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The article's thesis can be summed up as "low-code and other UI development trends (eg, non-2D) are taking over, but there will be plenty of opportunities for U

The article's thesis can be summed up as "low-code and other UI development trends (eg, non-2D) are taking over, but there will be plenty of opportunities for UI developers if they adapt". However I find the premise that low-code is taking over highly questionable. It may be for some use cases, but they will likely remain just a small slice of the pie in the big picture. Judging by the amount of job offers alone, React is also taking over - to the chagrin of some, and the delight of others -, yet React is anything but low-code. We all know the limitations of low-code solutions too: they're good up until a certain point, they make you feel like an utter genius for the speed at which you are shipping, causing nods of approval and high fives all-around. That is, until you want to stray out of the trodden path: then you wish you hadn't adopted them in the first place, and that behemoth of a React or Angular app you shipped last year suddenly elicits the nostalgia of a long-lost lover with all its shortcomings and misgivings. So it is hard to believe that the next 10 years will see the decline of custom UI 2D development, or anything close to it. I'd wager if anything low-code will be another tool in the developer's toolbox, and shipping great products at speed will mean carefully architecting them to mix and match the best of both worlds. On the other hand, I predict that those going all-guns-blazing on no-code will encounter some unpleasant surprises at best, and in the worst cases will see spectacular project implosions. Such has been the history of radical cost-cutting and time-saving measures in software engineering in the last 30 years (outsourcing, low-code itself, etc.). And so it goes...

lwhi 6y ago
I completely agree. Conceptually, no and low code tools allow you tred along the _trodden_ path. Sooner or later you're going to want to go somewhere new, and when you do want to provide something custom where do you go? Dreamweaver tried to do this in the 90s and failed, personally I still think we're a long way off from a generalised solution.
timvdalen 6y ago
One thing that I see happening time and time again with solutions aimed at less-technical users, is that they inevitably end up being pushed to more technically inclined users as they are still seen as 'too technical'. As a result, these users work with very limited options while they could (much more easily) build something from scratch. A concrete example of this is Google Tag Manager, which was made so online marketeers could implement tracking without having to involve software engineers. In the end, the actual implementation of anything non-trivial is pushed to a software engineer, who has to spend time fighting the system to implement basic things without proper version control that could have been implemented on the actual site in a fraction of the time. As I write this, I realize that the thing that irks me the most about this is that it is a complete departure from the 'normal' agreed upon way to do proper software engineering, with all the tools that go along with that. Working in a 'low-code' system almost always means changing your entire process (which often goes against everything we've learned over the last decades of software development).
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  At this point in my career, it is very apparent to me, that if you offer a B2B service and provide a way to customize the look and content, the end-user would rather pay you to do it, instead of struggling w another UI.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  What I'm seeing nowadays is that very often, businesses want 'monkey solutions'. People think that no matter what is problem, there's an easy solution to it,or they just want to click one button and all the magic happens. There's unwillingness to learn,to understand,or want to figure out. No wonder those companies who still want to do difficult stuff raking billions,while everyone else is left behind.
cosmodisk 6y ago
I work with low code aka Salesforce. Have been doing it for nearly 6 years. Apart from some abstractions on integrations( eg. Dell Boomi, Mulesoft), anything a bit more complicated requires proper development. After a year of using low code only options I was like "screw this,I need to learn programming", to do all the complex stuff I want to do. There a lots of ready baked UI components that can be used to build stuff but we are nowhere close to what some less technical people may think. It's still lots of JS, Python,or Java behind all those fancy abstractions.

lwhi 6y ago

I completely agree. Conceptually, no and low code tools allow you tred along the _trodden_ path. Sooner or later you're going to want to go somewhere new, and when you do want to provide something custom where do you go? Dreamweaver tried to do this in the 90s and failed, personally I still think we're a long way off from a generalised solution.

timvdalen 6y ago

One thing that I see happening time and time again with solutions aimed at less-technical users, is that they inevitably end up being pushed to more technically inclined users as they are still seen as 'too technical'. As a result, these users work with very limited options while they could (much more easily) build something from scratch. A concrete example of this is Google Tag Manager, which was made so online marketeers could implement tracking without having to involve software engineers. In the end, the actual implementation of anything non-trivial is pushed to a software engineer, who has to spend time fighting the system to implement basic things without proper version control that could have been implemented on the actual site in a fraction of the time. As I write this, I realize that the thing that irks me the most about this is that it is a complete departure from the 'normal' agreed upon way to do proper software engineering, with all the tools that go along with that. Working in a 'low-code' system almost always means changing your entire process (which often goes against everything we've learned over the last decades of software development).

daniellarusso 6y ago
At this point in my career, it is very apparent to me, that if you offer a B2B service and provide a way to customize the look and content, the end-user would rather pay you to do it, instead of struggling w another UI.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cosmodisk 6y ago
What I'm seeing nowadays is that very often, businesses want 'monkey solutions'. People think that no matter what is problem, there's an easy solution to it,or they just want to click one button and all the magic happens. There's unwillingness to learn,to understand,or want to figure out. No wonder those companies who still want to do difficult stuff raking billions,while everyone else is left behind.

cosmodisk 6y ago

I work with low code aka Salesforce. Have been doing it for nearly 6 years. Apart from some abstractions on integrations( eg. Dell Boomi, Mulesoft), anything a bit more complicated requires proper development. After a year of using low code only options I was like "screw this,I need to learn programming", to do all the complex stuff I want to do. There a lots of ready baked UI components that can be used to build stuff but we are nowhere close to what some less technical people may think. It's still lots of JS, Python,or Java behind all those fancy abstractions.