All-Code for Enterprise

TL;DR

The accessibility and ease-of-use that No-Code / Low-Code platforms offer comes at the expense of functionality.

All-code platforms attempt to escape this classic trade-off between functionality and accessibility by removing all the typical overhead that makes grown up software expensive and difficult.

The Alis Exchange Build platform aims to enable a new generation of enterprise software through powerful and simple tools and platforms for business practitioners and citizen developers.

We write software to solve problems.

Get some information. Store some information. Maybe get fancy and melt a GPU processing that information. Begrudgingly manipulate the DOM to appease retinas with this information (pesky eyeballs). Publish a PDF. Publish another PDF...

Low-Code and No-Code are new labels for an old trend. Platforms have long existed to make the software creation process slightly easier. Access and Excel were the original (and are still the dominant) No-Code platforms. Webflow and Squarespace have baked into their DNA two decades of Adobe Dreamweaver and Wordpress.

A scary amount of the global economy, including pretty much the entire actuarial community, runs on a Low-Code platform you might never have heard of: Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

The No-Code / Low-Code ecosystem, especially propelled by newer entrants like Retool, Microsoft's PowerApps, Zapier and Google's App Script, plays a vital role in increasing the surface area of software for business applications.

The accessibility and ease-of-use that No-Code / Low-Code platforms offer, however, comes at the expense of functionality. And as a company grows the technical challenges faced by business teams can quickly outgrow the capabilities of these platforms. The most common symptoms of needing grown up software are:

Performance: Do you want to implement a multi-objective linear portfolio optimisation and need to implement that in VBA? Need more than 10,000 rows? The entire company is dependent on that R script on your laptop? Good luck.

Evolvability: Software is ever evolving. Most Low-Code / No-Code platforms make it almost impossible to continuously integrate and deploy improvements in production without breaking downstream processes.

Flexibility: Some of the time Javascript is a kind of okay runtime. A lot of the time it's not. Much of the time your code will need to run in a specific language and have access to a specific library. Most Low-Code / No-Code platforms are not built this way.

Composability: Most Low-Code / No-Code demos are built around the simple use cases of read and display some data from a database you control or create a web form and save the data in a light weight database. Most business applications, however, require safely integrating data from multiple sources and surfacing the results in a predictable way for other processes. Without composability teams reinvent the wheel and then reinvent the wheel again.

When business teams encounter these challenges the response is typically some combination of (a) beg the overstretched IT department for capacity, (b) overpay a consulting company or (c) contract with a development outsourcing shop and become beholden to them for life.

All-Code platforms are a novel attempt to escape this classic trade-off between functionality and accessibility. Replit, for example, has made grown up software development 100x more accessible to aspiring developers. Their mission is to bring the next billion software creators online and they are well on their way to achieving that by removing all the overhead that makes grown up software expensive and difficult.

All-Code platforms promise to let you write the software you want to write while making it infinitely more accessible to do so. To do so, an All-Code platform needs to solve five big problems:

1. Standardized, ready-to-go environment: Running  `print('hello world')` in Python is trivially easy. Navigating the sticky hot mess of environmental configurations and package choices on your local machine, however, requires Masters in Computer Science.
2. Patterns, templating and frameworks: There is nothing more intimidating than a blank text file. Ready-to-go and accessible patterns, templates and frameworks lower time to value by getting the process going.  Patterns and templates also enable productivity by making cloud native design patterns (the tricky engineering stuff that gets in the way of writing code) a lot easier to do.
3. Tooling to remove toil: Toil, the non-value adding and finicky grunt work of software engineering, such as maintaining a cloud runtime environment or pushing code to production, often inhibits business practitioners and embedded engineers from productively delivering value.
4. Deployment and distribution: How to deploy a piece of logic and make it easy for others to safely and securely use is a non-trivial problem. Accessible software should be easy to deploy to the cloud.
5. Community and support: We all get stuck somewhere. Accessible software development requires having access to a resources, community and, if necessary, support that can help resolve those thorny issues and keep momentum high.

The Alis Exchange Build platform makes it simpler and quicker for business practitioners and embedded developers to design, develop, deploy and distribute great business need oriented and enterprise-grade software.

Our mission is to enable a new generation of enterprise software through powerful and simple tools and platforms for business practitioners and embedded developers.

Let's get building.