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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

As a marketer, I always look for no code solutions first. API integrations? Use Zapier. Email form integration? Sumo or similar. Triggers? Google tag manager. Etc. The reason being that the dev team at any company never has time for new projects.

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Yeah I've always read this to be a failure of engineering to produce stuff in time. I wonder if it's a failing of open source that it hasn't gotten to web infrastructure yet.

So, instead of "learning a new language", they're "configuring a new integration"? Guess how much these differ...spoiler: two marketing labels for the same thing.

I can train one of my juniors in how zapier works in an afternoon. Teaching them (or myself) a programming language would take years and be more error prone.

Okay, now that makes sense. I have originally understood it as "...and the dev team also gets to manage the no-code thing."

I can teach IF, FOR, and the basics of python in a week. I can teach ruby in about the same. For what they are going to need for a low code solution, that's enough. You don't need to teach all of programming - only a subset that would be covered in a low/no code solution.

If you don't believe this, look at how many non-CS professionals have learned VBA as their excel-fu reached a limit. Even if it's not clean to start, the natural human curiosity starts to take over.

One of the better programmers I ever knew had a high school education and was working in an airplane maintenance facility when he was frustrated with the tools he had and just started learning VBA on his own.

Doesn't matter if teaching fundamentals only takes "a week" -- that can't be afforded when you need a tool right now.

While true, that's a big failure of business - fix the pipeline before the fire, no?

I think you might be underestimating what these tools can do. I'm not the person you're replying to, but I have also seen a junior marketing person create a Web form to be sent to clients (using Jotform or similar), have it output to a Google sheet, have Zapier pick it up and move it to Airtable, where he defined a bunch of extra fields for internal staff to annotate the submissions, all while getting notifications when certain conditions were met.

Not only could he not learn enough python in a week to do this, but the professional developers on my team could not do this in a week.

This actually feels very unixish. `form | sheet; crontab: zapier | airtable`. Simple tools that can be simply combined - I feel similar about Tasker, where I can combine various building blocks without worrying about compiling an app. (It does get cumbersome without an IDE)

> I can teach IF, FOR, and the basics of python in a week. I can teach ruby in about the same. For what they are going to need for a low code solution, that's enough. You don't need to teach all of programming - only a subset that would be covered in a low/no code solution.

OK, now what? Do you teach them deployment of those "low code solutions"? Is it another week?

"Oh, now you want to send a notification to Slack? That's a little above basics. What about another week of learning the concept of libraries?"

Do you see the pattern?

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