When I started working at the Mail & Guardian, its website was the first news site in Africa and I had to learn to code HTML. Hypertext markup language is the glue that holds the internet together — and makes those underlined blue links click through to another page.
It was 1998, when internet publishing was in its infancy and things such as content management systems for creating a database of stories and publishing them automatically were still in the future. WordPress, the most widely used publishing system, was still years away.
Everything we did was manual. We wrote the stories, then used an HTML editor app to build the page. Then we had to use a file transfer protocol app to upload that file to our servers. Any images had to be separately uploaded. It was technical admin we had to do because the software widely used now didn’t exist.
In the 20 years since, internet publishing software has become so simple it’s possible for a tech neophyte to publish their own website within a few hours, using any number of hosting services and watching a YouTube instructional video.
Coding is something that happens in the background, especially using WordPress, which most of us never see or understand.
Nor should we. As trite as it is, I have compared tech to driving a car when explaining why it’s complicated. Everyone understands how cars work. You use the key to unlock and then drive them. How many people know or understand how an internal combustion engine works? Nor should they.
People have been forced to learn a lot of technical stuff they don’t need
In the past 30 years, as computers and then smartphones have become mainstream, people have been forced to learn a lot of technical stuff they don’t need. It’s been one of my continuing bugbears with the consumer technology industry: it has tried to entice buyers of shiny gadgets by impressing them with the millions of processors on a computer chip, or how many megapixels the camera has. Most of us don’t need to see or understand the complexity of what’s under the hood of our cars or our phones. This ease of use is coming to other parts of the tech universe — most notably in using services.
Often called “low code” or “no code”, this is a way of using payment services, online shops and web publishing for anyone who has a small amount of tech understanding. Want to build an e-commerce store? Then use Shopify, which helps you build it. Need payments? Plug in one of the many such services. If you run a yoga or Pilates studio, Bookamat does it all for the instructor and lets people (literally) book their own time slot and pay for it. Small businesses that can’t afford to build software from scratch have taken to low code with glee.
Software giant SAP is the latest big firm to adopt this methodology. Using drag-and-drop allowing average users to create their own apps and services, it lets them — and not an expensive developer — build their own software. Instead of bringing in a mechanic, the actual drivers can choose what they want. With a global shortage of software developers expected in the next few years, it also frees up a business from other types of congestion.
It’s one of the ways small businesses are leading the world.
*Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za and publisher of Scrolla.Africa
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