4 Reasons Why Low-code Is Great For Professional Developers

Recently I wrote the story “Coding Is Dead”. One of the readers asked a great question, “Why will low-code or no-code be beneficial for professional developers”. It wasn’t that clear why it would be great for professional developers to use low-code platforms.

In this story, I want to dive a bit more into why it’s an excellent thing for professional developers to use low-code platforms.

What is low-code?

I talked a lot about low-code lately, but let’s start with a definition of why I mean with “low-code”.

Low-code is a visual approach to software development. With low-code, you can abstract and automate every step of the application lifecycle to streamline delivery of a variety of solutions. Source: Mendix

I think that Mendix wrote a clear definition of what low-code is and why it will be beneficial to use it. They build a low-code platform; of course, they are optimistic about it. 😅

Read more examples of other low-code platforms.

With low-code, you automate what can be automated and streamlined as much as possible across multiple applications in an organization. It’s clear that a company can benefit from it, but what are the benefits for professional developers?

1. Automate, automated, automate

The nature of a professional developer is mostly lazy. And that is not in a negative way! We love to automate as much as possible! We love to make our work more manageable with more minor repudiative tasks.

In a traditional development team, we have professional developers with a lot of different strengths and weaknesses. One is better in database management, and the other is better with creating user-friendly UI’s.

One developer is visually strong, and the other is very strong with algorithms.

Most low-code platforms automate many tasks for you, which you have to do yourself when you have a code first process. This way, we can focus more on the user experience, which is essential for every application.

Others have integrations with Azure or AWS, for example. This will make the life of a backend developer a lot easier. Even some platforms offer functionality for scaling up and down traffic.

2. Don’t worry about a frontend build system!

In the early days of my frontend development experience (around 2008–2010), frontend development was about building excellent designs for websites and web apps. We focussed much more on creating incredible experiences for our users.

With most JavaScript frameworks we use nowadays, we have a build system. Some are performing better than others. Some techniques are super simple with a few configuration lines; other methods can be configured in every detail.

With the usage of low-code platforms, a professional frontend developer can go back to that time. Just building great UI’s and not focus on those build systems anymore.

Less worry about cross-browser issues, fewer worries about performance issues. More power for building great digital products!

I know many frontend developers don’t mind setting up an excellent build system! But for professional frontend developers who hate these things, this is a great way to deal with it.

3. Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, or Own cloud benefits

In the early days of web development, you had to upload your files to a web hosting provider via an FTP client like FileZilla. Every change to a file needed to be upload manually to the Webhosting.

Thank God! Right now, most of those manual tasks are automated. But not all organizations can afford developers and systems to set this up manually.

Let’s be honest to set up a continuous integration and delivery system that can cost a lot of time, especially if you have to do this for the first time.

That’s why it’s super beneficial for backend developers to use a low-code platform that offers neat integrations with Azure, AWS, Google Cloud or provide their cloud solution with a lot of benefits.

It is very beneficial to use the platform’s cloud. Most of the time, there are many benefits for scalability, CI/CD, load balancing, and many more. But if it’s required to host it on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, they can help you deploy the highly optimized code to hosting providers.

So it will require a professional backend developer or system engineer less time to set up the hosting of applications or the staging area.

4. Faster Visual Progress

When professional developers get so many tools to automate their work, there is less room for manual errors. When experienced developers can work together with citizen developers (people who are experts in the business field of a company), we are working much more efficiently.

For the business managers, it will be great to see much faster visual progress instead of taking months to develop a few minor features. I believe we as developers also love to see to make rapid progress.

Yes, we love to write code, but we equally love to see happy users using our applications hours after we deployed them. If we can deliver this with fewer people, it will costs a company less money. So happy users, after all!

If you want to learn what can be done with AI and Low-code on Mendix, check “Building a low-code app powered by AI (with Mendix and UbiOps)” from Wouter Hollander, I highly recommend it.

Conclusion

I know that I didn’t write all the benefits there are for using a low-code platform for software development, but the key benefit of them all is automation!

In this era, It’s all about the speed to build a scalable application in less time. Providing users with a solution for their problems is essential to attract more users.

Thanks!

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