Held on 26 May 2022
Software Without Engineers
My first job as a newly minted engineer was with a company that claimed it had built a "Universal Application". All you needed to do, they claimed, was to buy their (very expensive) software, and you could dump your engineering organisation and let business people construct what you needed from their toolkit. If this sounds too good to be true, like a One-Size-Fits-All spanner, you're right—they disappeared in the dot-com crash in a flurry of lawsuits.
But this dream, of life without the need for software developers, in a paradise of snap-together components that anyone can assemble, lives on, and on, and on. Today, the torch is carried by tool vendors like Airtable and Shopify, claiming they've finally solved the problem of building software without code—and there's some evidence that they're right, as more and more organisations are building complex systems out of these building blocks and slashing their IT budgets.
We should, however, listen to Ian Malcolm, and not become so preoccupied with whether we can build this way, that we forget to stop to think whether we should. IT folks in banks know all too well that a trader can hack together Excel of such fearsome complexity that no one can ever hope to maintain or debug it, and the same is true of Salesforce and Zapier. Come along to hear about the dangers of this approach and how to avoid them, to get the best out of your "low-code" investment:
- How "one line of Javascript" turns into a flying spaghetti monster.
- Why workflow is vital, testing will save your life, and diagrams are your friends.
- What makes visual coding fail again and again, and what works better.
- When to give up and write some code, and how to plan for this inevitable day.
