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I'm a full-time developer, but I had a recent need for some quick internal tooling coincide with a HN posting about Budibase, and it sent me down a low code/no
by sverhagen 5y ago
I'm a full-time developer, but I had a recent need for some quick internal tooling coincide with a HN posting about Budibase, and it sent me down a low code/no code rabbit hole. I evaluated a bunch of tools in that segment briefly, and spent a nontrivial amount of time on Budibase and Appsmith. And while I admire what they're trying to do, it was a disappointing journey. I made no serious progress, then threw together what I had in mind in React in half the time. Having spent some of this time researching that field, there sure seems to be a renaissance of what we'd call RAD (rapid application development) when I came of age. But it's astonishing how little progress was made since then. A younger me built some "applications" in Microsoft Access, which was not at all more frustrating than using these current day tools. So, Citizen Developers... good luck!
- habeebtc 5y agoI am old enough to recall RAD, and young enough to have seen a few of these low/no code solutions come and go. Don't get me wrong. I love them as a coder. Once I get the hang of them, I can bang out powerful stuff in a few minutes. The problem is (IMO) to get to that level, you have to already be a coder to some extent. I strongly suspect this stated success story had a ton of upskilling help from MSFT, if not hand-holding. I would not bet on a non-coder coming fresh to these platforms and building something useful with no other context. In their current state they are likely to be (very powerful) lazy programmer tools. Until there is some paradigm shift I do not see the "Citizen Developer" becoming a practical reality. A field tech who crimps ethernet all day is going to have to learn some programmer skills to make a power app that pulls data from an API, parses the JSON and then does something useful with it.