In this episode, I discuss how to calculate trends over time in Excel for the purposes for forecasting future values. I reference an old post about calculating trends where someone recently left a comment about the counter-intuitiveness on calculating averages of changes in your values. In order to follow along with this episode, I would recommend looking at the screenshot of Excel in this episode/blog post.

Is No-Code the future?

One of the other podcast episodes I reference in this episode is about the no-code movement. Everyone in my field is getting really jazzed about the possibilities of no-code platforms and the abilities it gives to millions of people who don’t know how to code (myself included). I discuss how I never considered myself as someone who is part of the “no-code” movement since I just figured I was building stuff in Excel and Google Sheets.

Alex Hudson wrote a great post about the “delusion” of no-code which provides the other side of the argument. I agree with a lot of his points and I think it’s worth a read if you consider yourself more than an analyst, but also a builder or maker who is building tools for your team or company. These two paragraphs stood out to me, but I would argue that it is indeed possible to have production-ready systems built with no-code tools:

With code, we’re used to being able to create a change, deploy that into a separate environment to test a change, and then be able to deploy into production. Or, failing that, we can deploy into production but switch the feature on progressively, so that if there are errors we can pick them up quickly and resolve them without impacting all our users.With “no code”, it tends to be difficult or impossible to have a non-production environment. Even if you do have one, accurately copying changes over from one to the other is non-trivial. Salesforce has some excellent tooling available to make this work, and even in that environment it’s extremely difficult to do.The ‘No Code’ Delusion – Alex Hudson

Other Podcasts & Blog Posts

In the 2nd half of the episode, I talk about some episodes and blogs from other people I found interesting:

* Software Engineering Daily: Indie Hackers (3 Years Later) with Courtland Allen* Product Hunt Radio: Early days at Facebook and advice for pitching VCs with Mike Vernal