Having just returned from US to Canada to ride this out, I'm pretty much confined -- as many of us are or, if not, should be -- in my apartment for the next couple of weeks or month.

I hesitated to write anything this week due to the grave circumstances in which we find ourselves in. Everything feels unimportant, useless in the face of the pandemic. Should I really be writing about no-code?

That being said, I've found great calm in the the mundane. A conversation where I don't talk about coronavirus or a transactional email that just wants to know how I like my new couch. Yes, how I rate my couch isn't important right now but I do long for the days where for some people at some corporate office somewhere that was their most pressing preoccupation.

I'm attempting here to strike a balance between saying nothing for worry of distracting you from what's most important and trudging on as if nothing was happening to keep up appearances. Maybe it's too much on one side or the other, I can't really say.

With that said, like everyone I've been following the news. Truthfully, I've been glued to the news. And in times like these, more than ever, I think it's important to disseminate accurate, up-to-date information quickly. We should strive all above all else for accuracy, availability and accessibility.

And let's be honest, doing things quickly that look half decent is kind of our thing! In fact, that is exactly our thing!

So it's no surprise, no-code has stepped up in a big way. It's allowed teams working on gathering data to disseminate and display it efficiently without worrying about standing up a front-end or a back-end. I've seen teams leveraging Airtable, Coda, Taskade, Googlr Sheets -- whatever, now is not the time for tool partisanship -- to provide employees a list of company resources, visualize disease spread, and some less serious stuff like a list of books to read while we're all quarantined.

Part look at what we've been able to contribute, part I can't stop looking at the news and clipping important stuff, here's some of the no-code gems I've found:

A free API you can use (in say Parabola) to get everything related to Coronavirus/Covid 19 (dislcaimer: haven't had time to use it!):

Coronavirus COVID19 APICoronavirus COVID19 API free to use

Notion released a wiki for everything work-from-home related!

Remote Work by Notion — www.notion.so

A central hub for the best resources on remote work - from tips to articles to company policies. Designed to bring together the most actionable advice (and keep adding to it).

Airtable preparedness kit while leveraging Nextdoor to know who has what:

[tweet https://twitter.com/chrisdancy/status/1238978923565920256]

National Science Policy using Airtable to gather questions for a bot:

[tweet https://twitter.com/scipolnetwork/status/1237919379976794112]

List of remote resources, built in GatsbyJS & Airtable:

[tweet https://twitter.com/paulbalogh/status/1237083495085867008]

Now, all of these feel unimportant. There's only so much any one of us bar being health professionals can do in a time like this. I've struggled to find how I can contribute in this time of need, here's what I've come up with:

1. I'm making my Essential Guide to Airtable free to anyone who requests it. Simply reply to this email or DM me on twitter
2. I'm trying to see if there's interest in doing livestream where anyone can come on and we'll debug/work on an automation problem. Reply to the thread if you're interested
3. I can advise if you need any help getting a livestream setup for your business (think yoga studios, fitness instructors or cooking classes!).

So that's what I've found at the intersection of "things I'm good at" and "things that can help during a global pandemic". They might not also overlap with "things the world absolutely needs" but I feel like if we each do our little part, we'll come out of this okay.

Best

Aron