Learning Airtable

Preface

These are exciting times if you’ve never learned programming. Until the mid-2010s, there were essentially two types of knowledge workers: those who could write code and those who couldn’t. The latter group was usually stuck organizing their data in spreadsheets. Now, the lines are blurred for the better. Anyone can build software tools with Airtable and other no-code platforms.

When I first taught my no-code course at Stanford, it wasn’t clear which no-code tool would be most appealing to students. It didn’t take long for me to find clarity. Semester after semester, Airtable is the tool that most students gravitate toward.

They love it because it’s intuitive to get started. They love the design. Most of all, they love that whether they need to do things that would normally require some software background, like creating an interface for a team member or triggering email notifications, there’s a clear path in Airtable that doesn’t require any coding.

Around the same time the no-code course was offered, I was raising venture capital for a startup. I’d used Airtable with great success to organize small projects before, but now my team and I were effectively running the entire company on Airtable. We tracked potential customers and investors in Airtable, for example, but we also used Airtable to serve application data into our prototype—without any code. In other words, Airtable was effective for an incredible range of no-code tasks that helped our team do more faster, and ...