A wonderful low-code experience: the student edition

Get to know the students

We would like to introduce you to Amber Nauwelaert, a 24 year old student from AP studying Business and IT. She's a real problem solver who loves to analyse things. She enjoys reading books and watching movies, as long as the story behind them is interesting.

Also, meet Koen Hellemans - 20 years old and a fellow business and IT student. Apart from his passion for analyzing and programming, Koen has been playing basketball for more than 10 years. In fact, he loves all sports.

At the end of this blog you can find a short video of both of them.

How it all started

In October 2021, Amber and Koen both wanted to broaden their horizons and experience, which led them to begin their adventures at Apvine. As both of them are analytical geniuses, they saw the similarities with the activity diagram from school right away.

They started their journey as #lowcodemaniacs by checking out the Mendix Learning Paths and trying out the Mendix Platform for themselves. As soon as they completed their crash course, they started working on an application where sports team managers could fill in the number of rebounds and other individual statistics for basketball games and players. The app gives access to data on all athletes.

As soon as the basics were in place, Amber and Koen began fine-tuning their masterpiece. They integrated an API to reduce the amount of manual work for team managers. The outcome - results and statistics can be integrated from an external website, and the app can both receive and give information back. This saves team managers from having to do everything manually, so they can focus more on the game.

The first low-code experience

So what did Amber and Koen think of their experience? Mendix exceeded all expectations. “It was easy to get started with the crash course, which I did not expect.” says Amber. However, it’s sometimes difficult to keep an eye on things as Mendix already does a lot out-of-the-box. With the classic way of programming, you have to do everything yourself step by step, and you have more control over what your concept does. The pre-built blocks are very convenient and have a lot of advantages when it comes to speed. In addition, the app already has a nice layout.

Amber and Koen are eager to keep working with Mendix in their future careers. "Why would you use classic programming when you can speed up your project with Mendix?" Dixit Koen.

The learnings

After working a year with Mendix, they discovered that there are several advantages using Mendix compared to classic programming:

• Speeding up the development process
• Easier for the business to use (with no IT background)
• You see results very quickly
• Fewer errors
• Fewer problems with coding mistakes
• Mendix Studio Pro is much better than GitHub
• Set-up of databases is easier

"As Mendix offers a lot of out-of-the-box functionalities, it was sometimes difficult to keep a complete overview of what is already available in the application and what is yet to be done. But we learned by doing, so that's great!"

Last but not least.. key takeaways and their experience at apvine

Definitely knowing what low-code is! In this project, they were able to troubleshoot more than they were used to – which brought some great advantages and insights. They had a weekly follow-up with their apvine colleagues and felt really part of the team.

They were always able to work at the office and grabbed this chance as much as possible. Koen said, “The team is really welcoming, they always made sure there was somebody there when we were coming to the office. And we were able to participate in some great team events too!"

It was great having Amber and Koen on board. Next year, we will probably see them again for another project!