Lo-to-No Code Tooling

While software engineering capabilities have obvious value in modern work, and we Neoco authors are incurable tech-heads, everyone can benefit from a powerful movement towards tooling that doesn't require serious tech chops to set up, manage and even develop. You can now build complex software architectures and workflows with minimal coding, or none at all.

By 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity.

– From the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, by Gartner Research.

<aside> 🤝 Build or Buy?

Closely related is the build-vs-buy process (although build-or-buy is more fun because it spells "Bob"... but anyway...) whereby it should not always be assumed that a custom-built solution is required to solve a problem. Instead, various off-the-shelf tools can often be installed, and integrated with each other, to meet your needs.

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Low and no-code tooling can take many forms, requiring an agnostic mindset to be able to select and coordinate the right components for each specific need and context. The technical skill and effort required can vary widely but some solutions need no coding at all.

We can roughly break down the types of tooling into these groups:

Platforms – For hooking together functions and apps, in order to perform a desired process. E.g. IFTTT, Zapier and Zoho. Related to this are service-oriented architectures (SOA) such as microservices, whereby small functional components are combined within a wider scaffold to perform more complex tasks.
Proprietary ecosystems – From established players, like Microsoft PowerApps, Google App Maker tool link and Salesforce.
A new wave of productivity and publishing platforms – Like Notion, Airtable, and Webflow – that act like traditional applications but are promiscuous in their options for restructuring and connecting content and features, e.g. to publish as websites and apps.
Dedicated tooling applications – Like Retool, which specifically serve the low-to-no code process.

<aside> 🤝 Related: The Neoco Toolkit includes a load more lo-to-no code tools.

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For a bit of background reading on the underlying concepts here, see Wikipedia on No-code development platform and Low-code development platform.

<aside> 💡 The Lo-to-No Code Tools Behind Neoco

Neoco was built with minimal coding, exploiting a collection of both new and (relatively) old platforms. We selected them in order to maximise flexibility, not just for rapid production and publication, but also for future feature development, integrations or migrations.

Neoco's code-lite weapons-of-choice include: → Notion – For publication, including this playbook. → Google's suite of productivity apps – Especially Drive, Docs, Forms and Sheets, and Workspace for operational stuff like email and chat. → Airtable – For collating the Neoco Toolkit in an accessible and publishable form. → GitBook – For publishing the playbook, although we ditched it for Notion in the end. → Markdown – For writing web content in a form that can easily be published, or adapted in future. → Cloudflair – For DNS and as a CDN, using the workers feature for Fruition/Notion hosting on a subdomain. → Netlify – For publishing the main site. → Github – For hosting the repository for the main site. → Fruition – For publishing Notion pages on a separate domain. → HubSpot – For customer relationship management, email forms, etc. → Vue.js – For wiring up the web pages, including the toolkit functionality (although it's not exactly low-code). → Tailwind CSS – For styling our web pages and making things look pretty.

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