David Hsu
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
Yeah. So the primary reason someone uses Retool is typically they are a backend engineer who's looking to build some sort of internal tool and it involves the front end. And backend engineers typically don't care too much for the front end. They might not know React, Redux all that well. And they say, hey, I just want a simple button, simple form on top of my database or API. Why is it so hard?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
And so that's kind of the core concept behind Retool is front-end web development has gotten so difficult in the past 5, 10, 20 years. It's so complicated today. Put together a simple form with a submit button, have that submit to an API.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
You have to worry, for example, about, oh, you know, when you press the submit button, you got to bounce it or you got to disable it when it's, you know, is fetching is true. And then when it comes back, you got to enable the button again. When there's an error, you got to display the error message. There's so much crap now with building a simple form like that. And Retool takes that all away.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
And so really, I think the core reason why someone would use Retool is they just don't want to build any more internal tools. They want to save some time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
Yeah, that is exactly right. The way we think about it is we want to abstract away things that a developer should not need to focus on, such that the developer can focus on what is truly specific or unique to their business. And so the vision of what we want to build is something like an AWS actually. where I think AWS really fundamentally transformed the infrastructure layer.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
Back in the day, developers had to spend all their time thinking about, how do I go rack servers? How do I go manage cooling, manage power supplies? How do I upgrade my database without it going down? How do I change out the hard drive while still being online? All these problems.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
And they're not problems anymore, because nowadays when you want to upgrade your database, you just go to RDS and press a few buttons. And so what AWS did to the infrastructure layer is what we want to do to the application layer specifically on the front end today.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
And for me, that's pretty exciting because as a developer myself, I'm not really honestly that interested, for example, in managing infrastructure in a nuts and bolts way. I would much rather be like, hey, you know, I want S3 bucket. Boom, there's an S3 bucket. I want a database. Boom, there's a database.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
And similarly, on the front end or on the application layer, there is so much crap people have to do today when it comes to building a simple CRUD application. It's like, you know, you probably have to install 10, 15, maybe even 20 different libraries. You probably don't know what most libraries do. It's really complicated to load a simple form.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)
You know, you're probably downloading almost like a megabyte or two of JavaScript. It's so much crap to build a simple form. And so that's kind of the idea behind Retool is could it be a lot simpler? Could we just make it so much faster? Could you go from nothing to a form on top of your database or API in two minutes? Well, we think so.