Why Full Stack Developers ❤️ Airkit

Authors: Jeff Whitehead, CIO Airkit and Zhenyu Li, Staff Engineer, Airkit

Many developers are skeptical of low code, as they have little or a previous negative experience with them (typically as too limiting in their capabilities), but Airkit is a different Low Code experience – designed for leverage and rapid development, with the power that traditional developers expect.

Here is what some of our customers and developers have to say:

“I think it’s because many experienced developers don’t really know how powerful the low-code/no-code tools are. Once they know, they will be addicted to them. “

Zhenyu Li, Airkit

“When I got to start working with Airkit, one of the first things that I found was that there’s a tremendous amount of functionality that already exists in Airkit so I don’t have to do a ton of behind the scene development.“

Troy Snowden, CamGen Partners

“In the last several years we’ve used a lot of low code … easy to utilize functionally, but due to the lack of functionality within those tools we couldn’t complete all of the use cases. When we got Airkit and evaluated this technology … within Airkit we can achieve everything, we can integrate with API’s, we can integrate with external systems, we can send emails, we can send documents to other systems … this is why we considered Airkit“

Naren Muttineni, Guardian

“A lot of low-code tools are not as powerful/flexible as Airkit – Low Code is  broad brush. I’m skeptical of a lot of low-code stuff that aren’t extensible.  We expose a lot more low-level functionality in our flavor of it.“

Dinesh Shenoy, Airkit

“Airkit isn’t about replacing developers, it’s about giving developers the power to take care of that ticket to ‘add a new contact us page to the corp website’ in an afternoon so you can get back to the most interesting and impactful work.  Sure it’s powerful, but more importantly it’s fast.“

Joe Chrzanowski, Airkit

“It’s like a fully-stocked woodshop for building apps. Airkit provides all the tools and guidance, and you just bring the ideas and materials.”

Taylor Ham, Airkit

“In a world where ‘what it takes to ship a feature’ quickly devolves into conversations around infrastructure and scale, Airkit lets me focus on giving value to the customer. I do not need to become an expert in Developer Operations in order to have an impact on my customer’s day.“

Jón Tómas Grétarsson, Airkit

Repetitive work isn’t creative work, and Airkit helps eliminate undifferentiated and repetitive work – setting up environments, ci/cd, theme libraries, 3rd party integrations (both identity – like OAuth and SAML, as well as other data sources like AWS, GCP, Azure, or on-premise data integrations). Set them up once for your organization, and all future applications can use and benefit. 

Airkit lets you get right to the building!

Here are the top 3 reasons why skeptical developers should try Airkit:

Just three layers to build a whole application

• Connection builder and integrations connect to third party API’s. Many developers are familiar with Postman for testing or mocking API’s – Airkit makes the process of getting a REST or JSON response back, filtering it down to just the data you need, and joining it from multiple sources
  
  Additionally, Airkit makes it easy to “go back and update the system you got this data from,” via variable change triggers, in a way that avoids complicated ETL or getting into complicated data synchronization situations
  
• Visual WYSIWYG Designer – Airkit’s Theme builder lets you build beautiful and expressive UIs, while conforming to your brands look and feel guidelines

• AirData – a convenience database / persistence layer

Huge developer leverage

• The real value of low-code/no-code tools for experienced developers is that they don’t have to worry about building or maintaining simple tools or apps  anymore and just keep focusing on the critical issues – development that has the biggest customer impact. 
• Enable business users to own and iterate on applications on their own – while initial setup and architecture can take more knowledge and be in the realm of more traditional developers, once your app is set up business people can iterate on the application –  if they can learn excel they can learn enough to revise and own the applications.

Security and Compliance

• Many low-code platforms weren’t built with Enterprise requirements- Airkit supports your enterprise SDLC with role based access control, logging to your Splunk instance or S3 data buckets, bring your own key with row level encryption, etc.
• By baking these tools into the platform, you can achieve both faster, higher quality, and more secure outcomes.

Here are some great examples of building real applications:

See how Airkit connects to external Google API’s for photograph image recognition, and then translation in a “Google Lens,” clone, in about 30 minutes

See how Airkit implements an entire application, a clone of Calendly, synchronizing to calendars and zoom, implemented in about an hour.