NextStep, Denver - Day 1

Several years ago one of my friends introduced me to her dad. She knew I was a software guy and she was pretty sure that's what her dad did, so she thought we might have a lot to talk about. At the time she turned out to be wrong - while he was indeed a software developer and a business owner, I didn't fully understand the nature of the technology he had used to build his business. I was still in college, bright-eyed and totally not-yet-jaded, so I asked him to show me the source code. What I saw was flow-charts, diagrams, and visual front-end development workspaces. Admittedly, I thought it was a joke. How can a self-respecting engineer use a tool where you don't need to code? As is the case with such academic elitism, I pushed the thought out of mind and moved on. I didn't even feel the need to commit the name of the technology to memory.

Fast forward a couple years and I found myself receiving a phone call for an interview at a new company to be predicated by a request: Can you take a look at OutSystems before you come in?  Well now that sounded familiar, but why? I headed over to the website, and all it took was a glimpse of a few images of the trademark OML (OutSystems Modeling Language) to make it come flooding back. I made a call to my friend to give him another opportunity to tell me about OutSystems, and I decided this job sounded like it was worth giving a chance. Within the week I was working for Thrivent in their new business innovation division and learning the ropes of low-code development, agile, and lean product design.

And now, it is almost 4 years into this adventure, and I am still riding the growing wave of low-code. With that, I find myself going to at least one big OutSystems event or conference every year. Barring one year when I went to the Global Developer Conference in Estoril, Portugal (which was amazing and will warrant its own blog post) the event in question has been NextStep - the low-code party of the year. Usually these conferences are not terribly exciting from a technical learning standpoint, but they have always been great for relationships and hype, in that order.

Which is why going to NextStep is always like going to Cheers ™  for me - I've been an active participant in the community for long enough now that I end up missing workshops just to catch up with peers, old and new. I shake hands for the whole day, then there are evening activities - dinners and drinks, schmoozing and chatting, learning and teaching. I am honestly uncomfortable with people buying me drinks for something as silly as using the same tech platform they do, but Denver does have some good beer to choose from. You repeat this the second day, and then you fly home exhausted but hyped up for what is to come.

This whole process can be totally overwhelming, but it seems like you have to do it to stay relevant in a rapidly growing industry with a presently smallish North American community. Besides, if you want to get all the cool announcements from Paulo Rosado this is where you need to be. Looks like OutSystems is throwing its full weight behind AI development tools this year. This is less exciting than the announcement a few years ago that they would be supporting native mobile development, but how do you top that as a feature add? I am honestly still just waiting for a midnight theme to come to to the Service Studio IDE.

To be totally honest, this is not why I came to NextStep this year. The winds are shifting in my life having just moved out to Seattle, so I have been focusing on answering some questions about my career. Where do I want to be in 5 years? 10? Sometimes I don't even know where I want to be for dinner. Now that I've been in low-code for 4 years, do I need to exit now to save face in the bigger, badder 3gl development space? I think this a question that a lot of people have, and I think I found my answer.

OutSystems is a wave which is currently racing towards North America across the Atlantic. In fact, you can already see the sea-level dropping on the east coast, a foreboding precursor to the tsunami that is about to wash over the whole of the country. Research companies like Forrester and, specifically, Gartner have been warning us of the coming trend for years and now, according to a writer from Gartner, "the future is already here... it just depends on where you're standing." Centralized IT is losing its control over large organizations: we are moving into a world where business centers can make tech decisions and IT is becoming leaner and more agile. There is a big gap in what you can build, what you should build, and what you should seek centralized IT partnership on. Tech teams are trending toward distributed and embedded teams of engineers of data scientists working on products within business centers, and this trend is going to continue.

The only way to support this trend is going to be a reconfiguration of how we view application development, perhaps even an abstraction of what we consider an "application." What I mean by that is this new development model is reflecting micro-services architecture - services are being developed by business centers and integrated back into other services via APIs within the same organization. One cohesive customer experience for a company could be the amalgamation of 10-20 different development efforts all interacting with each other seamlessly in the background. AI and low-code development tools will be the only way to support the agility required of this model, and Centralized IT will need to take a step back to take more of a loose-governance approach instead of acting the gatekeeper.

By 2022, Gartner estimates that at least 40% of all new application development projects will leverage virtual AI co-developers on the team. This is where low-code has the opportunity to play, and that is where OutSystems is going. The whole of the industry will be moving from project to product mentality with a focus on continuous innovation in a distributed environment. That is, low-code is not going anywhere but up.

So what does it all mean? I am not a great scientist - I don't make decisions based solely off data and regression lines. I find myself folding in hunches and seeking guidance from my gut on many choices I make and opinions I form. However, in this case the evidence is clear that low-code has a place in modern business as a highly effective tool to support the modernization of customer experience and problem solving across nearly every organization currently in existence. I would challenge you to ask Centralized IT at your company how long their current backlog is, how deep is their technical debt, and how long it would take to develop a simple new idea you have for serving your customers. I am willing to bet the unit of the answer is not in weeks or days. This seems to be the zeitgeist of this new era of development - or at least that is what my gut is telling me.

This is a new evolution in software development. Those of you who have been around long enough will remember when Java first hit the scene and how there were adopters and nay-sayers. We all know now that the people who took the educated risk and drank the java (get it?) found their place developing with the most widely used development languages in the world. While I don't anticipate OutSystems or any low-code language will be usurping that throne anytime soon, I believe there is a real opportunity to help build something great here.

Grab your board - the wave is building and it will be big enough for all of us to ride.

Sources:
Gartner, February 2019:  https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3902331