[11:38am: Drinking water to stay hydrated]

What technologies should I use to build this? It would be fun to try a no code or low code tool like Bubble.io.

No code tools seem to have grown in their capability. They seem more capable of building almost any app you can imagine. One advantage is that you can build a prototype quickly, a minimum viable product or MVP.

This gets the product into your customers’ hands more quickly for validation and testing. You'll get feedback faster. You'll know if it solves a problem—not an imaginary one—and whether people would actually pay for it.

Even though you might eventually have to write code or rebuild your SaaS solution in another set of tools, you won't even get to that point if you build too slowly.

On the other hand, I kind of like coding things myself. I like the hands-on task of digging into the code and sorting out hairy problems. There's something satisfying about getting your hands dirty with object-oriented programming or whatever your favorite paradigm is.

Maybe you could view no-code and low-code as getting dirty in its own way. You're just moving the point of decision making up a level of abstraction, so it just depends on where you like to get your hands dirty.

It's kind of like painting on a physical canvas versus painting on your iPad. You feel like holding a physical brush and mixing colors, setting up your physical canvas, maybe shopping for colors.

Maybe you like the smell of the watercolors. Maybe you like the feel of brushing against the cloth canvas, the sound of your brush strokes against the canvas.

And then there's the final product. Something physical you can display on your wall, give to friends and relatives... you'd miss all these things if you were just painting on your iPad.

Same thing with no code. You'd miss choosing your data structures, defining objects, writing if-then-else statements and conditional loops, and seeing it all culminate in a product that works.

What if the goal is to validate fast?

If you don't have the budget for a development team, then no-code is very attractive.

Conjecture: No-code tools and hardware will improve until page load speed and app responsiveness is not an issue (if it is at the moment), just like more powerful servers and tools make static site generators less favorable because their speed advantage isn't as attractive as before.

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