Introduction
What is Retool? Retool is a low code app builder that combines the ease of drag-and-drop visual components with APIs, logic, and escapes hatches so developers can custom code whatever they need. The internal tools developer build help the rest of the company work the way they want with 10x the productivity.
Why do you need to Retool?
The process of building software is expensive, building from zero is even more expensive, considering the coding, DevOps, testing & etc. If we break down the admin dashboard features, it’s always about user roles, CRUD, reporting and etc, why keep rebuilding the same components while what we need to tune are the model and business logic. Here comes the low-code tool kick in.
Faster goto production time
Certainly, developing on low-code is faster than building from scratch. Faster iteration means faster getting to the feature states that are required and useful to the end-user. Plus less effort and time on debugging the core ’cause most of the components provided are far more stable than custom build by the average developer. Not to say the average developer is bad, but in reality, hiring a pro developer is no easy mission plus a pro developer is keen to solve challenging and impactful problems rather than do repetitive dev like admin dashboard.
Community
Nowadays, most of the product grows together with their open source community. In which most of the issues we face, some other peoples already face before and it’s on community threads like Github issue, StackOverflow or other tech forums. A healthy community is always 1 of my important driver in selecting certain stacks. You don’t want to face the issue alone in the dark without any support, whether is community or corporate support. Sometimes the corporate support not really effective compared to the community ’cause the community is the real end-user of the product, so the community knows better.
What are some examples of Retool?
Check out their use case: https://retool.com/use-cases/
Pretty sure there’s useful use case there.
Retool vs Laravel Voyage
It’s an orange and apple comparison. Not going into deep here.
Both had experienced before, for a small and low-customisable dashboard, I choose over Retool.
What does the future look like?
Not every problem need to be solved by coding. My philosophy of tech is always about diversity and exploration, exploring different tools for different sets of problems. The future for low-code is reflected in the market share they gained and funds (Retool valued at nearly $1B)
Personally, pretty positive about the low-code future.
Wrap up!
Give yourself a chance to try on a new set of tools, that will make you better at your job. There’s a reason why companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook require their employees to give 20% of their time to personal projects outside of their core work. The reason is to develop a growth mindset. That’s because tech is the business of learning.
Next, I’m planning to try on AppSmith.
By the way, I’m not an affiliate of Retool or a related source.
