2024-02-22 22:23:53

From Excel to the ‘do it yourself’ culture

It may seem like a very groundbreaking idea, but Jepsen highlights that attempts to “turn programming into a process without technical difficulty and accessible to everyone” go back a long way, to initiatives such as the COBOL language, developed by Mary Hawkes in 1959. , a valuable tool that, even today, continues to be used by financial systems, insurance companies and a large number of institutions. Although COBOL is not, strictly speaking, a ‘no code’ tool, it is proof that we have been betting on simplicity and accessibility for almost three quarters of a century.

This trend accelerated during the COVID-19 health crisis, a period of the massive emergence of the so-called ‘citizen developers’, that is, a large contingent of people capable of creating web applications for personal or business use from tools no code or little code. In Jepsen’s words, the material conditions already existed, but companies needed to bet more and more decisively on amateur development ‘software’, a cultural change brought regarding by the shortage of personnel with programming skills that the pandemic brought and the current accelerated automation process.

Pedro Ortiz, innovation expert at the EDEM business school, assures that right now It is perfectly possible to develop a specific application without having to write a single line of code. It is enough to resort to some of the ‘no code’ tools that have proliferated in recent years, equipped with increasingly intuitive interfaces and configured based on a series of modules. Ortiz cites platforms for creating custom mobile applications such as Glide, Adalo, AppSheet and Thunkable, creating landing pages in advertising campaigns such as Unbounce or Instapage, designing and managing web content such as Hubspot CMS, e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, productivity organizing tools like Notion or even programming language ‘translators’ like Bubble.

Among the most common and consolidated ones is WordPress, which has been used since 2003 to create both commercial and personal websites. David Bonilla, founder and director of the Manfred employment platform, considers that all this bouquet of options is, to a certain extent, the child of Excel: “the effective and versatile Microsoft spreadsheet that we have been using for more than 20 years and which has accustomed us all to developing our own solutions without the need for technical knowledge.”

More and more companies are asking their employees to introduce themselves to the use of new ‘no code’ tools as they previously asked them to master Excel. This is due, according to Bonilla, to the fact that there are not enough people for all the companies in the process of digitalization and technological leap develop custom code, as was done until now. So there are two options: hire ‘software’ as a service (SaaS), which is the equivalent of replacing tailored suits with the much more democratic ‘prêt-à-porter’ (ready to wear), or resort to ‘low code’ and ‘no code’, the two variants of “do it yourself”. “If I cannot have a programmer to make me a custom suit, I can resort to an intermediate option,” Bonilla concludes, “and that will cover my needs in 80% or 90% of the cases.”

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