Hey there,

Welcome to today's issue of the Top 3 in Tech newsletter. I'm officially back from vacation and bringing you the hottest new take on "no-code" tools and what it means for the future of development.

Let's get right to it 🔥

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1. No-code tools

There's many different ways to build a website. From static HTML/CSS files, to using a modern JavaScript framework, to a traditional serverside language like PHP or Python.

All these approaches use code to determine how the website should look and work - and that's what we as developers are used to working with.

But in the last few years, there's been a surge of "no-code" and "low-code" platforms to make it even easier to create websites.

These platforms are usually designed for non-developers, to enable more people to create a website without needing to know how to code.

On one hand, this can be scary for us developers. We might spend a lot of time learning one way to code a website - only for it to then be possible to create a site entirely using drag-and-drop theme builders. It might feel like these tools potentially take away our jobs!

Personally, however, I believe that no-code tools are a great addition to the overall development ecosystem and nothing to be scared of:

1. No-code website builders make it easy to create "simple" websites. Think marketing / landing pages, brochure websites etc. That is, read-only websites designed to convey information with very light interactivity.
2. No-code tools often get a website 90% of the way. But it's very hard to create a website entirely using no-code that looks and works exactly how you'd like it to.

As a front-end developer, I still see a giant need for more complex web applications that no-code tools simply can't create right now. And if we can use no-code tools to build the simpler websites, that'll free up our time to work on those harder problems.

Additionally, no-code tools can be a huge asset for developers mostly working on the simpler types of sites as their job or as freelancers. Because all things aside, it's gonna be faster to create a no-code site than to code it entirely from scratch. And even though no-code tools are targeted at less technical people, developers especially can make great use of them to rapidly create cool sites.

I definitely don't think we should be scared of no-code tools. We should embrace them instead, and see them as a way to simplify the trivial parts of our jobs so we can work on more interesting problems.

And don't worry: the demand for devs in the job market is not going down any time soon.

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2. Framer

It wouldn't be right to talk about no-code without mentioning an actual no-code website builder!

And of those, Framer is one of the most popular ones - and for good reason.

It's flexible and powerful, with lots of templates to get you started.

The idea is to build your website like you'd build a design in something like Figma. Drag and drop your navigation, add a hero section with some text and a CTA, and then export it as a complete website.

That's exactly what Framer is, and it can make some really cool results. Definitely check it out if you're interested in no-code or just want to see a beautiful website:

​Check out framer.com​

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3. Powerful CSS one-liners

The final pick for this week is for the lot of us that still prefer coding our websites with some good ol' CSS. And it's always nice to have some nifty CSS tricks up your sleeve when doing just that.

This thread by Marko Denic shares some really cool CSS features in just a single line - and I know I personally learned a tip or two from this list. So check it out to level up your CSS game by clicking on the tweet below 👇

Marko ⚡ Denic @denicmarko The most powerful CSS one-liners: August 15th 2022 528 Retweets 2,625 Likes

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That's it for now! See you in 2 weeks 👋

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— Mads Brodt