Why You Absolutely Must Document Your No-Code Software

Here’s a conceptual framework to keep your no-code sane

I’ve released almost 200 versions of my web-based app to paying customers over the last 18 months. And I’m not even officially on version 1.0 yet. So last week, when I released version 0.9.24.25 via my no-code platform of choice, Bubble.io, I broke … well, almost everything.

What’s worse, it wasn’t a catastrophic break, the kind you can find with a few minutes testing. But a few days later, a customer reached out to our support team with a strange issue. It led me to discover a glitch in my logic I otherwise never would have caught. It could have lingered for days and made a huge mess of my data.

Thankfully, I was able to go back to my documentation, realize what I did and when I did it, and make a quick fix. It took me about five minutes to find and fix the glitch, and it only impacted that one customer.

However, without that documentation, it could have taken weeks before I realized what I had done, and maybe just as long to remedy it. All while revenue slipped through a gaping hole in my app.

No-code is no joke. It may make coding feel like a game, but you can’t treat it like one. You need to document everything you do.