Blog

How Noble Schools built an app to keep 12,500 students engaged during a pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how education works. Learn how Retool helped Noble Schools adapt to distance learning.

How Neo4j reduced churn by moving renewals out of Salesforce

As a company grows, the roles and functions within it grow and change, too. A marketing team might go from one Jane of all Trades to a team of 30 spanning content, paid

How Descript gives engineers more time to build for customer impact

In early 2019, Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi, co-founders of AngelList, decided to take Naval’s frequent blog posts and turn them into a podcast. The Naval Podcast gets to the meat of

Retool raises $50M led by Sequoia

Since Retool launched two years ago on HN, tens of thousands of companies have come to rely on Retool. It's how Allbirds measures the efficacy of their marketing campaigns; how Brex builds applications

How LeadGenius saved $1M with better internal tooling

Since switching to Retool two years ago, LeadGenius has saved over $1 million through efficiency gains achieved with apps built in Retool. How did they do it? They were able to leverage the

Can you build this for me?

As a not-so-technical marketer, I dread asking engineers these types of questions. It’s not that I have a deep-seated fear of working with developers or anything like that. In my experience, most people are happy to help (at least for the first few times).

How Assembled uses Retool to build internal tools

Assembled uses Retool to build and run internal tools on top of their Postgres data.

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.

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

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

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 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

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

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

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.

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

CRUD with Cloud Firestore using the Node.js SDK

This post walks through how to use Firestore's Node.js SDK to do basic CRUD with your Firebase data.

How to build a React form component

Forms are one of the most common elements of any internal app, but building them from scratch sucks. Here's a quick guide to building beautiful, functional forms with the react-hook-form library.

CRUD with the Firebase Realtime Database's REST API

How to work with the Firebase Realtime Database's REST API to create, read, update, and delete data.

Getting started with react-datepicker

react-datepicker is a library for building (surprise) date picker components in React. This guide will walk through the basics, as well as more advanced features like clear buttons and using state.

What's Accenture?

Accenture made $43B in 2019 - you've probably heard of them, but you might not be sure what they actually do. This post will help.

Building a React table component with react-table

If you’re building internal tools – admin panels, dashboards, CRMs, you name it – chances are you’re thinking about how to build a table component to display, edit, and manipulate data. Here's our guide to building a killer React table component.

Top React component libraries for 2020

A React component library is a collection of styled React components that you can use in your React applications to save time, add functionality, increase efficiency, and make the app look great. Here are six of our favorites for 2020.

How to work with auto-incrementing IDs in SQL

This guide will walk through how to implement and work with auto-incremented fields in SQL, run through syntax for different SQL dialects, and explain how to handle more secure UUIDs.

The 10 best React admin templates in 2020

React admin templates are templates for admin dashboards that are built in React and can be customized to fit your needs. Most templates come loaded with features for UIs, widgets, and apps, plus the ability to add custom React components.

The best MongoDB GUIs in 2020

This post walks through the best available GUIs for querying and working with your MongoDB data.

A beginner’s guide to the GraphQL ecosystem

Almost 40% of JS devs have used GraphQL to make it easier to query their APIs. This post walks through everything you'll need to get a GraphQL endpoint set up yourself.

The best GraphQL IDEs and their features

To support the growing number of developers building APIs via GraphQL, new integrated development environments (IDEs) are popping up quite literally every month. But which one is the best for you? Below, we review the best GraphQL IDEs available.

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

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.

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.

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,

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,

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

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

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.

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

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:

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