Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

The Future of Low Code/No Code

By Angela Castillo, HelloGuru

Low-Code / No-Code already came a long way in the past few years, with tools taking the spotlight in various areas of an organization and in the business environment as a whole. Take a tool like Zapier for example, which had a significant impact on operations and marketing teams, integrating the vast amount of systems they used. Another great example is Shopify, in e-commerce, which completely revolutionized the landscape of online shopping for small businesses. Now, business owners can set up their store in a matter of days, maybe even hours.

The pandemic simply accelerated everything. People were forced to work from home, and take their businesses and jobs entirely online. The majority of them did not know how to code, so they took advantage of Low-Code/ No-Code tools. Think about tools like Webflow for landing pages, or Airtable, or the already mentioned Shopify. And not only it was small companies and individual employees using No-Code tools. We saw amazing things happening, such as the city of New York building their Covid-19 Engagement Portal using Unqork.

Taking note of this, entrepreneurs and large companies, such as Amazon, started building more and more No-Code tools. As a consequence of this, education in regards to No-Code tools has boomed. For instance, at HelloGuru we have our No-Code Hub, where more than five thousand students can learn to use a variety of No-Code tools for free. But this is not only us, there are other great resources out there, such as Webflow University and Udemy Courses.

I believe that in 2022 and beyond we'll see more No-Code tools come to the market, tapping into more tasks that currently need coding knowledge to be performed. For example, at HelloGuru we're tapping the Product Manager role, with a tool that supercharges the way they work with product data, with no need to know and therefore use SQL, which is indeed a pain point. The truth is, there is a very limited amount of people in the world who know programming languages, so the more you can enable people to do tasks by themselves, without creating dependencies on engineers and developers, the better for a company. We all know dependencies never end well.

With more No-Code tools entering the market, I think we'll also see more agile and better work environments. It's not a mystery that with No-Code tools, development speed is a lot better, subsequently bringing in lower costs for organizations. Teams will be able to iterate quicker, and the fear of trying out new methods and interfaces goes away with No-Code. Hopefully this will bring a much better experience for the end users of a product or service. Within the same subject of productivity, Low-code / No-Code tools, will free up developers time, allowing them to focus their efforts on what really matters, building better products.

Another prediction I have is that No-Code will spark entrepreneurship, and that's a really good thing. With Low-Code / No-Code tools, we'll see non-technical founders building their companies, without the hassle of hiring a technical team right from the start. I'm already seeing this in my network, with many of my colleagues building their products, internal tools, and processes using No-Code tools. I think this feeling is exemplified by Alex Bouaziz, the founder of Deel, which just became a unicorn, who said in an interview that if he had to do everything again he would have built Deel using No-Code tools.

I seriously hope that educational institutions begin to incorporate Low-Code / No-Code into their syllabus, and I know some of them have already done so. The same way they would teach me to use excel, word, or SPSS, I think there are a number of Low-Code / No-Code tools that would be beneficial for graduates. Take Figma and Webflow for instance, it would be great if everyone knew how to design and actually build their own website, without knowing any code.

I firmly believe that the next five years will see an exponential growth of the No-Code world. The knowledge and the community is growing, which is in fact what makes tools better. In addition, some stigmas will be broken. For example, that No-Code is only for startups and for non-technical people, when not really. No-Code tools can and are being used in the enterprise, and more developers are liking them every day, because of the speed that allows their peers and them to work at. I think we'll see an era of development acceleration.

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