As you may remember, Ionic, the company where I’ve worked as a Developer Advocate for the past year and a half, was acquired in late 2022 by OutSystems. As part of that acquisition, I’m excited to announce that I transitioned to a Lead Developer Advocate position on the OutSystems side of the house this past November. In my new role, I will continue doing what I love – making it easier for developers to build quality apps with a great user and developer experience.

About OutSystems

If you’re not familiar with OutSystems, don’t feel bad! I’ll admit I hadn’t heard of the platform at the time of the acquisition. This is a little surprising, considering they have been around since 2001, have more than 700k community members, and thousands of active customers in 87 countries. They are definitively the leader in the low-code industry, and it’s been great getting to know more of the team over the past few months.

The OutSystems platform isn’t what you may picture when you think of low-code. Yes, there are drag-and-drop UI elements, but it’s more of a full-stack visual app dev framework built on top of React, .NET, and SQL (or a back end of your choice). It requires you to understand software architecture concepts, and the apps being built with OutSystems can be incredibly complex and used at massive scale.

With my testing and DevOps background, I’m particularly interested in LifeTime – the infrastructure management and app delivery part of the platform. I’ll definitely be talking more in the future about how OutSystems is leveraging AI to improve DevOps processes and app considerations like performance, monitoring, scalability and more.

What About Appflow?

Appflow, the mobile CI/CD platform built by Ionic, has been my focus during my time at the company and I’m incredibly proud of what the team has accomplished in 2023. We introduced Appflow to React Native, Android, and iOS developers, introduced additional features to our free plan to let developers start building faster, and continued to improve the mobile app delivery experience for thousands of users.

You can expect more exciting things from the Ionic Developer Relations team, including new resources around building and deploying superapps using Ionic technologies like Appflow and Portals. I’m looking forward to continuing to collaborate with the Ionic team to share how you can leverage OutSystems with your existing traditional developer toolkit as well.

But… Low-Code?

To address the elephant in the room, low-code tools definitely have a bad reputation. Among other things, I’ve heard they’re not meant for “real” apps, they require less skill from developers, and it’s impossible to build quality, performant apps with low-code tools.

Well, that sounds a lot like what people say about cross-platform developer tools like Ionic. 😉

If you’ve read my blog posts or seen any of my conference talks, you know that I always advocate for using the right tools for the job at hand. I am honest about limitations and tradeoffs of different approaches, and am guilty of frequently saying “it depends”. My goal is always to help the developer find the right solution and then get up and running fast so they can get the most out of whatever tool is best for them.

I’ll continue to do that as an OutSystems Lead Developer Advocate. I’ve been learning more about the platform’s capabilities, and for enterprise developers that want to build serious apps at scale, iterate quickly, and abstract away the more tedious parts of software development, OutSystems is a clear choice.

What’s Next?

This year, I’m looking forward to getting to know more of the OutSystems community, including our MVPs and Champions, and the contributors to our open source component library, Forge.

OutSystems has a massive, engaged community of developers and I’m excited to understand how I can best help them use the platform and continue to advance in their careers. One program I’m particularly excited about is using my experience as a speaker to help other speakers in the community develop and grow.

I’ll also be reaching out to developers like me – developers that are fluent with other languages but brand new to the OutSystems platform. Every day, developers previously using Java, C#, and JavaScript, start using OutSystems and need to get familiar with the platform as quickly as possible. My goal is to talk to software developers and DevOps engineers, get their perspective on the platform, and build resources for their unique development needs.

I’m also continuing my volunteer work with Women Who Code Mobile and Out in Tech, and am grateful to OutSystems for their support of my efforts to build inclusive developer communities.

Ultimately, not much has changed. I’ll continue to work with developer communities, help them find the best tools for their needs, and build resources for them to succeed.

Here’s to a great 2024!