Why We’re Drinking Our Own Champagne: Unqork Just Rebuilt Itself with Zero Code

By: Roberto Busó-García, Senior Director of Engineering at Unqork 

In early 2023, Unqork embarked on a huge mission to rebuild our core product, the integrated development environment (IDE) known as UDesigner, using our own state-of-the-art architecture—and zero code. 

So, why did we decide to become our own biggest customer? There are two reasons. 

First, by leveraging our own platform, we knew we could build a more intuitive, feature-rich product for our customers—and bring it to market much faster. By building UDesigner with zero code, we’ve also become a more agile organization focused on continuous innovation. And now, we are enjoying the same benefits we deliver to our customers—i.e. we’re drinking our champagne. 

Second, we knew the process would completely transform our relationship with our customers. Since we are using UDesigner every single day, we can immediately identify new opportunities to make our product better and to enhance user experience. Because UDesigner is built on Unqork, we can extend, augment, and optimize UDesigner faster than ever before. 

Now, just fifteen months later, UDesigner – Unqork’s new user interface – is live. In that time, we rebuilt our IDE—one that is trusted by some of the world’s largest organizations operating in the most highly regulated industries— from the ground up on an entirely new architecture. The fact that we could securely re-architect such a complex platform in 15 months is a testament to the power of Unqork’s zero-code approach. 

But that’s not all we got done!  We ensured that it is totally reverse-compatible with previous versions—no forced migrations or painful refactoring. We included powerful new features like Branch and Merge and a far more intuitive and personalized user experience. And we did it all with zero code. 

Introducing UDesigner

UDesigner supports all existing and new Unqork functionalities, and thanks to the power of Unqork’s architecture, we were able to add game-changing new features that simplify complex tasks and make the user experience more productive and compelling. 

As soon as users log in, they will see a much more personalized workspace, from links to their most recent tasks to personalizable favorite links. Other top new features include: 

• Branch & Merge: To support easier, more efficient cross-collaboration, users can work concurrently on the design & editing of multiple versions of an application. Then, they can also seamlessly combine changes across versions. 
• Commenting & Notifications: To increase productivity, it is now possible to add comments and tag team members at the workspace, application, and module levels. Their colleagues receive automated notifications and the ability to go straight to where they need to work with a single click.
• Enhanced Wayfinding: To accelerate development, UDesigner provides a significantly more intuitive navigation, increases personalization options, and eliminates clicks so users can get to where they need to go much more quickly and intuitively. 

Why Unqork on Unqork

Ultimately, we decided to build UDesigner using Unqork because it offered us exactly the same benefits it provides our customers, starting with speed to market. Previously, we used traditional coding development, and with that approach it took us several years to design, build, and extend our state of the art workflows feature. Using Unqork, we rebuilt the entire IDE, including Workflows, in half that time—and we added major new features like Branch & Merge and Commenting & Notifications.

We were able to tackle both the rebuild and the new features so quickly because Unqork lets you build and then visualize POCs instantly. In other words, we could get feedback from both technical and business stakeholders and iterate fast. When that’s possible, you can bring together both the design of both user experiences and the underlying architecture. 

Other development tools often have strict limitations on styling and experiences. And if we had built UDesigher with traditional code, iterating on both the design and architecting process would have taken far longer. By contrast, Unqork’s flexibility made it so much easier for us to create on-brand, modern experiences than using a code-based approach—and so much easier to collaboratively evolve them going forward.   

Because you build visually in Unqork and the platform is equipped with Unqork Development Life Cycle Toolkit, we didn’t require an army of engineers to develop UDesigner, like you need with any code base project. As a result, we could build an incredibly complex application—our own IDE—modularly with smaller teams but also with extreme flexibility. That’s just not possible when you rely on code. 

Yes, Unqork’s architecture accelerates development, but its other superpower is the elimination of code. Every new line of code (LOC) is a brick in the wall of tech debt that keeps organizations focused on keeping the lights on instead of innovating. By building UDesigner with zero code, we can now focus our resources on scaling, extending, and optimizing the developer experience instead of managing code and the tech debt that comes with it. 

We have also made it simpler for our team to take advantage of Unqork’s world-class security, which is trusted by some of the largest organizations in the world’s most regulated industries. Our platform has already earned certifications from HIPAA and SOC2 Type II to FedRAMP ATO. We would never have compromised on security, but it is still great that by removing code, we have freed up our own teams to focus more on innovation—just like we do our customers.

In short, we knew UDesigner represented a major disruptor in the way we work which has forced the platform to mature very quickly. That has already been proven by the major new enhancements we have built, like Branch and Merge. That was a high-value capability that we wanted to deliver to our customers as soon as possible. By building UDesigner on Unqork, we could make that happen much more quickly.  

A catalyst for customer-centric transformation 

Because we built UDesigner on Unqork technology, we don’t just try to think like our customers. We have to think like them. And that is already transforming how our teams approach our work in profound ways. 

In July, we weren’t just using Unqork’s architecture. We actually started building UDesigner using UDesigner! That means we could immediately spot opportunities to improve the user experience since we were using it every day. And by building with Unqork, we can make those changes right away. This also provided that extra bit of motivation, knowing that every enhancement we made for our customers would also make our own jobs that much easier going forward.

And this is just the beginning…

I like to remind my team that the initial launch of UDesigner is just the beginning of our journey.  And because both UDesigner and Vega—our new and far more powerful runtime—are built on Unqork’s architecture, we can really fly! 

Vega, which runs on React instead of Angular, opens up endless possibilities. As we were building UDesigner, we saw firsthand how much we could increase performance, speed debugging, and take advantage of much more granular logging functions, thanks to Vega. In other words, we increased scalability, extensibility, and observability by orders of magnitude. 

By building Unqork with Unqork, we’ve freed up tremendous amounts of talent for creativity and innovation. We’ve created a team whose goals are totally aligned with those of our customers. We’ve created a runtime that opens up endless new possibilities—and lets us test ideas quickly and push them out to our customers faster than ever. 

In short, I am genuinely excited about the future, both for our team and how we are going to be able to help our customers. So, I hereby raise a glass (of Unqork champagne, of course) to celebrate what we’ve achieved today… and all that we’re going to accomplish together tomorrow.

Learn more about our UDesigner and the rest of Unqork’s transformational new release.