No-code tools

There's many different ways to build a website. From static HTML/CSS files, to using a modern JavaScript framework, to a traditional serverside language like PHP or Python.

All these approaches use code to determine how the website should look and work - and that's what we as developers are used to working with.

But in the last few years, there's been a surge of "no-code" and "low-code" platforms to make it even easier to create websites.

These platforms are usually designed for non-developers, to enable more people to create a website without needing to know how to code.

On one hand, this can be scary for us developers. We might spend a lot of time learning one way to code a website - only for it to then be possible to create a site entirely using drag-and-drop theme builders. It might feel like these tools potentially take away our jobs!

Personally, however, I believe that no-code tools are a great addition to the overall development ecosystem and nothing to be scared of:

  1. No-code website builders make it easy to create "simple" websites. Think marketing / landing pages, brochure websites etc. That is, read-only websites designed to convey information with very light interactivity.
  2. No-code tools often get a website 90% of the way. But it's very hard to create a website entirely using no-code that looks and works exactly how you'd like it to.

As a front-end developer, I still see a giant need for more complex web applications that no-code tools simply can't create right now. And if we can use no-code tools to build the simpler websites, that'll free up our time to work on those harder problems.

Additionally, no-code tools can be a huge asset for developers mostly working on the simpler types of sites as their job or as freelancers. Because all things aside, it's gonna be faster to create a no-code site than to code it entirely from scratch. And even though no-code tools are targeted at less technical people, developers especially can make great use of them to rapidly create cool sites.

I definitely don't think we should be scared of no-code tools. We should embrace them instead, and see them as a way to simplify the trivial parts of our jobs so we can work on more interesting problems.

And don't worry: the demand for devs in the job market is not going down any time soon.