Why Low-Code Breeds Technical Debt

00:00:01 Mark Smith
Welcome to the power platform show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guests inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power platform. Now let's get on with the show.

00:00:23 Mark Smith
In this episode, we'll be focusing on the role of the developer, the consultant from the perspective of a power platform skeptic. Today's guest is from Lithuania, he works at McCaw, Lithuania as a power platform, dynamics CE consultant and developer. He has a strong background in project leadership and consultancy, having coordinated scrum teams. And engage directly with clients as part of his consulting career, you can find links to his bio socials, etcetera in the show. That's for this episode. Welcome to the show, David. Did I? Did I dumbness dumbness. Excellent.

00:00:55 Dovydas Grigaitis
Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Well, it's actually funny thing. I'll start by saying, as I'm always doing when I'm meeting new customers or clients. Usually I say for people that if it's really difficult to pronounce my name, go by David, because I think davidas is just the different kind of David. I think it goes from all the Hebrew and the more popular version in Lithuania, but in general it's the same name as David or. That it so you know, choose the one that you like. If you're if you're happy with it, you can. Yeah, you can. You can go with whichever you like. 1 the most. Yeah. But thanks for having me. It's it's really interesting to to be here.

00:01:26 Mark Smith
Yes. Well, I like that. I like that. Good to have you on. I always like to start with food, family and fun. What do you do when you're not deep in technology?

00:01:47 Dovydas Grigaitis
Yeah, it's starting. With the controversial, so are we so. Yeah. So actually with the with, I'll start with the food because. I was thinking to myself, hearing that you're asking this question to everyone as that I'm not really much into this, you know, expensive and and Porsche cuisine. So I myself, I'm a comfort food guy and and it really entangles a lot with with the fun that I'm doing. Basically. My my spare time goes a long way with cycling and and mountain biking, you know, so usually this kind of food tradition goes with follows along with a long ride with the fellows. You know, 5-4 hours on the saddle and and then you stop at some gas station, get a hot dog.

00:02:31 Mark Smith
Wow.

00:02:36 Dovydas Grigaitis
Or or, you know coke or or Sprite, you know, in in hot summer's day. So that's that's my food basically the the sole food that I'm having I haven't. That better experience than, you know ice cream after a long ride or or after some big journey. So that's that's the food and and fun. And actually the family is also quite entangled. So we're spending our days with the misses and and the dog, all three of us are actually spending most of our time.

00:02:50 Mark Smith
Love it.

00:03:06 Dovydas Grigaitis
And home. So we're basically sitting at the same room for 8 hours a day and then, you know, we're still spending another, you know, hours at home when it's summer, when we're riding our bikes, maybe a bit less together, but basically. Yeah, we we have. Really harmonious and peaceful. Kind of living here. And let's say yes. So, so and. And all of these experiences are really entangled to. One another so. And that's that's basically how it is.

00:03:33 Mark Smith
I like it. Tell me about Lithuania. I know very little about it.

00:03:37 Dovydas Grigaitis
Well, honestly, it's. I don't even know where to start if if I would, you know. Well, people sometimes are asking me what to see in Lithuania and and it's really difficult to pinpoint any one particular, you know, artifact or or building or a hill or so. Because it's pretty much a flat lands. So we don't have very well, you know big mountains or or very majestic nature, but it's very foresty area, a bit reserved people. So something that you would encounter more in the northern countries. So Lithuanians are usually more reserved. More careful, but really kind of warm and nice people. It's just that a little bit reserved. In general, the country itself wants it was a superpower of Europe together with Poland, but and then we still are kind of, you know, really into it and we we are really proud of our ancestry and and we're trying to uphold our identity within the Europe because Lithuania and Latvia in general. Only two nations in Europe that are still originating from the Baltic tribes. So we have our own distinct language. It's not Slavic, it's not Latin or Germanic or even, you know, Scandinavian, it's it's its own. So yeah, there is more history about Lithuania than actual, you know, things to pinpoint. We don't have Eiffel Tower, we don't have, you know great Canyon or or even sharks, you know in in our coastal areas but but in general it's interesting. It's it's a country that you need to you know. Work gets an elbow grease until it get to. Like it basically. And that's that's in. Short, this is how it is in the thing it's it's. This country that you need to need to experience, I guess, and it doesn't come in a week, I would say.

00:05:36 Mark Smith
Interesting. Interesting. I love that many of the phrases that you've used are very familiar to me, like Alba, Greece and and the misses, I mean it's it's very. Yeah, those are in New Zealand quite a bit. Yeah.

00:05:51 Dovydas Grigaitis
Yeah, this is one of the British in me basically I really am a big fan of of British culture and this. Yeah. And. And and people died. Well, I find that the the language, it's so very beautiful. The the English sometimes you're you're taking it for granted because it's the language that you're using for business mainland communicating but.

00:05:57 Mark Smith
Nice.

00:06:11 Dovydas Grigaitis
But yeah, if you read into it and all the terms and everything and and when you're starting to compare it with your mother tongue, you know, with, with your natural language. It becomes really clear that some expressions really nice and nice sounding, so I'm trying to include as much as possible into my vocabulary because it just makes the language so much more fun to to speak into and and and use.

00:06:36 Mark Smith
That's so cool. That's so cool. How big? How? Big is the the tech community in lithium. Yeah.

00:06:42 Dovydas Grigaitis
Well, the the whole country is small, so you know to to say that the the, the communities, the it's it's not very big it's growing and I think it's now making a considerable piece of of our in general you know working force especially Syntech area. In Lithuania. And in general, yeah, so it's growing, it's, I wouldn't say that it's really big. It's still you know it's not the the you know sector. That is is. Compiling the most working space in the. Country, but yeah, it's. I would say it's, you know, something that is very average. Especially for example in power platform, if we would speak in in more precise terms it's I would say small. I used to joke around that, especially in the days before the so-called power platform, when it was more of the dynamics customer engagement development and sales enterprise and so and and whatnot, you could say that you know all of the developers in Lithuania basically by names there are they were just the you know. Handful of of the guys. Then when you know low code and and you know low code solutions kicked in the community started to. Doing quite a bit so so now there are more developers, but for example our user groups are still quite small. You know it's like 40-50 people show up, you know. So nothing really crazy against small country, small tech community, I would say. But but it's growing. And it's making more and more considerable size in our economy.

00:08:27 Mark Smith
In our initial call, you, you classified yourself as a power platform skeptic. What did you mean by that?

00:08:34 Dovydas Grigaitis
Yeah, well, honestly, don't want to talk anything really bad about Microsoft because it puts food on my table. But yeah, maybe I'm a bit skeptical about the trends and and the general general direction at which this whole low code, no code, you know, approach is going towards. So to put it bluntly. Ah. I would say that. This threshold there is quite low nowadays for people to get into low code. No code breeds a lot of tech people or so-called developers that are not building bulletproof or future proof solutions, and that's where it it becomes a little bit tricky because. We have a lot of, you know, canvas applications and low code applications that are built on top of, you know, SharePoint. To without a good engineering practices in mind and you know, and this is kind of self perpetuating circle where more developers show up and they're spending and companies are buying more into these simple applications. And eventually we reach the point where those applications are becoming really difficult to maintain and you just need to rebuild them so the whole quality of of stuff being developed is maybe not at the. Of the best of the best kind of quality, the products are not of the best quality and there isn't much in the whole approach of Microsoft or marketing of the products that would suggest people utilizing. More sophisticated tools, so for instance. To to take a comparison, for example with flutter flow and how they are positioning themselves when they're releasing, you know their new tools and platforms, so. They are they. Never position themselves as a low code. No code platform, regardless of the fact that you can build applications using low code, you know approaches they still allow you to, you know. Those those applications and then export them and extend them within the, you know realm of. Proper, you know so-called pro. I don't even like the term, but pro code, you know, development approach. So for example you download the whole project and then you have this flutter framework dark code that could be worked on and maintained and. So if you would take for example canvas applications, if you have something built which is de facto standard now in the market, you know canvas application with some SharePoint database. If you have this application, it really becomes difficult to, you know, extend it and build on top of it so it it reaches its technical threshold really fast and then you need to figure out what. To do next. Either you're again putting more fire onto this technical depth bonfire, or you know. You're rebuilding everything from scratch, so I don't really like this this you know. Gap between low code, no code approach and you know pro code way of working like I I see this you know whole but in these two approaches to towards building software and this whole doesn't have any way to transition from one side to another. To only all the approach nowadays is to start building. Everything was idea in mind that you will need to, you know, extend it in the future and and that's where I see this huge problem with new developers and and people getting onboarded within the whole power platform environment. They tend to approach it as. You know drag and drop kind of software building paradigm instead of actually focusing on how to build something that will last and can be, you know, extended in the future. Yeah, that's just all demagoguing me. That's that's. Yeah, that's that's that's something that I'm noticing more and more often, to be honest. Every now and then, you know, some customer kicks in and and says that, OK, we need to build this integration and then you get in all sorts of problems. So for instance.

00:12:50 Mark Smith
Good. Good.

00:13:07 Dovydas Grigaitis
Very, very recently I've been building the integration on canvas application. Accountancy system and the canvas application was built with, you know, standard connectors on canvas apps that are not required, no model driven apps and and then when they built it, no one actually thought that it will need to be extended to uphold the INTEGRATIONAL standards or or to hold the business processes. That are involving integrations. And then when? You are start taking over it and starting developing it. You see that it's very difficult to to do it properly. If you want for example having invoice lines on the header, it becomes a problem with SharePoint. You know data model. If you want to have a proper you know. API calls to the back end or Azure functions. You already need premium connectors so. Then if you want. To keep the status quo for the company to see them, OK, we will do the implementations and you won't need to pay. More for, you know running software. Then just start putting a lot of you know different kinds of workarounds into the into the software until it becomes really difficult to manage. So This is why I'm a bit of a skeptic. You know it it it encourages developers to do stuff, it encourages more people to build.

00:14:19Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:14:30 Dovydas Grigaitis
The More stuff and that's this is really nice in the end of the day, it's still where engineers were here to. Save time this. In a sense, our job is to save time. The only only resource that is. You know, limited it's time and that's what we're doing. And and that's very good thing that that people can, you know, do more with less. But that's yeah. Also where it greets other kind of problem when you need to redo something from scratch without actually necessity of doing it. So that's why in short, yeah, it's a difficult question. You know why you're a bit of a skeptic, but more and more grumpy I'm becoming. Few days of working with this.

00:15:16 Mark Smith
It's interesting the there's there's data that shows that 50% of IT spend inside an organization is just on managing technical debt and that's a lot of productive time. Just managing technical debt.

00:15:33 Dovydas Grigaitis
Yeah, I had never heard about the actual percentages, but I. Fully agree with that. I mean it, it might be possible that you're spending a lot of time just to, you know, to to work out problems or you know, going into this art of not shooting yourself in the foot, you know, so it's it's. It's quite difficult. Sometimes you have to to to go around with it and and not create that technical. Depth. And you know these local platforms, they are actually the breeding ground for technical that like, you know, I've never been very big on on canvas applications before. I, John McCall, usually in my previous companies who would always build something from scratch. Mainly on web resources, you know with some front end framework and you know cannabis education state came into my life later and this is where it actually is. I got the real taste of it because you would start building something with in mind that this is a necessity. This is just the hygiene.

00:16:19 Mark Smith
No.

00:16:37 Dovydas Grigaitis
And this technology just absolutely must be included into the framework if you are building the software and then turns out you know that canvas applications do not support keyboard events like if you want to, you know, override keyboard events, there's no such thing. And you. You know your either you need to if you're building some software, especially for the front end. Either you need to plan it ahead in the waterfall like manner and check what kind of roadblocks you will have in the future, which is very not scrummy or you are, you know, going and dealing with the problems. You know. The way. So, thank God. Well, not God but, but the guys in Microsoft that they came up with the PCF controls and that actually alleviated a lot of these problems. So in some cases you can solve those by writing your own extensions like for example. These keyboard events, so I'm I'm taking this example because I had to create this PDF control also it's in the PCF gallery. If someone is having the same problem as I. Did feel free to. Use it. It's working fine. So yeah. And and This is why why actually a bit more optimistic in terms of all because you know these PCF controls came into light. So that's that's that's one of the good things that actually happened.

00:17:48 Mark Smith
Nice. I want to talk more with you about peace here for controls. But before I get there, tell me what are your views? And the difference is that you're you've observed. Between the consultant versus the developer, and perhaps before you give me that view, how do you define a consultant and how do you define a developer you know? And these are from your points of view, of course, yeah.

00:18:31 Dovydas Grigaitis
Yeah. So actually I always presented myself as a consultant, never as a developer. Maybe because I started from the, you know, consultancy side of of working. But as it is with the power platform, I want to, I would like to sound, you know, clever here by defining consultant as some subset of developer but. In a true sense, like from classical point of view, I would say developer is someone that can work independently from the customer, mainly in the scrum team or in any kind of other setup without exposure to the actual customer.

00:19:16 Mark Smith
Interesting.

00:19:17 Dovydas Grigaitis
And and the consultant is someone that most probably will do the same thing as the developer, but without the luxury of not, you know, approaching the customer and in a sense, I was always a little bit also skeptic on developers working within the. Framework of our platform. I'm not a well big believer of, you know developer. Developing in low code, no code effective development platform in you know closed quarters with other developers and then exposing only product owner project managers you know with with the customer. So I think that the whole platform is actually pushing the developers to be consultants who can develop so. So that's that's why I always been a bit, I've always presented myself as a consultant though in my company, as far as I know, I'm I'm in a software engineer like. Developer but in how it's these days and the power platform, I think that you're so much more value if you can actually. Talk. Basically talk. With the customer and explain what you're doing and why you're doing and why it's the reason. So yeah, that's my $0.02. You want this? To different types of.

00:20:42 Mark Smith
I like it. It's a it's an interesting perspective because I I see everyone try to define, you know, developers and or makers, being a developer writes code and a maker configures the system and you know brings in parts. But. I like the definition that you've used as a developer doesn't necessarily need to be in customer facing, but a consultant does, and that that you're seeing this transition that a developer really needs to become more customer facing in in, in a low code world. And that's a very unique and different way of looking at it and I like it.

00:21:18 Dovydas Grigaitis
I think that you know the whole approach towards you know your classical developer. Your classical solution architect. Your classical consultant comes from the older days of software development where we didn't have any kind of, you know, very easy going frameworks to build stuff. And back in the day, you know, you you didn't have your definition of front end and back end developers and then DevOps engineers and everything. And that came from the point that there was number luxury for one person to, you know, learn all different kinds of stacks and technologies. It it just was not cost efficient. You would have one, one engineer that goes into a rapid hole of certain area and this is how it was the most efficient way. Of working and then. There are there some companies, some IT companies, they transitioned into this, you know, local, no code or very, you know. Easygoing platform. Kind of working. For example, super based and fire based and a lot of cool tools you know that are still considered pro codes. You know tools but but they themselves are actually alleviating a lot of work for developers. And you know there isn't that much of A necessity for you to, you know focus on certain. Area you can see that you know. Yeah. I'm. I'm a really big expert, you know. Really ******** front end, developer on canvas applications and everything that I'm doing is that I know power effects and I I know how to make a square you know on the canvas applications with. Borders. That's. That's something that is you. You won't got to get far with it, you know. It's it's not something not the rabbit hole that you want to go. So I think nowadays with these platforms what you want to do is to have engineers that they still need to have this focal point on certain technology, but they can be more. Spread across the whole stack so you can have the one that that you know can do canvas applications. You know, model driven apps, power BI, you know Azure development it's like. There's no point in my belief of having really, you know, true engineers or developers at certain points. So I think that's why we have this definition still nowadays, though, it doesn't really make sense in my mind.

00:23:35 Mark Smith
Yeah, so valid PCF controls tell us about your experience, why you like them, and and some use cases where you have you have found there have been, you know you gave an example of keyboard shortcuts. And my mind was like, wow, that's so cool because it's not a visual type of experience where most PCF controls are considered visual type experience.

00:23:56 Dovydas Grigaitis
Yeah. So. I think that's. First of all, I don't want to present myself as some sort of, you know, front end development guru of of reality guru. I started with PCF controls maybe 2 1/2 years ago when when they started, you know, I slowly but surely got into into working with those. And nowadays when it comes to. DCF controls. First of all, I like them because of course they give you this flexibility on the front end layer. But in a sense, I'm not really focusing that much nowadays in building something on front end, but actually filling the gaps of technology that it cannot be supplemented by by out-of-the-box components. One of the examples is this, you know, keyboard shortcuts for the whole logic is. Is not you. Know visible for the user and the whole PDF control is not usable, but it's still in the front end. It listens in the client side. But on the same account, for example, I like to, well, recently I've built one again like just the a grid on which you can drag a picture, you know and then I have in the back end you know the logic that reads the picture and now converts it into base 64, sends it to the. Model driven apps. You know plugins and and then it collaborates with OCR in AI model to translate it into a JSON. So the whole use case came from the really interesting situation where there was 1 customer that had really interesting pricing models for the. Products and those pricing models were in table manner. So if you like have width and height and each combination would have different price and you could not apply any kind of normal function that would represent those prices, you can go to the polynomials. Or or some advanced math, but you would still have some, you know discrepancies. So that's why you need to, you know, translate each and every one of those. Combinations that might be, you know, 400 combinations for one product into different, you know prices. So that that's where it's really you know works out perfectly fine. So if without PCF controls you would need to you know utilize some maybe model driven apps file attached functionality and then.

00:26:04 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:26:19 Dovydas Grigaitis
That that functionality would again kick in the same back end logic. But then here comes the PCF controls and it gives us. Really kind of low hanging fruit out benefit for the user that you just, you know drag the file on top of it.

00:26:34 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:26:35 Dovydas Grigaitis
Allow them for the back end to pick up the work faster, the more recent actually, and the one that I really like and it's it's more recent actually with the PDF controls is the grid extensions and you will see now in the even in LinkedIn community there are more and more people started talking about those. Because nowadays you can override. I think it's called. Our App Spirit control and model driven apps that allows you to put your PCF control into that PCF control well, it's in a sense PCF control that allows accepts your PCF control. So that is actually really cool because the grids were always a big problem. In model driven apps they were not really customizable and if you would want to build your own grid, that's a lot of work. That's really, really a lot of work to build your own. Grid. And this is actually really cool functionality, because then you can have your PCF control attached to certain cell and then you can apply your your node logic. So that's other area where I'm working on. While this is again another piece of control that I. Published into the library. Into PCF gallery at the you know so-called Quick Edit dialogue that allows you to open for example the description field and edit it in a bigger field to see more from the grid line with the latest developments that I've noticed with PCF controls is that actually you can. In this PCF control and built it on top of model driven apps and hide all other model driven apps navigations and features and that actually creates you a custom React application running on model driven apps. And very recently I wrote this lichton arts. About how they're it's it's very close for the Microsoft to present another back end as a service platform for the developers because everything is basically there. You have a really nice way of building your entity relationship models with data versus builder. You have your security.

00:28:36 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:28:48 Dovydas Grigaitis
Model, which is really cool and really, really, you know powerful. You have your server side functions or logic running on NET Framework plugins and then you have your front end that can be built on top of PCF controls which also has all sorts of connectors with your. You know front end and back end and you have hosting as well. You don't need to worry about hosting. So basically you have all the tools you are required to allow users to build completely custom front ends on top of model driven apps. It's doable right now as. Well. So we need to do a little bit hacky stuff. You. Need to know. Include the URL parameters to hide navigation. And you know and and some some some additional, you know settings in manifest file and then you can have just these simple you know front end single page application on top of model driven apps. But I think this is a this would be really appreciated by a lot of developers and model driven as because time and time again. And having the same problem with any customer saying that, OK, we would want to have this functionality and then you're going into this consultant mode, you're saying, yeah, you know, but maybe let's start now with the model driven apps and and let's make it more simple and let's see how the adoption goes. And if adoption goes well, we can then think of implementing something. Sophisticated. So when it comes to these, you know, front end building things with PDF controls, you can, you know, just say yeah, no problem. You know we will build our front end functionality like that you know in in few days and.

00:30:27 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:30:31 Dovydas Grigaitis
The back end is there and and where we can roll off. So yeah, that's that's why what I would really like Microsoft to go. For. Yeah, I don't think that they will do it. But but yeah, this is something that I already implemented for a few of my customers. Really simple applications on top of model driven apps that are just applications. You know, single page applications on fluent UI and you react, but it's fast. It's got leaked custom and and you don't have this instant rejection of users noticing, you know, model driven apps. And I think every consultant, every developer will say the same that. Regardless of what you're presenting and what value you're presenting in any of Microsoft applications, people will dislike it because it's Microsoft. So. So I think that gives a lot of wiggle room to actually trick your users into using Microsoft without knowing it.

00:31:29 Mark Smith
Yeah. I like it. I like it. It gives it, it gives a lot of scope. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how the space develops davidas it's been great to have you on the show. You've got some very unique perspectives, and I and I love your views. And how you're using PCF, I think that for some time I've thought PCF has got so much more runway on it. It could do so much more and there needs to be more adoption of it and the impact it can have in the the software that that is built on dataverse. I think the back end is just, you know amazing and I like this concept of it. You know, just using it as a service, then to build whatever you want on the front end is is brilliant. Thank you for coming on the show.

00:32:16 Dovydas Grigaitis
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. So it was really. Nice to talk. To Durant a little bit, if I may say so, not everyone's really wants to to hear me ranting about Microsoft. It's maybe too much flowers and stuff, and maybe some reality check every once in a while really. Nice but yeah.

00:32:38 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP, Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. If there's a guest you would like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buy me a coffee.com/nz365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.