No-Code and Low-Code Are The Wrong Focus Right Now

No-Code and Low-Code software development. Recent articles give you the feeling that we should be screaming in on two wheels and not just trying it out, but embracing it as the BEST way to go in the future:

• "The Most Disruptive Trend Of 2021: No Code / Low Code" - Forbes.com
• "No-code/low-code: Why you should be paying attention" - venturebeat.com
• "The power and possibilities of no-code: Creatio releases first vendor-agnostic playbook" - venturebeat.com
• "Why low-code and no-code can be a route through recession" - IT Pro

I am a HUGE fan of this new movement and what it offers up to everyone. I agree with those who say it has its place, and isn't for everyone, but that is not what I want to share today. I am sure 800 other folks have gone into that just fine. (see this post for some well-done, deeper insight)

What is not being discussed, and what I believe is a better topic to be focused on right now, is the idea of building software via functionality.

"Huh?"

What's the difference, right? You build software with code. Or no code. Or low code. But functionality is always the result.

That is true, but it is simply how we've built software to this point. Some person comes up with an idea, some geeks write the code, and (hopefully) the result is eventually received. All kinds of good things have come from this!

But this methodology of innovation is no longer feasible nor practical. Over time, the more we built, and the more we learned about coding software, the deeper the geeks like me got into the weeds of it all. The more the business people, the dreamers and innovators stayed OUT of the weeds.

Back in the 80's the gap was not all that huge; you often had smart business leaders writing snips of code alongside heavily-caffeinated and pork rind-eating masters of the keyboard. Not the Jordan Rudess kind of keyboard, but the computer keyboard where all the magic happened. I still hear the sound of those huge keys clacking along quickly as master coders did their magic, ending with a <THUMP!> as they hit the enter key to announce they were done.

We thought THAT was the gap between dreamers and do-ers. The gap is much larger now. Over time the complexity and depth of the software coding grew, causing the smart business people to remain "over there", feeding ideas over the wall (or under the door with more pizza) to the developers. It became an obvious "us vs. them" tug of war between what the business side wanted and what the developers felt was best.

A recent stat sounds obvious enough: " According to a recent survey by Appian, a huge 82% of organizations cannot hire and keep as many qualified software engineers as they would want." (article here) Kind of an obvious yawner of a stat, but consider that it comes in the context of the No/Low-Code discussion. The stat is to make you think that the gap can be filled by the re-emergence of those smart business people like in the 80s.

They call it "Citizen Development". It is really more like "Non-Pork Rind Development". This scares me. Let's put the power of building systems into the hands of people with little to no skill in what it takes to build software? Just because there are fewer people building software (average age of today's software dev is 40.5 and growing 0.152%), and the ideas are flowing at a huge pace, the whole concept of low/no-code has evolved. "We've got to build the software and if YOU won't do it, we'll have to!"

Now before the haters chime in, let me clarify. I don't want to squelch the innovation. In fact I want to EXPLODE it. I don't want to hold back the smart business people from building software themselves. I want to ENCOURAGE it! Kudos to those who are embracing this new way of building software!

But do you notice something? Other than my mentioning pork rinds too much? We are still talking about writing code, just shifting who writes it and how much of it. No Code software is giving you a blank canvas. Sure, some have nice templates, but in general you have to be the one building out software by choosing the text box to use. The chart to show data. The dropdown list for choosing a state code.

We are all trying to make you developers. "You can build the software now!"

The issue is that there are now smart business people wrinkling their noses at the idea of it. "I want my IDEA to come to life. I don't want to learn how to be a developer. Even without code." You quickly have a database of whatever, sure. But you are 100% tied to the tool you used to create that. And there are more and more vendors providing tools for it. Did you choose the right one? What happens when you want to migrate it? What if you want something bigger than a new version of a recipe manager (the cool first database app to make in the 80s)?

I want to see software development take a turn. Instead of being all about US DEVELOPERS giving you the tools, I want it to be about YOU SMART BUSINESS PEOPLE telling us devs what you want. And we build that.

You want an app that sends an email when something happens? No problem. You want to import data from a CSV file that is sent to you every day? Got it. Each of those things written 1000 different ways in 1000 different languages, none of it done by the business person.

"Isn't that No Code?" No. Not the way No Code is being built today.

I want a catalog of building block pieces, big and small, that work perfectly. Tied together through an ecosystem of standard connections. If your "lego" block that sends SMS is not efficient, goes away, or no longer meets your needs, you just swap it out for a different one that does the same job. Who cares who wrote the SMS block? Who cares if it is located in Toronto, Tallahassee or Timbuktu?

I want software innovators to build the BEST blocks. To provide rock solid, performant, wicked cool blocks. I want the crap to die out but I want the 18 yr old kid to build one alongside the 30 year veteran. I want them to innovate and make great stuff.

I want the business and life innovators to come up with new ideas. New ways of thinking. Freed up from screens and text boxes. I want people to build systems and automations that just work...giving them functionality they can use.

I want the discussion to be about the functionality that is available to the innovators. "Hey, did you know that if you overlay that airplane flight path data with carbon usage data, you can see how X correlates with Y and that changing flight paths might actually have a positive impact on our crops?"

True innovation. True discovery. True change. The focus cannot be about how much code we write, and how to fill a growing gap between smart innovators and smart developers. We need to build software differently to open the floodgates of new ideas to great progress.