NoCode/LowCode for Tech founders and small businesses

Who am I?
I feel that its necessary to first establish my background and experience so that there is some weight to what I say below :).

I've been a full stack developer for the past 8 or 9 years(approximately). Mainly working with Angular, NodeJS, C#, Python and Unity.

I've had the pleasure of working with small companies, startups, mid size companies and even large corporations. From Oil and Gas to AR/VR, I've worked on some pretty cool things! I definitely have a preference for working with small companies/ startups as they like to move fast and break things!

The past 2 years have been life changing for me as I started freelancing / consulting on my own.

NoCode/LowCode has been absolutely instrumental in my success as a consultant.

I'd just like to talk about my favorite NoCode/LowCode tools I use today.

Something to keep in mind, as I'm writing up the following text, is that I mostly work with start up companies and small businesses. Most of the time they need something done rather quickly so they can validate and move on(fail fast!) and I can't think of anything better for this other than LowCode/NoCode tools :).

First is Retool(https://retool.com/):
ReTool is Low code.

ReTool saves an incredible amount of time for me. The UI is all drag and drop. There are built-in integrations for your most common databases (https://retool.com/integrations/).
The neat thing is that you can write javascript inside of Retool and customize it pretty well.

A small example of a recent use case with Retool:

I'm working with company that needs an internal tool/dashboard to calculate the cost of plugging abandonded oil wells. Initially their data existed only in spreadsheets and some 3rd party proprietary database.

At first they thought they needed a bespoke fullstack solution, but after a couple meetings with them it was clear that they're still figuring it out. I suggested using Retool as it will allow us to iterate much quicker and figure out what's really needed than starting completely custom.
This was important because the cost of a completely bespoke solution is magnitudes higher than a lowcode solution.

I was able to quickly get up to speed, and create quick dashboards and charts using Retool's integrations with spreadsheets and databases.
This helped them move away from spreadsheets as a whole into an internal dashboard where multiple people could login and run validations/calculations.

I had to write some custom JS in Retool to make data/columns look uniform but other than that, I know without a doubt this would not be possible this quickly in just straight Angular/C#.

The value in all of this was being able to prototype and get feedback rapidly.

The project is still going and growing successfully :).

The following tutorials were handy when figuring this out:
https://docs.retool.com/docs/google-sheets
https://docs.retool.com/docs/insert-csvs-into-a-database

Next tool: GlideApps (https://www.glideapps.com/)
This is probably the most underrated NoCode tool out there.

I have many hobbies from powerlifting, skydiving, salsa dancing, and BJJ (to name a few).

I mention my hobbies because a significant portion of my social circle are coaches/trainers in the hobbies above, so I've had the opportunity to create apps for booking classes, booking private sessions, event/conference information, and scheduling apps.

So why GlideApps? It turns out that many of these small business/gym/studio owners run their entire business on spreadsheets!!! (Google sheets specifically!) Glideapps is truly drag and drop and for most of the niches above I was able to put something together in a day (or a weekend at the most). Glideapps is truly undervalued and not mentioned enough.

Glide apps offered a way to rapidly turn their existing spreadsheets(with a bit of organizing) into web apps/pages or even private dashboards with a low time and dollar cost.

Coupling Glide with Zapier, you can make some epic apps. (Just check their templates for inspiration: https://www.glideapps.com/templates)

The biggest take away from my past 2 years as a consultant/freelance dev(from being a full time 9-5 dev) was that most businesses don't really care about what language you use, or if it was Angular or React, design patterns, TDD CI/CD etc... These all have their place, but I had to ease up on this purist/elitist developer mentality as I started consulting because what they really wanted was a working solution... not code. We're being paid to solve problems not write code! :)

Some honorable mentions:

https://airtable.com/
if youre using spreadsheets somewhere, chances are airtable will work just as well if not better because of really simple integrations and apps.

https://zapier.com/
https://automate.io/
^^^ the above two are basically the "glue" between different services.

https://docparser.com/
speed up /automate extracting data from documents

https://nocodeapi.com/
an api for apis

https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/
because its quicker and easier to set up and deploy cloud functions on netlify than on AWS/GCP/Azure

Please AMA if you have any questions.