No Code, but from the Perspective of a Recent Software Engineering Bootcamp Grad
I graduated from Flatiron School in September, feeling accomplished and ready to take on the world as a full-stack developer. Not one week out, and I was getting ads on Instagram about no code platforms. No code platforms, which, for those of you who don’t know yet, are websites which offer users and startups the ability to create a basic web application, without the need for developers.
Learning about the no code movement was great for my self-esteem (sarcasm). I just took a huge leap, switched career paths, and now Instagram is telling me that these technical skills are for naught? One article from makermag gives a great perspective on the pros and cons of this movement, as well as where programmers like you and I fit within it.
Instead of droning on about whether or not no code is bad or good for me as a now-searching-for-a-job programmer, I’d like to take some time and establish what we, as recent bootcamp graduates, can do to make ourselves more marketable in this ever-progressing industry with no code in mind.
Learn more about scalability
One thing that I did not receive from my education (which is understandable, given that it was only three months), was learning how to build apps to scale. Now, as I’m looking for jobs, it seems that every posting wants candidates to have experience with building apps to scale.
Take some time to read about what this really means. Don’t dive in code-first. Search about scalability in your language. How do people achieve this? What are the principles you should follow?
Go through your code, and determine which parts can be more modular
If you’ve done the “learn more about scalability” part, you probably know that modularity is important in programming to-scale. Look at your past projects. Is your code DRY? Are there certain features that share something? Make those edits, get those git commits!
Now, clean it up, make it legible
A huge part of the no code movement is that its easy to use and doesn’t look too messy, right? Make your code easy to read. Add comments if necessary. Make sure your function names are descriptive, and it doesn’t look like hieroglyphs.
Learn “no code”
While it may seem contradictory, no code and code can work really beautifully together. Imagine not having to go through CSS and changing your margins from 10%, to 15%, to 12%, to 13%, etc. No code can handle the design aspect for you, given that you don’t need it to do something fancy (which is where UX/UI designers come in!).
At the end of the day, no code is a great template, but I’m not sure I’m comfortable with saying it’s the future of programming. Maybe I’m biased because I just sacrificed a lot of my time in learning how to program so that I can enter this industry, but I think my opinion is more than that too. If you want a custom, complex feature, these no code platforms likely can’t deliver… You can!
Oh, and… maybe apply to work for one of these no code platforms since they were, uh, developed with software engineers ;)