Is it time that users stepped on up and took control of their own destiny by crafting applications to meet their own needs BY THEMSELVES? But I don’t code I hear you say…Well now there’s a bunch of user friendly tools for non-techies exploding onto the market.

I felt the same way when we started Sunstone nearly 6 years ago. We had some feedback that our IT jobs page had too much scrolling and yes we had big photos of the South Island that we wanted to keep as we loved promoting the balanced lifestyle of living in Christchurch and attracting IT folk to our great city.

Steph said why don’t we just create hyperlinks to our job openings? I looked into it and was like well our CMS doesn’t do this…she was like I had to do this as an HR Coordinator like 20 years ago..well why don’t you do it I said…I caved in and was thinking well they’re only hyperlinks pretty simple really so there’s probably a solution on the net somewhere…

So next Monday afternoon I cleared the decks…no phone calls I’m going in….After about a half hour I found the solution in an online forum and a small HTML script that was going to do the trick and I went to town…marking up code (let’s face it A LOT of cutting & pasting) and making a nice search list for our candidates looking for IT jobs they could just click on and go back to the list…a way better user experience :-) We could now also send them a link too which was super handy.

Finally I’d finished and I looked up at the clock…Midnight!!! Everyone else was in bed but I’d done it…it was out in the wild and we’ve used this wee process ever since everyday for 5 years now...as I update the live IT jobs for Christchurch daily….Here it is here: https://sunstonetalent.com/it-jobs-christchurch-nz

I really felt like a developer (hahaha yes I know I’m more of a Psychologist) for a day and I guess I’d be waiting quite a number of years for CMSs to improve from their rudimentary beginnings when I created a rock climbing website called sublimeclimb.com in the UK many years earlier. Man it was so slow to upload photos etc using a basic template CMS…it might have been an early Wix or similar…terrible.

But finishing my little web dev project gave me a real sense of fulfilment & empowerment to create something basic from code that fitted our needs and now in the market these very user friendly ‘No Code’ or ‘Low Code’ apps, that can be dragged & dropped are blowing up in digital transformations.

According to Gartner, 65% of all application development activity will be low-code development by 2024.

What ‘No Code’ tools have you had success with? Or found very useful in your job or business? Please comment below :-)

I'm Paul, I love coffee, Founder & Principal Consultant of Sunstone, an IT Recruitment & HR company specialising in recruiting IT roles within software, web, mobile, blockchain, data, cloud infrastructure, security & networks in Christchurch & South Island of New Zealand.

What is ‘Citizen Development’? No Code? Low Code? At Sunstone we tried this out…