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In my B2B saas company we massively increased customer satisfaction by making it easy to integrate with retool and metabase and then letting anyone internal or external extend the product with new views and functionality.
Having said that, I have been working with Microsoft PowerAutomate for the past 1.5 years and while it has saved a lot of time and been overall a good experience, there are times when the no code/low code gets in the way and I wish I could just "drop into code" to get something done. Examples are things like data validation. This technology is not going to replace coding, the paradigm shift is really happening for people in the marketing and sales operations parts of the business. For these folks, this tech is life changing. In a lot of ways, this tech felt like when you try a new framework in your language of choice; at first it's super easy and you get hyped, and then you hit a requirement where the nocode/lowcode environment really gets in the way.
It's not a movement, more like a mini-trend based on rediscovery of an old idea. At least not a pure investor duping like "metaverse".
> Clearly these apps/platforms enable non-developers to solve a bunch of problems which would otherwise need a software engineer. Is this a paradigm shift?
If it is, it happened in the last century and many times since then already. You could still hype it up for a new domain to grab some investor money, I guess.
I previously was supporting a company integration with Appian (building the AWS/Webservices integrating the two halves), which bills itself as a Low Code platform for Business Process Management. And their hello world example kind of worked fine for getting "a business person" to "write code". So the idea was they get these business people to write code instead of developers. But the problem with this platform was that we had to eventually get full time software developers (so no cost savings there, but also had the issue of these devs were now niche developers and not learning broader skill sets). Because their graphical development didn't cut it, so they had to drop down into their code proprietary DSL. Then the actual platform was a mess of no cicd, bad disaster recovery, bad monitoring, bad everything. It would have been cheaper and easier to literally just write a business process management from scratch in whatever language we wanted.
tl;dr No code, low code, graphical programming is a fad.
The "no-code" desire has been around for decades -- just using different terms. E.g. in 1980s and 1990s, a common phrase for new tools that didn't require programmers was "self-service" ... like Crystal Reports software for "self-service reports without programming".
To put it in perspective, consider that Microsoft Excel is a "no-code" tool. In the old days before desktop computers, if a business person wanted to look at a report of sales amounts grouped a different way, he would ask the COBOL programmers in the IT department for a "change request" and they'd do the following:
- "code" new punch cards for the mainframe: https://www.google.com/search?q=mainframe+punch+cards&source...
- load of magnetic tapes (each held about 40 megabytes) of the sales data: https://www.google.com/search?q=mainframe+9-track+tape&sourc...
- get a new report on greenbar paper: https://www.google.com/search?q=greenbar+paper&source=lnms&t...
Now, any office worker can do the above with a "no-code" tool like MS Excel with pivot tables, filters, etc. Even though Excel eliminates a lot of coding work, the demand for programmers keeps going up. No matter what "no-code" tool is invented, the world keeps inventing new tasks for human programmers to do that today's no-code tool can't do. There's always a delta in capabilities.
Graphical "low-code" programming has been around for a long time in e.g. the control systems community, where people typically have strong math am physics backgrounds (e.g., knowledge of vehicle dynamics), but little experience with programming or software engineering.
Matlab Simulink and LabVIEW are well-known products that offer a low code approach to these fields. Large and complex projects are done with these tools.
IMO the complexity is shifted from interacting with the hardware to wrestling with the tools, e.g. version control, knowing what happens exactly and cooperation is really hard.
On the flip side, my wife and I ran a home bakery for a while and I LOVED the website builder we used. Click, click, click - full integration with credit card processing, email handling, etc. No way I'd sit there at night hand building a website.
It's interesting, but always calibrate their claims against the fact this is about the tenth time this movement has come around. This movement literally goes back to COBOL. That is not a typo. It's not only likely older than you are, but probably much older than you are. I recognize COBOL may not seem like "no-code", but that's just because "no-code" is a stupid label. "No-code" doesn't mean "no code" just like "serv…
I am an engineer with 20+ years of hands on keyboard, I've got projects that are now part of Apache, 1000's of stars on github. I've been CTO at a number of startups that have got significant funding. My point is to establish some credibility. I probably still suck. Having said that, I have been working with Microsoft PowerAutomate for the past 1.5 years and while it has saved a lot of time and been overall a good ex…
Since you're using PowerPlatform you can prob easily do that with Microsoft's Power FX, built - I believe - especially for this.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/power-fx/ove...