Glide was happy to be featured at the No-code Conference by Codebreakers on October 23rd where Anna Radzievskaya, founder of @codebreakers.tech, interviewed our CEO, David Siegel. David gave the audience an idea of how Glide fits into the No-Code ecosystem, and what makes the founding idea and values of Glide ever-evolving, to the benefit of users.
In case you missed No-code Conference, we've shared the recording above, and here are a few highlights from the talk:
As you may already know, Glide creates apps from Google Sheets, without code. To create your app, first pick a sheet from your Google Drive. Glide analyzes the data and make some smart decisions about how to structure an app based on the data. Next, you can customize anything Glide doesn't get right—drag-and-drop visual components, add functionality, adjust the look and feel. When you're done, you can instantly share your Glide app with a link.
Picture above, we have a Google Sheet containing the inventory of a fictional store. Based on the spreadsheet’s data, Glide can help you create a Stripe-powered store where you can sell your goods—in this case, fancy egg-shaped mirrors!
Glide is a mobile-first platform. With Glide, you have the option of using your apps on desktop or tablets, but Glide is still strongest with mobile devices.
We’ve been asked, "why are we taking this approach, why are we starting with the data? Why do we talk about Google Sheets and spreadsheets so much?" On this non-scientific chart, you can see the top programming languages in the world by the number of people who use them, and then there's Excel:
Excel is a programming language (and spreadsheet tool) used by about a billion people. We were very inspired by this fact. This really captured our attention. Spreadsheets are flexible enough to adapt to basically any use case, so you see people using spreadsheets to model the operations of Fortune 50 companies, and then people use the same software to start a new business or to manage a project.
“Spreadsheets are one of the most enduring and incredible technologies that we ever created. Email and spreadsheets… There are deep properties that these technologies have that are super beneficial so we decided, let’s stand on the shoulders of giants. Let’s see if we can build a non-technical programming platform that combines the versatility and flexibility, the power and usefulness of spreadsheets with mobile computers.”
We’ve also been asked "why Google Sheets?" Google Sheets has around 250 million active users, and an API that makes it technically possible for us to connect to your sheets. We're not part of Google, we don't have specific loyalties to Google, but it’s been an incredible resource. We're very excited to someday connect to Excel, Airtable, CRMs like Salesforce, and any other data source.
