Blog

The Best GraphQL IDEs and Their Features

To support the growing number of developers building APIs, new integrated development environments (IDEs), tools, and resources have been developed. Here are our top picks for the best GraphQL IDEs around.

tutorial

Building a Shopify customer and order dashboard with GraphQL in Retool

If you’re selling something that needs shipping, chances are you’ve heard of Shopify. And if you’re one of the over 1 million merchants selling on Shopify, visibility is key: you

The State of Internal Tools in 2020

We surveyed 300 developers and builders about their internal tools: how much time they invest, which frameworks they use, and what their biggest frustrations are.

Best Google App Maker alternatives in 2020

Google App Maker is shutting down next year. See what alternatives are available for low code and no code app building.

How we migrated our community from Spectrum to Discourse

The details behind how we migrated our community from Spectrum to Discourse, and the scripts we used to do it.

Building an admin console in react-admin

This tutorial walks through how to build a fully functional admin panel in React backed by a REST API with authentication using the react-admin framework.

sql

Best PostgreSQL GUIs in 2020

psql is nice, but nobody wants to write their queries in the command line. This post walks through the best GUIs available for querying your Postgres data.

sql

Isolation levels and locking in relational databases

“We need to build this for scale!” yells your manager, in a fury. You think back to a simpler time: when your application only had a few users. When your transactions executed sequentially,

interview

How to build great internal tools: Jeremy Edberg (eBay, Reddit, Netflix)

Everyone seems to know what internal tools are, but they are poorly understood on a broader level. How do the world’s best companies think about internal tools? How much time should engineering

interview

How Retool helped run a presidential campaign

“Within two months of announcing candidacy, the team needs to scale up to 200 people. That’s faster growth than any startup you’ve worked at.” A great tech team is now table

interview

How to build great internal tools: Chad Rosen (Twitter, Wealthfront)

Everyone seems to know what internal tools are, but they are poorly understood on a broader level. How do the world’s best companies think about internal tools? How much time should engineering

What's an ACID compliant database?

When you’re building and maintaining an application, the last thing you want to worry about is data integrity; Charging a customer the wrong amount or losing their data can be catastrophic. Thankfully,

tools

What’s SAP?

What's SAP? And why is it worth $163B? Every year companies spend $41B on enterprise resource planning software, commonly known as ERP. Today, almost every large business has some sort of ERP system

tutorial

Building a listing approval tool in MongoDB

If you’ve ever worked at a marketplace company, you know that not every listing should be approved. If you’re managing any kind of listing data – apartments, ecommerce SKUs, or even vendor

guide

Formatting and dealing with dates in SQL

It’s 3AM, and you’re sleeping soundly in your room. But slowly, your sweet dream turns into a nightmare: all of the queries you wrote earlier in the day are parsing dates

Tell us about how you build your internal tools!

TL;DR: we're running a survey about internal tooling and we'd love you to participate. State of Internal Tools Survey Chances are you’ve spent time on internal tooling: operational, non-customer facing software

Building a version-controlled S3 file manager in Retool

Contents: Background Live demo Versioning overview Connecting to S3 Reading files from S3 Uploading files to S3 Building our version control system Drilling down into a file Adding finishing touches Adding finishing touches

guide

Typography for Developers

You may have read the title for this post and thought, "Why on earth does a developer need to know anything about typography?" I mean, there’s already a lot on

tools

What's Salesforce?

Customer-relationship management is the biggest, fastest growing software market in the world. $40B is spent on CRMs annually, and almost all companies have one. But for those of us that don’t directly

tutorial

Connecting Google Sheets to APIs, and building apps with Retool

Spreadsheets are great for some things, but bad at others. Retool fills in those gaps. You can build apps on top of the data you have in Sheets with Retool. It lets you create polished UIs by dragging and dropping commonly-used components, and your apps can connect to almost any data source.

integration

Build tools on top of Firebase

Contents: Background Live demo Querying data Displaying data Inputting data Input fields Automagic forms The story of software is a story of abstraction. Programming languages abstracted away the complexities of computer instructions — flip-flop

tools

The Technology That Changed Air Travel

A lot has changed about air travel since it went mainstream in the 1930s. On-board smoking, free-flowing booze, and five-star meals have given way to baggage fees, cramped seats, and mystery meat. Through all this change, one thing has stayed the same — the software that manages it all.

guide

Web Admin Panel Comparison (updated 2020)

There are a few off the shelf options for building admin interfaces: 1. Database GUI Clients 2. Frontend admin libraries 3. Backend admin frameworks 4. 3rd-party admin tools They’re all good at specific things. Let’s see how you can decide between them:

tools

Bicycles For The Mind: The Slide Rule

At the turn of the 16th century, Johannes Kepler set out to disprove Copernicus, who believed planets orbited in perfect, concentric circles from the sun. Kepler first formulated his hypothesis: planets had elliptical

product

Building apps on top of Google Sheets

Before the advent of the spreadsheet back in 1979, people didn't really understand what the personal computer was for. Since then, spreadsheets have come a long way — they've eaten the businesses across the