Archive of posts with tag 'low-code'

Potluck →

November 9, 2022 • #

This paper describes an experiment to merge freeform document-style text and structured computations into a single interface.

We think a promising workflow is gradual enrichment from docs to apps: starting with regular text documents and incrementally evolving them into interactive software. In this essay, we present a research prototype called Potluck that supports this workflow. Users can create live searches that extract structured information from freeform text, write formulas that compute with that information, and then display the results as dynamic annotations in the original document.

The idea is to prioritize the open-endedness of documents with the benefits of some schema, to enable computations and...

✦

When to Design for Emergence →

October 14, 2022 • #

Building products that address long-tail user needs (i.e. the wide variety of infrequent-but-sometimes-painful needs of specific users) requires somehow providing users an open-ended landscape to create a solution. It’s the promise of the entire “low-code” tool space. We want to create a playground with appropriate guardrails that lets users discover and build their own solutions. Since the tool-builder can’t possibly understand the intricate details of the long-tail of user problems, we want a solution to actually enable the emergence of solutions we didn’t predict or design for.

In this post, ✦

The Low-Code IKEA Effect

March 22, 2021 • #

I linked a few days ago to Packy McCormick’s piece Excel Never Dies, which went deep on Microsoft Excel, the springboard for a thousand internet businesses over the last 30 years. “Low-code” techniques in software have become ubiquitous at this point, and Excel was the proto-low-code environment — one of the first that stepped toward empowering regular people to create their own software. In the mid-80s, if you wanted to make your own software tools, you were in C, BASIC, or Pascal. Excel and its...

✦

Weekend Reading: American-Dream-as-a-Service, Content Marketing, the Fifth Column Reading List, and More

March 20, 2021 • #

👨‍🎓 The American-Dream-as-a-Service

Antonio Garcia-Martinez interviews Austen Allred, founder of Lambda School. Lambda charges no tuition and builds its program on the ISA (income sharing agreement), in which you only pay when you get a salaried position in your field of study.

The cool thing about the incentive alignment is that we’re not going to train you to be a sociologist, because it just doesn’t work. A common critique of the ISA model is: oh, now people aren’t going to study poetry anymore. And my response to that is: yeah, we’re not a university, we’re...

✦

Real Programming →

September 6, 2020 • #

Paul Ford with short piece about low-code tools and the importance of working with data versus writing code:

Code culture can be solipsistic and exhausting. Programmers fight over semicolon placement and the right way to be object-oriented or functional or whatever else will let them feel in control and smarter and more economically safe, and always I want to shout back: Code isn’t enough on its own. We throw code away when it runs out its clock; we migrate data to new databases, so as not to lose one precious bit. Code is a story we tell about data.
...

✦

A Nomenclature for Low-Code Users

July 7, 2020 • #

The low-code “market” isn’t really a market. Rather, I see it as an attribute of a software product, an implementation factor in how a product works. A product providing low-code capability says nothing about its intended value — it could be a product for sending emails, building automation rules, connecting APIs, or designing mobile forms.

What are termed “LCAP” (low-code application platform) software are often better described as “tools to build your own apps, without having to write all the code yourself.”

This post isn’t really about low-code as a marketplace descriptor, but about refining the nomenclature for...

✦

Weekend Reading: Honeycode, Imagery for Utilities, and BigQuery in Google Sheets

July 4, 2020 • #

🍯 Amazon Honeycode

AWS is making its entrance into the low-code app platform space.

🌲 Using satellite imagery to prioritize vegetation management for utilities

Geoff Zeiss on combining satellite imagery and spatial analysis to identify tree encroachment in utilities:

Transmission line inspections are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. They are generally performed by manned helicopters often together with a ground crew. There are serious safety issues when inspections are conducted by helicopter. Data may be collected with cameras and analyzed to detect...

✦

Browse the Archive →