The paradox of the happy no-code-developer

A presentation about the Automation Tools: Airtable and Zapier and how I created the seecfp.com tool. I also spoke about the future of such development tools on the programming landscape and problem-solving vs coding.

Transcript

1. THE PARADOX OF THE HAPPY NO-CODE-DEVELOPER DWX 2021 – TIMOTHÉE BOURGUIGNON @TIMOTHEP – TIMBOURGUIGNON.FR – MATHEMA.DE
2. The story of an itch that needed scratching CHAPTER 1/6
4. @timothep
5. 1. Gather CFPs 2. Publish them on a website 3. Send a weekly newsletter 4. Tweet at regular interval
6. ▪Submit CFPs via a public form ▪Persist the CFPs with a few attributes ▪Validate each CFP manually ▪Administer the data ▪Subscribe to the newsletter ▪Create and send a weekly newsletter ▪Tweet about the CFPs ▪Parse Tweets and RSS-Feeds to automatically add new CFPs
7. WHICH TOOLS WOULD YOU USE?
9. (Antwort von 2019) ▪ Azure Table Storage ▪ Vue.Js lightweight frontends ▪ REST Backend & Table Bindings ▪ Serverless Functions ▪ Time Triggered Function ▪ Azure SendMail ▪ Logic Apps for the Bots?
10. JUST BEAR-LY EASIER…
11. WHAT WE WANT TO DO IS SIMPLE ...WHY IS IT SO COMPLICATED TO BUILD?
13. ARNAUD PORTERIE FOUNDER “ECHOES HQ” EX-DOCKER SENIOR ENG-MGR AIRTABLE & ZAPIER
14. AIRTABLE
15. AIRTABLE EXAMPLE
16. ZAPIER
17. ZAPIER EXAMPLE
18. AIRTABLE + ZAPIER
19. I’M HAVING A BAD IDEA
20. without writing any line of code? using only existing services? binding them with an orchestrating service?
21. CRAZY…
22. WWW.SEECFP.COM
23. The story of an itch that needed scratching PART 1 How I built SeeCfP.com CHAPTER 2/6
24. AIRTABLE ZAPIER MSFLOW MAILCHIMP GMAIL DATABASE, UI & FORMS MAILING ORCHESTRATION, VALIDATION & BOTS (+STATIC GITHUB PAGES WEBSITE)
25. CFPs Table @itcfplist @cfp_exchange @cloc_wise @confstech RSS Admin review Admin notification Submission form Add CFPs to weekly email digest Weekly Newsletter User Airtable Zapier Gmail Mailchimp Flow Self-hosted static- website with the CFP DB as an iFrame Consults CFPs Parsing & insertion @timothep
26. CFPs Table @itcfplist @cfp_exchange @cloc_wise @confstech RSS Admin review Admin notification Submission form Add CFPs to weekly email digest Weekly Newsletter User Airtable Zapier Gmail Mailchimp Flow Self-hosted static- website with the CFP DB as an iFrame Consults CFPs Parsing & insertion @timothep
27. CFPs Table @itcfplist @cfp_exchange @cloc_wise @confstech RSS Admin review Admin notification Submission form Add CFPs to weekly email digest Weekly Newsletter User Airtable Zapier Gmail Mailchimp Flow Self-hosted static- website with the CFP DB as an iFrame Consults CFPs Parsing & insertion @timothep
28. CFPs Table @itcfplist @cfp_exchange @cloc_wise @confstech RSS Admin review Admin notification Submission form Add CFPs to weekly email digest Weekly Newsletter User Airtable Zapier Gmail Mailchimp Flow Self-hosted static- website with the CFP DB as an iFrame Consults CFPs Parsing & insertion @timothep
29. CFPs Table @itcfplist @cfp_exchange @cloc_wise @confstech RSS Admin review Admin notification Submission form Add CFPs to weekly email digest Weekly Newsletter User Airtable Zapier Gmail Mailchimp Flow Self-hosted static- website with the CFP DB as an iFrame Consults CFPs Parsing & insertion @timothep
30. CFPs Table @itcfplist @cfp_exchange @cloc_wise @confstech RSS Admin review Admin notification Submission form Add CFPs to weekly email digest Weekly Newsletter User Airtable Zapier Gmail Mailchimp Flow Self-hosted static- website with the CFP DB as an iFrame Consults CFPs Parsing & insertion @timothep
31. CFPs Table @itcfplist @cfp_exchange @cloc_wise @confstech RSS Admin review Admin notification Submission form Add CFPs to weekly email digest Weekly Newsletter User Airtable Zapier Gmail Mailchimp Flow Self-hosted static- website with the CFP DB as an iFrame Consults CFPs Parsing & insertion @timothep
32. CFPs Table @itcfplist @cfp_exchange @cloc_wise @confstech RSS Admin review Admin notification Submission form Add CFPs to weekly email digest Weekly Newsletter User Airtable Zapier Gmail Mailchimp Flow Self-hosted static- website with the CFP DB as an iFrame Consults CFPs Parsing & insertion @timothep
33. 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 2018 2019 2020 2021 Entries on SeeCFP Sessionize Entries Marketshare for Sessionize
34. FROM NO-CODE TO LOW-CODE
35. CFPs Table @itcfplist @cfp_exchange @cloc_wise @confstech RSS Admin review Admin notification Submission form Add CFPs to weekly email digest Weekly Newsletter User Airtable Zapier Gmail Mailchimp Flow Self-hosted static- website with the CFP DB as an iFrame Consults CFPs Parsing & insertion Sessionize Data Extraction with „Zapier Code“ & Python @timothep
37. ▪ All requirements met? ▪ Without writing any line of code? ▪ Using only existing services? ▪ Binding them with an orchestrating service? ▪ Mandatory cat picture?
38. The story of an itch that needed scratching PART 1 “Just for fun” CHAPTER 3/6
39. Company Focus Financial No-Code Tools used Lambda School Learning Platform $122M Funding Typeform, Airtable, Retool, Webflow, Salesforce, Calendly and Zapier Comet.co Online Job Board $13M Funding Bubble Kollecto Art Marketplace $30K/Monthly Revenue Strikingly, Typeform, Plasso, Stripe, Paypal and Bubble Dividend Finance Green Energy Funding $380M Funding Bubble Makerpad No-Code Learning Platform $4.4M Funding Webflow, Stripe, Zapier, Airtable and Convertkit Plato Mentorship Platform $3.3M Funding Bubble Qoins Finance Coaching $750K Funding Bubble Followup Edge Sales Funneling $30K/Monthly Revenue Bubble and Zapier Sources: Stories | Makerpad.co The 10 Most impressive startups built with no-code | no-code.ch
40. The story of an itch that needed scratching PART 1 Microservices² CHAPTER 4/6
41. “REMEMBER HOW FUN IT WAS TO CREATE OUR OWN STRING-MANIPULATION AND XML-PARSING LIBRARIES?”
42. ▪ OS ▪ SourceControl ▪ CloudHosting ▪ Browsers ▪ Databases ▪ OR-Mappers ▪ UI Frameworks ▪ …
43. ▪Give me a good reason why Wordpress isn’t “good-enough” Source: Joost.blog & W3Techs
44. “Reinventing the wheel” APIs Time Libraries
45. „The microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.“ Martin Fowler @timothep
46. The Rapidly Expanding No-Code Landscape (Nasscom 2021)
47. The story of an itch that needed scratching PART 1 Problem Solver or Software Developer? CHAPTER 5/6
48. LOVE CODE OR CREATIVITY?
50. ▪ Less technical knowledge required CODE IS RARELY THE PROBLEM
51. START SIMPLE & ITERATE
52. 1. RAD, Prototyping & Market-Fit Research 2. Automation, Interna- facing systems & process streamlining 3. When you don’t want to deal with infrastructure!
53. NO-CODE ≠ NO-KNOWLEDGE
54. The story of an itch that needed scratching PART 1 Let’s wrap up! CHAPTER 6/6
55. LOW/NO-CODE IS HERE TO STAY, ACCEPT IT!
57. ▪Code is not always the solution ▪We are problem solvers first, software engineers second
58. https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-best-code-is-no-code-at-all
59. TIMOTHÉE BOURGUIGNON ▪ Chief-Learning-Officer, Head-of- Agile, Team-Coach and Mentoring- Evangelist at MATHEMA GmbH ▪ Podcast Host: https://devjourney.info ▪ Contact: @timothep, https://timbourguignon.fr „DAS PARADOX DES GLÜCKLICHEN OHNE-CODE- ENTWICKLERS“