DEV Community

Cover image for No code systems but not for "Makers"?
Tom Routen
Tom Routen

Posted on

No code systems but not for "Makers"?

Hi all,

nice to find this community.

We develop a product called Logiak. I want to tell you a bit about it, and then ask your advice about terminology.

It has been in evolution for years. In the past couple of years we have, with the help of Flutter, we've developed it into a cross-platform SaaS product.

It is definitely a 100% "no-code" system - you can create apps with it, but it is not quite right to call it an "App Builder". It would be more correct to say "System Builder" where "System" here can be taken to mean "multiple apps working together".

The system evolved in the context of developing advice-giving apps for health-workers in resource-poor settings. In such a situation, a couple of things are really important, and these things are the core of our system..

  1. Firstly, medical knowledge which is the basis of the app has to be really clearly encoded, with a consistent interpretation, intelligible, modifiable (because things change).
  2. Secondly, to avoid interpretation errors, the need that a medic can express and manage the knowledge without a programmer having to transform it is really strong. No code as requirement.

The "system" part comes from the need to have an app for the clinical health-worker(s), an app for the supervisor(s), maybe an app for the community health worker...

Now the question: we note the explosion of use of the term "No Code", but also note it is so often paired with the idea of "Maker" - which we take to mean: the non-programmer entrepreneur who can create an app which makes money using a no code system.

These terms seem so tethered, it sometimes leads to misunderstanding when we talk about our system. Sure, our system is 100% no code, but our target users aren't Makers..

We want our system to be used by organizations when making custom mobile systems (single or multi-app), because it is just really a efficient way to do it.

We are not targetting the individual Maker, nor would we want someone to evaluate our system on whether it is possible to build an Instagram clone with it.

We enable organizations to embody important logic and important data manipulations in systems which can be used by field teams.

The questions:

(1) do you see the terminological problem we are running into here? We are "No Code" but not "Maker" focussed. Or have we misunderstood "Maker" usage?

(2) do you know of a terminological strategy which would help us communicate about our "No code" product with fewer "Maker" connotations?

Thanks

Top comments (0)