I know I previously complained about nocode distracting me from diving deep into learning how to code, because nocode was so easy and fast that it set up unrealistic expectations of coding. But I’d never shared how the opposite can be true too. Actually nocode does help lower the barrier to learning how to code. 

I would have never even tried learning JAMstack and Gatsby, and using tooling like Github and Netlify if it weren’t for Stackbit’s one click install and the headless CMS WYSIWYG editors available with the install. To be honest it does still feel scary even now, when I browse through the repository and I don’t understand 80% of what I’m seeing – the file structures, the confusing JSX and React code (why is everything in Javascript, even where it’s supposed to be HTML?), and even styling is done very differently (not good ol’ CSS unfortunately)! But because Stackbit allowed me to set up websites quickly and without the code barrier, I could get something up and running, and slowly tinker with it, biting off pieces I can chew, like changing the stylings, adding meta tags, editing small UI features. And leaving out the more scary bits till I’m more competent. And this approach had got me to a point where I’m feeling more adventurous to dabbling in Gatsby and Next.js now. 

Similarly for Vue.js and Nuxt. I recently built a website for a chat bot project using a Vue template called Argon, and it was my first time trying out Vue with best practices file structures, separate components and all. Prior to that I was just dabbling with Vue on Codepen, which didn’t require or have folders. Though not exactly nocode, using that template really helped me acquaint with how real-world, production-ready Vue apps are made. Similarly for Nuxt – there’s so many Nuxt starters right now that come with one click install on Netlify and Vercel. I think I’m going to try this approach again for Nuxt. 

So yeah – nocode, the gateway drug to code.