Hooked on Mendix
Joris Hiemstra is a seasoned professional with a solid technical background and sixteen years in IT. He began his career in software development, spending several years in various industries working on developing modules and workflows before becoming a consultant with a systems integrator working on document management solutions. It was during his time as a consultant that he was introduced to Mendix by a former colleague.
As some professional developers do, he first questioned how a company could rely on a low-code framework for their core business apps. Are apps hosted in the cloud a security risk? Is low-code able to offer the type of flexibility through extensibility that enterprise applications often require? However, the more he learned about Mendix, the more he was hooked.
“Mendix integrates easily with other systems, legacy or not. It’s like water; it fills the gap in enterprise application landscapes. For both bigger and smaller businesses, it’s the ideal platform to create quick data entry forms to collect data, develop a small workflow process to align with their business processes, and integrate with other systems to collect and share data. From there, Mendix can be used to modernize the enterprise application landscape.”
Related reading: How PostNL Modernized and Expanded with Low-Code
Joris started working with the Mendix Platform for larger organizations, gaining experience in multiple industries across various exciting projects. He became a big believer in the benefits of low-code. Not only was it possible to build, test, and deliver releases with ease, but pairing low-code with agile workflow methodology created a smooth process for development, including registering bugs and accepting requests for features. Eventually he transitioned into the freelance space as a Mendix developer, starting his own company Joris Hiemstra Consultancy, where was able to take his love of working with low-code to different projects and customers.
While talking to some friends of his, Joris noticed how useful the Mendix Platform and low-code development would be for companies who badly needed to move away from increasingly complex Excel spreadsheets, but for whom a typical enterprise license would be out of the question.
Mendix Basic: A new world of opportunity
The release of the new Mendix Basic license in 2021 would prove to be an easy entry point for many new organizations, including Joris’ friends. Like so many others, their company had started out with relatively simple and transparent digital administrative processes that proved to be challenging to maintain and therefore scale successfully or remain centralized. As Joris so aptly put it:
“Basic licensing opens the door to a relatively cheap customized solution, so businesses don’t have to worry about their administration and they are able to focus on their core business again.”
As a company, Joris’ friends are responsible for physically attaching cables to large apartments in order to connect those buildings to the fiber network. They had been handling their administration in Excel. Still, they were running into issues, including oversight into the status of each apartment and any problems that cropped up during or after installation, in addition to managing and planning team workloads. When Mendix Basic was released, Joris reached back out to his friends and offered to build an app.
What they wanted was a simple offline administrative app that would allow them to select the address where work was being done that day, upload a snapshot of the completed or in-progress installation, and enter any notes pertaining to the project. Not only did this make planning workloads and responding to issues easier, transitioning away from spreadsheets to the app paved the way for significant new insights thanks to data now being centralized and easily synthesized.
The Mendix Platform: There and back again
When asked about how his assumptions surrounding low-code have changed since he was first introduced, Joris had this to say:
“Low code isn’t a buzzword anymore, it’s there, and it will help organizations, big and small, to deliver robust, future proof, and beautifully designed applications.”