I’ve been involved and using no-code tools since discovering Airtable around 2016. I tried to get it into some of my workflows while I was working at Hootsuite as a product manager but adoption was tough. Airtable can be anything you’d like it to be and I was essentially trying to create a simpler version of Jira (which was ingrained in the process and the culture) so it never really took.

I still had it in mind as I started taking side projects more seriously and when a friend approached me with a newsletter idea I knew there was an opportunity to cut my teeth on things and build a few workflows with Airtable as a backbone. This was around 2018 and as a project, Airtable was still pretty young. Over time a number of features were added and functionality was improved to the point where I was able to use it to build a referral system that also let me tinker with Webflow a bunch. 

To this day, these two tools serve as the perfect one-two punch whenever I need a database solution along with a front-end that’s flexible and also powerful from a design-perspective. If I need a front-end that’s a bit more no-frills, I turn to Glide, although they’ve recently changed their pricing which has me reconsidering how viable it is to build with it for clients.

The missing piece for all of this, especially if you’re looking to go tie everything together in a more advanced way, is to use something like Make.com or Zapier. These both serve a similar purpose but ultimately this is all about connecting the front-end and the back-end, performing complex automations and transformations “in-flight(ish)” and tapping into the vast number of services Make/Zapier integrate with. That means whenever a client’s requirements involve using tools they’re already familiar with, there’s a very good chance that’ll be enabled by one of these platforms and all you’d really have to do is study API documentation to understand what it takes to drop these other tools in the stack.

There are more modern tools out there that either have more or less to offer but this is what I’ve grown with and that’s the only hard rule I have to offer – find the stack that works for you and know everything you can about it, backwards and forwards. From here your thinking can be abstracted into the realm of understanding client problems as intimately as possible and spec’ing a variety of solutions that’d satisfy their requirements – something I’m sure you’re comfortable with given the background you shared.

You can also up-skill quite a bit by dabbling in some JavaScript since it can save you from dealing with some of the nuances that’ll exist as you bridge these tools together. This’ll lead you down the path to reading API docs before anything else whenever you’ve got an idea or an itch you want to scratch. JSON will be second nature to you too.

On AI, well I definitely agree with you – it’s changing a breakneck speeds but it’s also just another tool in your tool belt. The main advantage it offers me (for now) is the new paradigm of thinking through things. That sounds dramatic but having ChatGPT and OpenAI’s API at my disposal means that I have a very reliable way to correct my JavaScript when it’s wrong, explain something to me when I don’t get it, and sometimes just write a simple Airtable formula when I don’t want to deal with nested if statements over and over and over. It’s a powerful utility when used the right way.