By David Head
The podcast currently has 7 episodes available.
This episode of The No Code & Code Podcast features Chris Obdam, CEO and Co-Founder of Betty Blocks.
Chris starts by giving insight into how and why he and his brother first started Betty Blocks and then dives into how Betty Blocks benefitted from finding its target audience right from the start. He goes into detail about how focusing on their target group of enterprise companies meant honing in on building bigger and more complex applications instead of smaller, more general tools for independent professionals, and how keeping this as the focus helped the company operate at higher efficiency.
Chris also discusses how Betty Blocks was able to combine many essential components to a usable no-code tool, including a drag and drop UI builder, visually linking tables, a workflow diagram, and integrations. In addition, Chris touches on the politics associated with software development, unique capabilities that Betty Blocks has, including flexibility, safety, and optimization, VC-funding in the no-code space, and more.
Chris wraps up the episode by giving his two cents on what he thinks the no-code space will look like in 10 years and discusses how long he thinks it will take before we see a large company built on top of a no-code platform.
You can find Chris on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to check out Betty Blocks and the tools and resources mentioned in this episode:
Resources
Betty Blocks: https://www.bettyblocks.com/
HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/
AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/
Kubernetes: https://kubernetes.io/
MySQL: https://www.mysql.com/
Power Apps: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/
Microsoft Dynamics: https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/
SAP HANA: https://www.sap.com/products/hana.html
Airtable: https://airtable.com/
Javascript: https://www.javascript.com/
Vlad Leytus first started working with no-code as an MBA student at Harvard in 2013. He had an idea for an application that he wanted to launch, but he didn’t have any programming skills or finances to spend on hiring. He was introduced to Bubble by a classmate and spent days and nights becoming an expert on the platform. In 2015, he and his co-founder, Andrew, quit their jobs in management consulting and analytics to build what would eventually become Airdev.
Vlad starts by discussing how integrating two big tools, such as Bubble and Salesforce, can lead to both powerful results and potential problems when the ‘source of truth’ data is not clearly defined. He shares his experience of having data live on both tools and how an outage on one tool can cause activity on the other tool to not be updated.
Vlad also dives into the different methods in which you can structure your company, depending on the stage your company is currently in. He talks about how earlier in a company’s lifecycle, it’s more important to get things out quickly and to have a shorter line and continuous feedback loop between the developer and someone on the business side, and how later, it is more important to optimize for stability and scalability. He mentions that while this principle applies when using code, too, no-code makes application of this principle even more crucial.
Vlad ends by discussing the importance of scoping in client projects. He mentions the ‘rule of pi’, which means that traditionally, you have to take a developer’s estimate for timing and pricing and multiply it by 3.14, and how Airdev places a much greater emphasis on scoping to better manage client expectations on time and pricing.
You can find Vlad on LinkedIn and Twitter and check out his company AirDev and some of the resources mentioned in this episode at the links below:
AirDev: https://airdev.co/
Bubble: http://bubble.io/
Zapier: https://zapier.com/
Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/
Redshift: https://www.redshift3d.com/
Postgres: https://www.postgresql.org/
Code Mentor: https://www.codementor.io/
Salesforce: www.salesforce.com
JIRA: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
Ruby on Rails: https://rubyonrails.org/
Welcome to the No Code and Code podcast, hosted by David Head. David started using no-code almost a decade ago, and since then, he has led the no-code team at a Y Combinator backed startup that he co-founded called Sixty, worked on migrating no-code to code as an engineer at Lambda School, consulted numerous companies on scaling their no-code stack, and more.
David draws upon his expertise when interviewing guests on the podcast who range from founding teams building no-code stacks, to engineers who have led migrations from no-code to code, to freelancers and agencies who use no-code tools, to no-code platform founders.
David and his guests discuss the limits of no-code, re-integrating no-code tools after migrating to code, and other obstacles associated with no-code. These discussions all support him in answering the ultimate question: How can companies integrate no-code and code tools together right from the start?
You can find some of the resources mentioned in this episode at the links below:
To stay up to date on new episodes of the No Code and Code podcast, head to
www.bridge.so/podcast.
Peter O’Malley is the co-founder of Advisable, a marketplace for hiring freelancers. Peter made the decision to build part of his company on a no-code stack, predominantly Airtable and Zapier, because of the increased iteration and testing speed it allowed.
Peter talks about the importance of filtering for startup engineers who are open and receptive to using no-code tools during the hiring process, and suggests asking them the question, “what is your opinion on no-code building?”.
He goes on to discuss how his company was able to scale his no-code stack as far as it has. He credits the small size of his team and having a high degree of trust between him and the CTO as being main reason scaling Advisable’s no-code stack has worked.
Peter also dives into the processes that are necessary to have in place when moving data from Airtable to Postgres. He also talks about pushing updates in small batches so that if something breaks, it’s easier to identify where it came from.
Peter continues by describing the biggest obstacles he faced in growing his no-code stack and ends by reflecting on what he would have done differently.
You can find Peter on LinkedIn, and check out his company, Advisable, and some of the resources mentioned in this episode at the links below:
Resources list:
Advisable: https://advisable.com/
Unbounce: https://unbounce.com/
Postgres: https://www.postgresql.org/
Airtable: https://airtable.com/
Zapier: https://zapier.com/
Retool: https://retool.com/
Github: https://github.com/
StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/
In this episode of the No Code & Code podcast, Jason Barone takes us on his journey from auto mechanic to a senior design engineer at Uber in San Francisco. He talks about starting his own business building websites, which led him to become one of the top Squarespace freelancers, which in turn helped him land a job at Uber.
Because Jason was a non-technical designer, he started looking for what we know today as no-code tools over 15 years ago. This led him to Squarespace back in 2006 when the company was still fairly new and small. As one of the early adopters of Squarespace, Jason found himself constantly pushing the limits of the site, submitting countless feature requests.
He eventually became somewhat of a Squarespace celebrity, being a top contributor to the forums, Quora, Twitter, and moderating the Squarespace sub-reddit. So when Uber was exploring the use of Squarespace to scale web publishing operations, they found him pretty quickly.At the time, Uber had over 1,000 websites for city operations hosted on various platforms such as Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, and Wordpress. Jason solved this by building a sophisticated, cloneable Squarespace template that consolidated all cities into one system. Afterwards, he joined the enterprise web platform team and rebuilt the product internally with the larger web team.
Jason also touches on the structure of the team he worked with, the amount of time it took to migrate everything (hint: it’s longer than you’d expect), and the one main feature that Squarespace has yet to build out.
You can find Jason on LinkedIn and Twitter,and some of the resources mentioned in this episode:
Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/
Squareront: https://squarefront.com/
Weebly: https://www.weebly.com/ca
Wix: https://www.wix.com/
Wordpress: https://wordpress.org/
Skillshare: https://www.skillshare.com/?via=header
CodyHouse: https://codyhouse.co/blog
Codrops: https://tympanus.net/codrops/
Zapier: https://zapier.com/
Firebase: https://firebase.google.com/
Bubble: https://bubble.io/
Shopify: https://www.shopify.ca/
Salesforce: www.salesforce.com
Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
Coda: https://coda.io/
The podcast currently has 7 episodes available.