Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift. — Dante Alighieri
The birth of No-Code Softwares
The power to create tech solutions has stayed with software engineers for years. Regardless of the industry, whenever a brand needed a tech solution implemented they came to us, the ones who could build anything from an empty file, I'm sure you sense the pride in my tone . But over the last few years, the use cases for software solutions and the tools required to implement them have gotten more complicated, which has led to the need for larger software teams, longer development timelines, and all these have contributed to making software solutions more expensive to build.
For small to medium-sized brands paying a software team millions to build a service for them might not be a good idea, hence brands and businesses began the search for software solutions that were fast to get up and running and were cheaper and of course innovators listened to their requests.
Fast forward to recent times we have seen a deluge of these so-called no-code platforms allowing pretty much anyone to set up services for various industries with little or no help. We have witnessed the release of some very impressive no-code solutions - I mean these days a seller can go from screaming we are still taking orders on their WhatsApp stories to having a fully functional eCommerce solution in a couple of hours without contacting a developer.
Combine that with statements like "The future of coding is no coding at all." - Chris Wanstrath the fear ought to kick in. Also, in case you were wondering why we should care what Chris thinks he is a former CEO at GitHub.
In the middle of this invasion is there any hope for developers?
The bootstrap paradox
The bootstrap paradox is a hypothetical causal loop in time travel in which one event causes a second, which was actually the cause of the first. Netflix's Dark does a good job of explaining this.
Yeah I know you are wondering what time travel concepts have to do with any of this but bear with me. Essentially as developers, our job is to build solutions for the future. Developers built these no-code platforms in the first place and in doing so we also secured the relevance of our own existence.
Companies who rely on these no-code solutions will continue to request more features that better suit their needs and solves their problems and developers would always be there to ensure that these features and updates are implemented and hence an endless cycle is created.
There would also be companies who need to solve bigger unique problems outside the capabilities of these no-code services, and without an understanding of the complex algorithms happening behind the scenes you can't build tools and services that either simplify or eliminate their problems.
These platforms exist because of brilliant developers, and brilliant developers are always working on new and better ways to solve problems so upcoming developers just learning HTML and CSS should not be scared of getting replaced but instead should know they just have to do more to separate themselves from the average group.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” —Buckminster Fuller
Stay Safe.