Some time (not long) ago I was working remotely on some software that was driven by an API on a remote server maintained by some folks in a different country. A long way from me.
Cutting a long story short I realised that the lack of control over the server was because they really did not know how it worked, or how to fix it or diagnose issues their server was having.
It was a laraval/MS-SQL system built from building blocks supplied by Microsoft. They wired all the blocks together in a GUI and look! It works!
* Putting images into a UU-encoded text field worked for images <7MB... The actual images the customers want are >10MB
* Low levels of activity it was reliable. Under load it randomly dropped sessions.
* They did not seem to know what logging was, or how to use it. I was supplying them with problem reports, carefully noting the time - and getting ghosted. I realised they had no way of knowing what their software was doing, or did. They could only set it up to do what they hoped.
* The stored times as wall clock time strings "2019-02-12T03:02:12.123" No time zone included. Time series data worth a lot of money. "What happens when daylight savings repeats an hour or skips one?" I asked. No answer. This infected the whole system. I spent a lot of time fighting dates, and was that in the past? Future? Is that supposed to be now?
Back in 1997 we had more reliable, and higher quality software, on a telehoused 486 Apache/Perl/Postgres system. But we compiled it from source and edited the configuration files by hand.
"No code" might be OK for Aunties cookie recipes, but for building infrastructure it is rot
