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I did the thing I thought I would never do - I built a to-do list app. This is a side project outside of my day job (Tech Lead for a streaming company) so I knew progress would be slow. I wanted to learn something new as well as keeping my day to day maintenance of servers etc to a minimum - so I opted to go with no-code - and Bubble specifically and so I began building the team to-do list app I wish I had.

The app is a checklist/to-do app for teams that move fast - it's simple, updates in real time across multiple users and gets rid of any of the clutter that you get with ticket tracking apps like Jira. I also wanted it to be unique so I created a Roku app for use on the office (or bedroom) TV. The TV app itself keeps everyone updated with the progress of the selected swarm/checklist/to-do but doesn't have any functionality for checklist management by design. I plan to do tvOS/Android TV/CTV in the future. As a long time lurker I thought I'd share my experience with no-code.

Using no-code as a developer was a strange experience. I loved the things that saved me time such as user management, privacy & security but there were other aspects that had me moving slower than expected. These often had a fairly steep learning curve - where it probably would've been quicker for someone that doesn't know how to code to learn it in Bubble than in code - I personally was wishing I could just switch to code. An example of this was the responsive UI. I have it pretty much nailed on Bubble now but I felt it was like walking in treacle to start with.

For some elements I ended up shifting to writing plugins in code as I was having to do too many workarounds to get things working as expected and felt progress would be quicker using code.

Working in a visual way took some time to get used to - if I wanted to know where something was and how to do something I'd often get confused (probably says more about me than anything else). I also prefer to just hit some keyboard shortcuts to find what I want rather than clicking around the screen using a mouse.

I built the Roku app natively in code and it was a joy interacting with the Bubble API. This was a total added bonus where it seemed I was provided with the API free of charge without any effort on my side - surprises like this is where no-code excels.

The no-code community are also great - very positive and happy to help - that was a massive plus point when developing this. Overall it has been a massively positive experience but it kind of cemented the fact that I still love to code and will not be moving over to no-code full time yet. Kind of missed unit tests.