Citizen developers versus pro developers

I have always loved development and code. Although I am not a developer by nature, I like to do light coding and can read code. When Kim and I started in Navision, we didn’t have all the documentation and YouTube videos, and even Microsoft Learn didn’t exist because, at the time, Microsoft wasn’t in the picture. I mentioned I used a lot of Access databases to pull data out of Navision and build applications; one application I made was a service management system. We would link tables from Navision to other tables and queries. Back to my point about learning Navision – when we wanted to know how something worked, we would run a debugger and step through the code; I think this is where the love of code came from. I consider myself a citizen developer, not a pro developer.

Several years back, the goal was to take all the external systems, Excel spreadsheets, and databases and combine them into one ERP system. Times...