Retool First Thoughts

After seeing Retool’s visually stunning post about the history and legacy of Visual Basic, as well as other articles linked on Hacker News, I knew it would be inevitable for me to try their platform. As someone who grew up using Visual Basic, the article was very satisfying for me to read and brought back memories of creating simple GUIs with VB. The speed in which you could get a simple GUI going in a matter of minutes with VB was empowering to a younger me and helped foster a passion for programming that continues today.

After playing around with Retool for a couple of days to build a prototype admin GUI, my first thoughts are that Retool does live up to that legacy. In an hour or two, I was able to create this prototype with no prior experience with the platform. I’ll have to see how well I am able to flesh out this admin GUI, but my initial experience has been very positive.