The future is here with exciting new low-code and no-code software development platforms that save companies time and money. Ok, this may not be exciting to you from a development standpoint, as it is for me, but I know everyone loves to save a boatload of money when they can. I will crawl into the details of where we are seeing and using low-code and no-code tools for client software projects, and if you are a founder or CTO, how you can take your project to market faster.

Low-Code and No-Code tools have been around for a while.

1. Content Management Systems - (CMS) have been present for about 20 years. They have evolved thanks to solutions like Wix, which incorporated all the functionalities of a website:
   1. Used for quick content changes and blog posting.
   2. Creation of SSL certificates (encrypted secure web connections).
   3. Setting up analytics and tag management scripts for tracking.
   4. Updating DNS entries (a human-friendly name to a DNS server) and changing name servers.
      
      

      

2. eCommerce - You can launch a store without knowing anything about coding using Shopify.
3. Data Pipelines - If you have had to pull data from various sources into your analytics and data warehouse platforms and you worked with solutions like Fivetran.com, you know that you will not have to go back to building a data pipeline yourself. The Fivetran tagline is “The most reliable pipelines you will ever build.”  They are right about that. Their tool is highly reliable and will save thousands of dollars in your cost of maintaining system integrations.

An example might be to tie your Google Analytics to Amazon spending with ads to your LinkedIn account and then connect all of that to your sales in Shopify conversions from SalesForce. You could create your own "Mission Control."

Back Office Apps I Love.

Retool.com has a custom back office app solution that always starts simply. And because of their simplicity, their solution is powerful. One example of why I love Retool is when a client asks, "hey, I need to see how many customers we have in the UI and be able to search by email address?"  Our answer is, "Sure, we can make a simple CRUD app from this single SQL table in a day or two." CRUD is engineer-speak meaning (create-retrieve-update-delete).

The following month client asks, "Can we add a search based on mobile?" We say "yes ." After that client asks: "We have this weird bug; we need to cancel and approve customer accounts to mitigate the bug. Can we do it from this app?" We tell them, "Absolutely; we can do that on Monday; we'll add a button and call this 'function.'"

Low-code and no-code tools can save your company from a Software Meltdown.

I have seen cases where a business built an internal software system that started humbly, for example, five years ago, with some simple lines of code. Today that simple beginning has turned into 500,000 lines of code. This is a case where the business had now taken on considerable Technical Debt. We call a scenario like that "Godzilla," named after the 1954 B-movie film that featured a destructive and oversized monster that terrorized local towns.

In software development parlance, no one wants to touch a "Godzilla project" because it's one 'big monster' of messy code developed ad-hoc as the company grew. These home-grown internal back office apps always have ugly user interfaces, outdated styles, and legacy technologies. And they rarely work on your phone. This would be a case where it's best not to engage with the monster, stand down, and instead rebuild with a low-code and no-code solution.

We saved Bruno.ai a boatload of time and money using Retool.com's back office.

Bruno.ai has been a MarTech startup with founders in the marketing and SEO business for several years. In 2020 they had an idea that they wanted to build the most accessible and straightforward way to use Ranktracker, business software that measures SEO effectiveness. Their previous dev team was missing deadlines, and their project was very much off-course. Goddit.io took over their project. And we used Retool.com as the platform for back-office management for their project. Our key take-ways were:

• Retool.com is blazingly fast and saved Bruno.ai the cost of hiring a senior frontend React.JS dev. Their product manager designs the UI on his own. He completed the task in a week. 
• I value great design and products that create maximum efficiency. We were impressed that Retool keeps all the critical logic in one spot. My company maintained the business logic in a single place in our code repo. We hooked up Lambda functions and REST API calls to our system. The Retool platform handles all UI and permissions.
• We can publish multiple apps for different roles. Bruno.ai's CEO recognized more data than the company's employees. His cost of implementing permission checking was $0.
• We didn't have to write any code which handles pagination, filtering, and searching. As trivial as it sounds, this saved the company thousands of dollars in development hours.
• We published the iOS app for the user so that the PM can trigger the actions while he's on the subway traveling to the office (it is best to do this for the most often used cases, it's a startup - there is no fully operational customer service yet ;). Cost of iOS Swift Dev: $0

It took us only a few days to set up Retool for Bruno.ai, and we loved working with it. Why? This low-code tool made for speedy project delivery and saved this customer a great deal of money. It made us faster and more efficient.

It will speed your delivery by working with developers that use Low-Code and No-Code tools.

Even though we are a development team, we will not rebuild back-office tools for our clients from scratch. It is a waste of time and no longer necessary with today's technologies. Long live the 'No and Low code platforms'; the future of software development is here today.