Hey pals! It's been a long time since I wrote here on Dev. I admit my experiment wasn't going all that great and then I got distracted with higher-priority work. So the goal of becoming a consistent blogger sort of faded for a while...

Welp.

The past month has been wild. I (along with 300 of my friends at Twilio, and massive numbers of other folks in other tech companies) received a layoff announcement for Christmas this year. Some gift, huh?

Oh, don't worry - this isn't about the woe of being laid off in a holiday season or anything. Just setting the stage for what I've been up to. You see, I went into "gotta-find-a-job" mode... and looking for DevRel opportunities has turned up some really cool things!

Today I'd like to share an incredible company I found called Thunkable. It's a zero-code way to make mobile apps. That pitch line had me intrigued
(even though I do love some coding), and I thought eh, why not? So I signed up for their free tier. Here's the pricing at the time of this writing:

I've seen lots of these free-tier things and they always felt exactly like what they are - a teaser to get you onto a paid tier. Features are conveniently grayed out, some annoying little pop-up keeps saying "Hey buddy, upgrade and get the actual cool stuff!"... you know how it is.

Thunkable so far has done NONE of that. I signed up, and got dropped into my environment to start building:

Editing your app in Thunkable is, like... stupid simple. Want a new screen? Click, there it is. Want a button on the screen? Drag that sucker over there and size it. Want it to be purple? You do you, buddy.

Ferb, I know what we're gonna build today

I'm a Tolkien fanatic, so I happened to know about this free API over at The One API that I've used in previous exploratory projects. It's only natural, then, that my first Thunkable app is a Lord of the Rings movie quote finder! It's a very visually simple sort of app - an input box, a button, and some text. The premise goes like this: you enter the name of a character from Lord of the Rings, and the app will respond with a random movie quote from that character.

Building the screen was easy - now how do we make it do things? Well - up on the left there are two tabs - a "Design" page and a "Blocks" page.

"Design" is the one you start on by default, where you drag and drop and color and size components and lay things out the way you want. "Blocks", on the other hand, is where the app's instructions are written. Here's my final product:

Quick Summary

In my one screen here you see a fully functional app that, when you click the button:

1. Queries the API to get a full characters list
2. Finds the character whose name you entered in the list, and returns their _id property
3. Uses the _id property to return all the quotes of that character from the API
4. Randomly selects one and displays it

If you'd like to see it in action, Thunkable provides two testing options: You can either run your app in a mobile emulator right there in the Thunkable interface (left button below) or you can download their live-testing app to your phone and use a code to connect to your app (right button below)

Here's me testing my app in the first manner, direct in the browser:

I went from "I don't have a Thunkable account" to "I have an API-driven app ready to test" in thirty minutes, y'all. And the hardest part was navigating the API docs for my free API to remember how to consume it.

So... now what?

In the Pixar movie "Ratatouille", Chef Gusteau's tag line is "Anyone Can Cook". It was the first thing I thought of as I started trying to make my example app do something interesting - because it took most of the hard parts out of building an app right away, and made it so "Anyone Can Develop".

A dev with a new project always has a host of "initial setup" decisions to make - what framework do I build with? What's the latest edition? npm install every-lib-in-the-whole-world! Uh oh, did they change the interface of this library and now I have to learn how to use it all over again? Even as a seasoned developer, there are days when I look at that laundry list of things I have to do before I can start building, and think, "eh, I'll start that project tomorrow". All of that was immediately swept to the side in the Thunkable interface - it was just ready for me to come up with something.

And while it helps that I'm an experienced developer, the Thunkable interface was super intuitive to use. The blocks "click together" to help you understand what logic is allowed to be connected. I have never had such a pleasant experience parsing a JSON response.

Further, when you're ready to publish your app, it's this easy:

To quote my kid: BRUH.

If you have an idea but you're daunted by what it takes to build it out - try Thunkable for free and see if you can get something working.