing i wanted to do was go write some code but i told myself that's a distraction that doesn't prove anything about the business i am not allowed to write any code until i validate the actual business idea so that's what i did is i fired up the application and put it on wordpress it was just a wordpress site and i used a couple of plugins to allow charging and restrict the content of the videos that i was selling online and i did that for a full year after about a year i had hired about three other instructors and then i needed to calculate certain royalties based upon viewing and watch time so i did have to write a little bit of code in the back end that ran every night more say that was a little bit of low code because the wordpress site still ran the main platform for the next two and a half years after that but every night i had a automated script that would run out and go check some stats and then just calculate some revenue that's what ran my training business for over three and a half years before i completely rewrote it in rails to be a fully customizable solution so those are going to be the first big ones you're going to want to look at for just like the whole website building type of scenario you're going to look at webflow you're gonna look at wordpress squarespace and wix okay so you got a website but a lot of times you need to put data somewhere so you need some type of database now of course you could go find a database and write sql and all that stuff but we're talking no code here so what are the biggest options out there again there's a lot of options so i'm not going to name them all but the two most popular in this realm are going to be google sheets and air table both of them will allow you to integrate directly with them they have apis that you can call into and store data in rows and columns inside of that you put data inside of sheets as well which you can think of them as tables airtable's very popular has very powerful api sheets probably not so powerful but you can still use it effectively and i have i did use it for a couple of years for a project which i'll talk about in a moment so check out google sheets and airtable when you're building applications sometimes you need to accept user input and you can do that of course with something like gravity forms which is a plug-in for wordpress that works very well or if you don't have a wordpress installation perhaps you're running a static site you can use something like typeform that allows you to quickly build forms you can even integrate with tools like stripe to provide payment details on the form that need to be submitted with the form so if you need to sell something you could have someone provide all the details that they need to provide and then provide the purchase price they could plug in their credit card information it integrates with stripe so the user will then be submitting their payment details and you'll get paid through stripe again not having to really write a single line of code now the payment one i already mentioned that stripe that's what i'm going to recommend now of course you can go with paypal as well however i find striped had the most level of integration simply because the way stripe has been built it has very powerful apis that run things on the backend so the integration points are phenomenal so definitely check out stripe if you're going to build anything that requires payments with no code now i would be remiss if i didn't mention this last one which is probably the best and biggest one of them all this is the integration elephant that i call it that is zapier zapier allows you to connect the internet basically if you want to connect a google sheet with a typeform form which means as someone enters something on typeform and they submit a payment then a row gets entered on google sheets you can do that if you want to get notified when a new row is entered into that google sheet and you want to have it send you a text message you can do that if you want to read from an rss feed and then publish it to a twitter feed you can do that if you can think of it once something happens i want something else to happen maybe it's someone's been added to an email list i want to automatically add them to another database or i want to automatically put them in some type of other funnel over in another software that i use most likely zapier can handle that you do get a free they're called zaps which are the unit of measurement of how you execute things inside of zapier i think you get about 10 zaps a month at the time of this recording for free highly recommend upgrading to a pro plan i have no affiliation with them whatsoever however it is something i've used for years and it's just probably one of the most useful things i've used so check out zapier probably one of the best no code solutions out there so lastly let's just ask the question does this stuff really work okay we hear about no code but who really uses no code as i mentioned i used no code for three and a half years to run my training platform my training platform at one point was grossing over five figures a month on wordpress so it's something that does work and will work for you again you're gonna reach a point in which you need to do something customizable and it may not work for you at that point in time but things like wordpress integrating with various plugins and stripe gravity forms etc and all of the access control plugins you can use give you a ton of flexibility another thing that i have done is i used webflow typeform stripe google sheets zapier and a email service provider to send emails all integrated together and that was what ran android jobs dot io for close to two and a half years it was a one hundred percent no code solution that generated over five figures a year so it's nothing that's gonna make you rich by any means but it's a nice side hustle income for you to create something and that ran for two and a half years as a strictly no code solution again my goal was not to write code that i had to maintain my goal was to ship a business that provided value and had economic benefit to myself so that was for two and a half years i've been now since moved it off onto another job board platform again i didn't want to write the code i didn't create the job platform i'm using another job platform to do that for me i liked it it seemed a lot more stable so that's why i went that direction all right let's talk about the cons of using no code this is something i have experience with in the real world for both my training site and for android jobs which was bolted together from multiple different integrations here's the thing things just start failing an integration is going to change perhaps a network times out and the payment doesn't go through and something gets declined you'll have a bunch of weird error scenarios eventually over time you have something called bitrot and bitrod is where your code just kind of gets old in this case these integrations start breaking the connections between them aren't working as well anymore it's not the fact that the connection broke it's just perhaps parameters have changed things are being done underneath the hood that you're not aware of and things break and then you have to hop back in and troubleshoot and figure out what's going on and since you don't own that platform a lot of times you have to relearn exactly what's going on end to end and if you haven't touched it in six months or more it can be very time consuming and frankly very frustrating because something that was working all of a sudden breaks and you didn't touch a thing so that's one of the biggest downfalls about no code and of course the other one is going to be eventually you possibly are going to outgrow it you're going to need features that are not available to you by bolting together all these integrations or it's simply going to turn into a huge spaghetti mess of integrations and you just want to simplify it so should you use a no-code solution you should definitely use a no-code solution simply because it's going to give you experience in that area and you're going to know what's coming through the entire industry at the time so play with it build something with it validate an idea with it it's going to work well for you now you're probably still going to keep developing software in whatever language you're using and if you're interested in learning the kotlin programming language i have a course that's available right here just click on that link in that nine hour plus long course i'll teach you kotlin from the ground up you don't need any prior existing knowledge or anything of that nature i'll show you everything you need to know to get running with kotlin 100 free feel free to check it out when you have time i hope that helps and i'll catch you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Donn Felker - Freelancing for Software Developers

Views: 7,692

Keywords: no code tools, no code website builder, no code saas, no code low code, software development, low code development, no code vs low code, no code development platform, no code app development, no code software development, no code application development, webflow review, zapier, webflow, wordpress, typeform, stripe, google sheets, airtable, no code re, no code revolution, freelancing and no code, code vs no code, low code, no code development, what is no code development

Id: 1QHwZL238WU

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021